“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
That’s what British statistician George Box said back in 1976.
As a builder and user of models, his point was that we should focus less on the broadness and comprehensiveness of a model and more on its practical usefulness for the situation at hand.
Newton’s laws govern motion from falling apples all the way up to planets revolving around stars, but they stop working once you get down to the quantum level, where new models take over.
As visual thinkers, what we do is create models in the form of drawings and diagrams to help us understand, explain, or put into practice a particular set of ideas.
At the moment I’m working on a model that helps to explain how the concept of “smartness” develops throughout childhood and the impact that has in the transition from high school to college. As I work to make sense of a half-dozen research articles, I’m trying to keep in mind that whatever model I come up with will be wrong (at some level, for some people) but it still might be useful, especially when I keep in mind the intended audience for this work (students and faculty in the engineering department of the specific university that hired me).
The way “but some are useful” shows up in how I think about visual thinking is at a particular intersection within the Sketch It Out Framework that I’ve recently been developing (which is itself a model).
When working to create a useful visual artifact, you move through these three primary stages: define your purpose, collect the pieces, and solve the puzzle. As you move from purpose to pieces, you go through a process of inquiry. As you move from pieces to puzzle, you focus on integration. And as you move from puzzle back to purpose, you turn your attention to impact.
What the Box quote addresses is that last intersection of impact. Here you ask yourself: did the visual artifact that I created (i.e. the completed puzzle) serve its purpose? Did it help me learn something new, solve a sticky problem, or communicate a complex idea? If so, then what you created was a useful model, even if in some cases it’s “wrong”.
So don’t get caught up on the comprehensiveness and universality of the models that you’re sketching out. Sure, make them as “right” as you can, but pay more attention to their impact.
The models that you make don’t have to be right for everyone, everywhere. They just need to be useful for someone, somewhere. Focus on that person (even if it’s just future you) and you’ll find things falling into place much more smoothly.
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Cheers,
-Doug