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Chapter 8. Visualizing Abstract Concepts

BEFORE WE LET THE entire metaphorical representation thing go, let’s take a metaphorical look over our shoulder at the ground we’ve covered so far. I hope you can see that the variety of figures, faces, and objects that you are sketching has increased, and I hope you can see where you’re becoming more confident. And there’s that cool “happy accident” you drew with which you were delightfully surprised! I hope you took a selfie at that point: it was worth it. And by now you’re taking visual metaphor in your stride, too.

We now stand at the rugged steppes of conceptual representation. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to sketch the intangible—as opposed to the tangible. You’ll also learn how to synthesize meaning and sketch visual models to communicate that meaning to others.

Conceptual Representation

It’s worth briefly recapping the types of visualizing that we’ve being doing so far (Figure 8-1). First, we looked at how to sketch actual real things, like figures, hands, headphones, and so on. That’s literal representation. Sketching things like this is very useful for telling the story of the problem or solution that we’re thinking about, and helping others identify with that problem or solution by mentally putting themselves in the picture.

Then we tackled visual metaphor, for which we sketched concepts (like walls, targets, and ladders) based on real things and other concepts. That’s metaphorical representation. Sketching with visual metaphor is tremendously useful for engaging people’s hearts as well as their heads, and helping people to understand new concepts (or complex concepts) based on what they already know.

There’s also diagrammatic representation. Diagrammatic representation is useful for showing how something works. It can be a blend of what is seen (tangible) and what is unseen or conceptual (intangible). Diagrammatic representation is also essential for showing things and processes that are real but invisible to the naked eye, like how rays of light work (see Figure 8-1) or how cellular and atomic processes work.

Now we come to the right side of the visual communication spectrum (again referring to Figure 8-1). This is where we visualize things that we can take in and understand, even though they don’t actually exist in the real world. This is conceptual representation.

It’s easier to explain conceptual representation by showing you examples. Take a look at Figure 8-2, and you’ll be surprised to see that you’re probably already quite familiar with conceptual representation. Conceptual representation visualizes and explains invisible, intangible concepts. The trick is to not only understand how this conceptual visual language does what it does, but know how to wield it yourself.

I hope that by looking at these examples, you can see how important it is to have these different visual languages to explain and represent concepts that literal representation just can’t handle.

Conceptual representation is also really important for helping us to synthesize. You know that feeling when you have so much going on in your head that you can’t think straight? Or when a problem seems so huge, vague, and complicated that it’s almost too difficult to know where to begin solving it? What you’re suffering from, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, is too much information and not enough synthesis.

In this chapter, we’re going to do that special magic of making invisible problems visible and synthesizing big, foggy, muddled messes into crisp, clear, visual models and communications. To do this, we’ll first look at how to think about problems, ideas, and plans in a better way as well as how to sketch what we’re thinking. By adding just a little bit of structure to your thinking and sketching, you’ll witness more of that beautiful chemistry of your brain and hand working together more effectively.

The Three Elements of Conceptual Thinking and Sketching

Sometimes, all we need is a little bit of structure to help us on our way to unmuddling and visualizing. With that in mind, here’s a way to pair thinking and sketching to help you synthesize, to distill meaning from muddledness and signal from noise. Try to think of any problem, situation, idea, or plan in terms of these three things:

The entities involved in the problem, idea, or plan
The relationships within and/or between those entities
The spaces involved in the entities and relationships

Entities, relationships, and spaces are like three different lenses that you can use to look at the same situation. These three lenses work together to help you think, synthesize, and communicate. Let’s look at each one in turn, and then some examples of them in action.

Entities

Entities are the separate objects and things (or nouns) involved in whatever the problem, idea, or plan is that you’re thinking about. Entities include objects, people (or groups of people), roles, products, services, and processes. You also can think of entities as separate pieces that make up a product, service, or system, and consider whether they’re visible.

Looking at a set of entities helps you to understand simple comparisons between them (e.g., size) or different attributes worth noting about the entities (e.g., locked/unlocked, active/inactive). Examples include all the parts that make up a hammer drill, or all the parts of a support service.

To explore a problem, idea, or plan in terms of its entities, ask questions that begin with “Who” or “What,” and sketch what you’re thinking about. By immediately sketching what you’re thinking, you are thinking visually. You are pulling the problem apart, putting it onto paper (or a tablet or whiteboard), and making all the parts of it real and tangible.

It’s super important to note that you don’t need to sketch a fully formed problem, solution, or whatever, in one go. Your sketching is a process; it represents mental stepping stones toward a fully realized outcome of some sort. Figure 8-3 shows some examples of how entities can be visualized even just as letters or words in frames.

As you can see, you don’t need to sketch the actual entities to represent them visually. After all, some of those entities might not exist as real things. But if you do want to sketch them as real things, go right ahead (Figure 8-4).

Example: Cane toads

Let’s apply this entities lens to a situation that’s certainly well known to people in Australia (where I’m from): the introduction of cane toads. If you’ve been to Queensland (a state in Australia), you might well have seen these stocky, poisonous, and highly smug-looking amphibians. And you also might know that unique creepy feeling of opening up the back door at night, turning on the outdoor light, and seeing your back yard seething with cane toads, as they scuttle around doing all their smug little cane toad activities.

