How to Get to Essence

As visual thinkers, what we do is make sense of the world by making marks on the page.

Those marks can take all sorts of different forms, from words, boxes, and lines to simple icons and complex visual metaphors.

Whether the completed work lands toward the diagram side or the drawing side of the visual spectrum, the question we ask ourselves next is this: How well does this visual artifact capture the topic I’ve been thinking about?

Evaluating this type of visual work can be tricky, because as I often say, your notes don’t have to look good, they only have to serve their purpose. If they help you to remember some new information, or think through a sticky problem, or share a complex idea with someone else, then they’ve done their job.

But if you’re still asking yourself, “Am I done with this, or can I make it better?”, then let me propose four tiers of capture to help you evaluate how much visual processing you’ve already done, and what might be left to do.

Note that you don’t have to work your way up this tier for every visual artifact you create. You get to set the target for each piece of work.

It starts with being efficient. Here the goal is simply to get it down. This can take the form of a simple bullet point list, maybe with a handful of headings to separate different topics. The focus here is on speed of capture, and its accessible even if all you’ve got on you is your phone.

In the second tier we focus on being effective. Here the goal is to make it visual. Perhaps you take that bullet point list and turn it into a mind map, with simple sketches scattered throughout. If you’ve got the bandwidth and materials in front of you, you can jump straight to this tier.

The jump from tier two to their three is kind of a big one. At this level we shoot for essence. Here the goal is to boil it down. Getting to a good reduction takes time and it takes heat. When sketching, that heat takes the form of attention and experimentation. There’s a tuning in that’s required in order to know which elements of the topic you can boil off and what remains in the pan.

This type of capture is likely to take up less space on the page compared to what lives in the previous two tiers. It’s the visual equivalent of the writing mantra “It I had more time, this would be shorter.”

That could look like a simplified diagram as opposed to a messy one, or a single visual metaphor instead of a collection of disparate sketches.

In the fourth and final tier we shoot for elegance. Here the goal is to make it shine. Not only have you boiled the topic down to its essence, you’ve also represented the topic in a way that makes you go “Oooooh, that’s good.” It’s got a wow factor to it. That could come from the cleverness of the visual metaphor or the simple-yet-completeness of the diagram.

You might think that the tiers of essence and elegance require a certain level of drawing skill, but I don’t think they do. It’s not about how good the drawing is, it’s about how good the thinking is behind it.

That’s why I think there’s a distinction worth pointing out between the first two tiers and the second two. You can reach those lower levels with one-and-done captures, where the first marks you make are the final ones. But to get to essence and elegance, an iterative approach is required. You’ll need to get all of the ideas down first, and then play around with them as you explore potential visual structures. For me, that’s the fun part.

As you think about whatever project is in front of you right now, a project that you’re using a sketched visual to make sense of, ask yourself which tier you’re shooting for.

Remember that not all of your work needs to get to essence or elegance. There’s not enough time in the day for that. With some work, efficient or effective will do.

Set the target beforehand, and then sketch your way there.

Dig Deeper

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Cheers,

-Doug