Whenever I hear folks question how to make sense of a complex situation, how to learn a complex subject, how to solve a complex problem, there’s one phrase that always comes to mind: sketch it out. That’s my favorite piece of advice, my favorite way to summarize what visual thinking is all about.
To support folks in their effort to sketch it out, I have developed the Sketch It Out framework, which takes the form of a Venn diagram. It starts with defining your purpose, then we move on to collecting the pieces, and we’ll finish things off by solving the puzzle.
Let’s break down what each of those mean.
Define Your Purpose
At the start of the process you define your purpose for working with whatever ideas are in front of you. There are three questions that I encourage you to consider, three things that if you nail correctly, you’ll hit a bullseye.
First you identify your audience. As you’re learning something new, or solving a complex problem, or sharing a set of ideas with someone else, it’s worth identifying who it is that you’re making that thing for, whether it’s just for yourself or for a specific group of people. When you know who it’s for, it’s easier to make the little decisions along the way that result in a useful visual artifact representing that set of ideas.
In addition to your audience, you need to set a particular intention. What role do you want your sketch to play? What will determine whether or not it’s successful?
Finally, it’s worth identifying scope. Scope is about what you will and won’t include in your sketch. It’s about saying this sketch will include this, this and this, but not that, that or that, we’ll save those other things for later. Sometimes we try to include too much of a given topic in one single sketch. By identifying scope, you get to decide what you will exclude.
I’ve got to give a shoutout to Abby Covert in her book STUCK? Diagrams Help for bringing in this concept of scope. Prior to her work, I’d only identified audience and intention at this stage in the process. But scope is a powerful thing to address up front, because it puts some bounds on the rest of the experience.
Collect the Pieces
Next we move to collecting the pieces. This could be as simple as jotting down a bullet point list of the who and the what. What are the individual ideas that you’re working with? What are the details? Who is invested, who is involved?
This is where you just get everything down so that you can see what you’re working with. If you’ve got more modular materials available, like sticky notes or index cards, you might use those for this process, because that will allow you to sort and categorize as you go. You can do some sketching out in this phase as well, but don’t get too caught up in any individual drawing in this stage of the process. It’s more helpful to move quickly.
Solve the Puzzle
Now it’s time to solve the puzzle. This is where you bring your ideas together into a cohesive visual artifact.
As you think about the form that visual might take, I encourage you to make a model. Bring together the ideas you’ve been working with into something that falls on the spectrum from diagram to drawing.
A diagram could be something like a Venn diagram or a flow chart or a mind map – anything that involves simple shapes and lines. A drawing could be a visual metaphor (think target or iceberg or mountain or staircase) or something more representative (like a sketched scene – a person or a group of people in a certain situation.
Diagrams tend to light up the logical networks of your brain. Drawings tend to hit more of the emotional side. Both can be effective as individual models that can serve as a container for these ideas that you want to bring together.
Try to find a single overarching diagram or drawing that can be the centerpiece for your set of ideas that works well for the audience you’re trying to reach, fulfills the intention, and stays within the scope. In this case, the model for the Sketch It Out framework is this Venn diagram.
Even though there is a general flow from define your purpose to collect the pieces to solve the puzzle, there’s still a decent amount of bouncing between those. As you’re solving the puzzle, something about the diagram or the drawing might inspire some additional pieces that you hadn’t originally considered that you need to add into the mix. Or maybe you realize your scope is a little bit off, or that there’s a slight tweak to the intention based on the insights that come from exploring these questions.
So allow yourself to bounce between these three stages as needed, but generally moving in the clockwise direction.
The Intersections
I think it’s also worth pointing out what lives at each of the three intersections. As you move from purpose to pieces, you’re going through a process of inquiry. It’s more of an open exploration of the individual ideas that relate to the topic you’re exploring.
When you move from collecting the pieces to solving the puzzle, you engage in a process of integration. It’s less about expanding the number of ideas you’re working with, and more about bringing them together in this process of synthesis to identify what might be a helpful diagram or drawing that represents how those pieces are connected to each other, and ultimately helps you do something with those ideas.
In the intersection between solving the puzzle to defining your purpose, you consider impact of the sketch you created, the model that you made. Does it actually help you think through the problem that you’re trying to solve, or understand the topic that you’re learning about, or effectively share an idea that’s really important? If it doesn’t achieve that intended impact, that’s when you might revisit the last two stages. Try reworking the puzzle, test out a different model, add or remove some pieces, and see if that results in an impact that’s more aligned with your intention.
Conclusion
So the next time you’re working with a complex set of ideas, try following this Sketch It Out process. Start by defining your purpose – identify the audience, intention, and scope behind the work you’re about to engage in. Then collect the pieces – quickly, expansively. Don’t get stuck in any individual drawing, just get all the ideas down. Then solve the puzzle – make a model that brings together those pieces into a diagram or a drawing, and then put that model to use to see if it achieves the intended impact.
This Sketch It Out framework is the core model within a new book that I’m working on that is itself called Sketch It Out: Leverage the Power of Visual Thinking. If you would like to follow along with the book writing and book sketching process, sign up to the Verbal to Visual Newsletter.
When you do that I’ll send you a preview of The Verbal to Visual Notebook, which includes a set of activities to build your visual note-taking skills as you get comfortable making marks that aren’t just words.
Cheers,
-Doug