The blog

To me, struc­ture is to achieve what you want as eas­i­ly as pos­si­ble; to do what you want to get done with the least amount of effort. 

Some­times in my work I enter ​”devel­op­ment-mode”.

This can be when I for exam­ple am to help a man­age­ment team set a clear­ly defined course for their busi­ness, when I am in the process of devel­op­ing a new ser­vice, when I am
try­ing to make a process run smoother or when I need to sort out the key mes­sage in a new lecture.

Words com­pli­cate matters

When I’m tuned into ​”devel­op­ing-mode”, I need to think and work with images. Words, text and cer­tain word­ing only slow the cre­ative flow down for me in these sit­u­a­tions; per­haps due to that words are so dis­tinct that it becomes very impor­tant that you choose just the right nuance in order for the group to strive in the same direc­tion. Some words might be impaired by a par­tic­u­lar set of val­ues, which will eas­i­ly side-track us instead of allow­ing us to focus on the task ahead. 

An unbeat­able tool in this sit­u­a­tion is to make a sketch by hand with a pen on a blank, white sur­face. It can be a white-board, a white sheet of paper or some­thing similar. 

Do you have sit­u­a­tions in your line of work when you need to devel­op a busi­ness-mod­el, or illus­trate how your prod­ucts are dis­trib­uted to the final client, or show how one thing inter­acts with anoth­er, or you need to explain the con­se­quences to the sales-work orig­i­nat­ing in that a cou­ple of your prod­ucts or ser­vices over­lap, or per­haps you need to explain a com­plex mod­el to your co-workers? 

Wouldn’t you agree that it’s in times like these you grasp for soft­ware which can aid you in delin­eat­ing the image? ​“Hmm… Word, per­haps? Or Keynote? Or Visio?”

For­get about it. Make it sim­ple. Make the sketch by hand instead.

Some­times ​“sin­ga­long”, or the lack of it, makes me sad

“But, I can’t draw!”, might be your instinc­tive response. Few things make me sad­der than when some­one doesn’t ​“sin­ga­long” when meant to since they don’t believe they can sing. I expe­ri­ence that the same is true for being able to draw or not. We make it more com­pli­cat­ed than it needs to be and think we need to do it ​“right”.

The only thing you need to know

No, you see, the only thing you need to be able to draw to be able to make a sketch of the most com­plex of mod­els is:

• A cir­cle, a square, a tri­an­gle and a rectangle
• A line, an arrow, a dashed line and a thick arrow
• A sim­ple face (a cir­cle with two dots as eyes and a small curve which makes for two eyes and a mouth)
• A stick-fig­ure
• A box drawn in per­spec­tive, in 3D
• A cylin­der in per­spec­tive, in 3D

I assure you — you can do it.

Do this

1. Down­load a prac­tice-sheet from here.
2. Print out the practice-sheet.
3. As you can see, I have drawn the sym­bols I men­tioned above to the left (I haven’t done a course in sketch­ing either). Prac­tice draw­ing each sym­bol on the right hand side until you feel you’ve got it. Didn’t need too many times to get it right, now did you?
4. Take a blank sheet of paper or head towards the near­est white-board and sketch how your most impor­tant prod­uct or ser­vice is sup­plied to your client (who is the receiv­er of what you do), from that the client orders it until he has it in his hand, or until she gets the ser­vice performed. 
5. Erase the white-board, alter­na­tive­ly get a fresh sheet of paper and get a col­league who would need an expla­na­tion of the mod­el. Do the sketch again. Now you know it well, and you have prob­a­bly had a giv­ing con­ver­sa­tion with your col­league about an essen­tial part of the busi­ness. Two birds with one stone!

Faster, more engag­ing, more live­ly and more playful

If you adopt the sim­ple sketch as a tool, you’ll be able to illus­trate com­plex con­nec­tions faster so that they become clear­er to you. If you sketch while hold­ing a lec­ture, the crowd gets more engaged, the lec­ture comes to life and you will prob­a­bly come through with your mes­sage to a greater extent. And, it’s eas­i­er to be play­ful and think out­side that box peo­ple keep refer­ring to when you are writ­ing, which is fun in itself.

What was your way of doing it?

When have you used sketch­ing as a tool and got­ten great results? Com­ment below and tell us how it hap­pened, and what you think was the great­est con­tribut­ing fac­tor of it being a success. 

P S Here you will find a true mas­ter on the top­ic.
…and few things can beat these small ani­ma­tions.