Cane toads were introduced to Queensland from Hawaii in 1935. They were meant to put an end to the beetles that were eating all the sugar cane crops (by eating them), but instead have spread, multiplied, and wrought devastation on Australia’s northern flora and fauna as a feral pest ever since. They eat just about everything, they spread disease, and they also kill anything that eats them, because of their poison. I mean, they might as well bleed acid and take all our jobs, too.

Let’s take a look at that last paragraph again, and then sketch the entities we can find (we can probably ignore the entities of acid and jobs: those might not be 100 percent accurate...). We can visualize them simply as words in circles, as depicted in Figure 8-5.

We can also visualize the entities as real-world objects if we want to (Figure 8-6). This certainly helps us (and others) to clarify what each entity means, but it isn’t always necessary.

For example, sketching flowers and an animal might make it clearer to people what you mean by “flora and fauna,” but sketching an icon version of the term “poison” is probably a bit redundant.

Some common gotchas

Here are some things to keep in mind when you think about the entities in your problems, ideas, and plans:

Using vague terms and clichés

Keep your entities specific and meaningful. For example, avoid picking words like “collaboration” or “outcomes.” If this happens, ask yourself: “What do I really mean by ‘collaboration’?”

Using noun-verbs

Using a noun that’s actually a verb (like “transformation”) can hide a lot of important information that’s worth thinking about. In the case of “transformation,” what is being transformed? How is it being transformed?

Scoping your situation too widely or too narrowly

Sometimes it can be tricky to know the boundaries of the situation that you’re thinking about. If the scope is too small, you can limit the effectiveness of any solution you come up with. If it’s too large, it will be too difficult to tackle.

If this happens, add sizing words to your “Who” and “What” questions, like these: “Who is experiencing this problem the most?”; “Who has the most to gain from this idea?”; “What is the most significant part of this situation?”

Exercises

Exercise 8-1: Write down the entities

Just like we did with the cane toads situation, take a look at these problem statements and write down what you think are the entities involved:

My kids become bored waiting in the car while I’m filling it up at the service station, but I don’t want them just playing on screens all the time.
There’s this fantastic group of local volunteers who really want to help the community around them, but they’re all chasing after their own individual ideas rather than putting their energies behind just a few integrated ideas.
The Department of Transport is going to sell the rail network to three separate private companies. One of the companies is going to put in a new rail line to connect two previously unconnected cities, but this will break a lot of existing train trips into three separate train trips, and commuters aren’t happy.

Exercise 8-2: Sketch the entities

Take a look at the sets of entities you’ve written for each problem statement in the preceding list and sketch each set. First, try sketching each entity as an abstract concept (just the word in a circle). Does this raise any questions about each entity for you?

Next, try sketching each entity as more of a real-world object. Which type of representation works best? Why is that?

Relationships

Sketching entities might help you to clarify, classify, and compare all the parts of the idea, problem, or situation that you’re thinking about, but they’re not that useful by themselves. As Donella H. Meadows said in her wonderful book Thinking in Systems (Chelsea Green Publishing): “The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.”

You often need to think about—and sketch—the relationships going on between the entities. Relationships describe the ways in which the entities are connected, or the ways that the entities regard, behave, and contribute toward one another. To explore a problem, idea, or plan in terms of its relationships, ask questions that begin with “When,” “How,” and “Why,” and sketch what you’re thinking about.

As usual, let me show you what I mean with some helpful examples of patterns that you can use:

Process relationships

Process relationships describe how one element leads to another, and another.

Examples:

Flowcharts
Gantt charts
Customer journey maps
Swimlanes
Circuit diagrams
Timelines

Dependency relationships

Dependency relationships are related to process relationships, and describe situations in which one entity or step can’t happen before another finishes. Examples:

Flowcharts
Herringbone diagrams

Hierarchy relationships

Hierarchy relationships describe situations in which one entity has one or more entities related and subordinate to it. Examples:

Genograms
Decision trees
Information architecture schemas
Mind maps

Value relationships

Value relationships indicate what value one element gives to another. This can be one-way or reciprocal. Examples:

Money
Support
Goods and services
Saving time

Causal relationships

Causal relationships describe how one or more elements (lower-level causes) contribute to one or more outcomes (higher-level effects). Example:

Outcomes hierarchies

Proximity relationships

Proximity relationships describe how close a connected set of entities are to one another. Example:

Brand onions

It’s pretty rare that any one thing exists in isolation, which is why looking at the relationships between entities can be really insightful. One example of this is in root-cause analysis, wherein causes can be mapped according to symptoms (using a causal relationship map of boxes and arrows).

Another important example is mapping systems that store and move resources around, and the flows and dynamics between entities in systems.¹ Visualizing what the relationships are doing can yield a lot of insight, whether the system is as simple as a thermostat-regulated heater or as complex as the economic and social effects of closing factories and moving labor offshore.