There’s a romantic vision of creativity that we’ve all been sold: the artist struck by inspiration, the writer consumed by their muse, the innovator hit with a flash of brilliance …
From Goals to Roles: How a Network Self Diagram Helps You Plan for the Year
Every January, millions of people set goals. By February, most of those goals have been abandoned. It’s not because people lack willpower or commitment. It’s because goal-setting, as typically practiced, …
The Four Levels of Scribing
Have you ever sketched something during a conversation or while processing an idea, and then later looked back at it thinking, “This is fine, but it feels… shallow”? You capture …
Model by Model
You sit down with your notebook and pen, ready to tackle that complex project that’s been bouncing around in your head. You’ve got a lot to figure out, and the …
The Two Words That Transform Any Visual Thinking Project
Here’s a simple question that can transform your next visual thinking project: Why are you sketching this out in the first place? You might think the answer is obvious. But …
Purpose, Not Pride
Recently I’ve been thinking about the barriers that keep us from making marks on the page, even when we know those marks will be helpful. One of the biggest that …
The Double Duty That Makes Notebooks So Powerful
When new ideas come to you, where do they go next? I address that question in one of the new lessons that I developed for the updated Verbal to Visual …
What Good Models Do
A food forest is a specific type of permaculture that blends together a fruit and nut orchard with a vegetable and flower garden. I’ve known that I’ve wanted to grow …
What We Build
I’ve recently realized that the visual thinking programs that I run are about three things: 1. Building Skills We gather together for the purpose of building visual thinking skills, to …
The Three Shifts
To become a visual thinker requires three shifts. The first shift is from consumption to creation. This is the decision to not just passively take in new information, but actively create …









