Like 75% of the world, I’m a visual thinker, and I need sketching as part of my tool kit to describe the problems I face and iterate on the solutions I ideate. The sad part is, as a business graduate, no one ever told me that this was a skill I needed. For some, sketching comes naturally. For others, a little inspiration is needed.

As a strategist and experience architect, sketching solutions is one of the most important tools I have available to me. While we’ve been trained over the years to believe that sketching is an artist-only skill, the reality is that any problem solving process, no matter what field it falls under, can be improved through the infusion of pen, paper and design thinking.

A wife, a thesis and a drawing

My wife is currently finishing her PHD in child psychology from McGill University and spends most of her free time analyzing the data associated with her dissertation. Over the weekend, I passed by her desk and saw the following sketch:

What you’re looking at is Meredith’s use of sketching to describe, understand and test the relationship between the variables in her survey data set.  The visualization of this information allowed her to better understand the systems of her data and progress her understanding of the problem at hand. My mind was blown.

A Sketching Definition
From the words of the always wise Wikipedia:

A sketch is a rapidly executed freehand drawing that is not intended as a finished work. A sketch is a quick way to record an idea for later use. Artist’s sketches primarily serve as a way to try out different ideas and establish a composition before undertaking a more finished work, especially when the finished work is expensive and time consuming. Sketching sharpens an artist’s ability to focus on the most important elements of a subject and is a prescribed part of artistic development for students.

While this definition clearly leans towards the realm of artistic sketching, there are a number of important takeaways:

• Sketching is freehand. If you can put pen to paper, you can sketch. You do not need an artdegree, an expensive set of tools, or the ability to draw the perfect straight line. There is no barrier to using sketching as part of your tool set other than your own lack of self-confidence.
• Sketching is not intended as finished work. For some reason, non-designers feel the need to be perfect the first time. Sketching is not the same as a final marketing strategy, information architecture, project proposal or whitepaper. Your sketch will go through dozens of iterations before it’s done, so it should be treated as disposable.
• Sketching is a tool to try out different ideas. The old saying the first answer is usually the right one is an unfortunate one. Imagine how unsuccessful brainstorming sessions would be if you stopped after the first idea was delivered. When you sketch, there is a low investment required to try other avenues. Sketching is an opportunity to explore dozens of different directions with no consequences.
• Sketching lets you focus on the most important elements. It’s amazing how communicating through sketching can cause you to completely reframe the nature of your problem. By forcing yourself to communicate ideas visually, sketching can enlighten your problem solving process.

Sketching in the wild
When brought outside the domain of designers, sketching is a communications tool to help organize and socialize ideas. Literally, it’s using our innate drawing abilities to organize information in a way that goes beyond pure verbal communication. In this context, sketching is less a piece of design than it is an aid to thought. Sketching provides us with insight into our own definition of a problem, and the better we can define the problem we’re trying to solve, the better the solution.

While rougher sketches require more imagination as a tool to facilitate discussion, the bigger point is that using sketching as a descriptive tool rather than relying on verbal communication enhances our understanding of a problem.

Any problem.

Sure, sketching is a tool to visualize the solution,but it’s also useful in defining a system, organizing ideas and prototyping thought-based solutions. When we (business people) solve a problem based only on verbal queues, very seldom do we take the time to define the scope of a problem. The greatest benefit of sketching is that it forces us engage with an idea in new ways.

The reality is we blessed with the innate problem solving skills of my wife. I learned that sketching was necessary to describing the context of a problem after many painful client meetings facing tough questions that never even crossed my mind. For business people, sketching can enhance your understanding of a problem and allow you to try variations rather than settle on the first answer we think of.

There is no risk in sketching, other than uncovering some input you should have thought of long ago. So go ahead, be sketchy, and take your problem solving skills to the next level.

—Excellent advice I need more and more of, everyday. Catherine Powell. {via blankenship}

On Lateral Thinking

I understand why some people are so afraid of brainstorming. Coming up with ideas that no one else has thought of before is an intimidating task. But a large part of the intimidation comes from the belief that coming up with amazing ideas is a serendipitous experience.

It’s not by the way. But for some reason, no one ever tells you that.

Brainstorming is a process. Coming up with the ideas during a brainstorm is attributed to a creative method called lateral thinking, which is the polar opposite of the logic-driven vertical thinking that we use to get us through the day. Lateral thinking is about identifying ideas that are not immediately obvious – they can’t be reached by using step-by-step logic. Lateral thinking is about finding connections between previously unrelated ideas or concepts in order to break out of old patterns and stimulate new lines of thinking. It’s a network model on overdrive.

So what sparks imaginative lateral thinking? In my opinion, it’s unexpected stimuli (auditory, verbal, visual, it doesn’t matter). The lateral thinking secret is that if you don’t have new stimuli, you can’t make new connections. Sit around the IC office for an afternoon and you’ll start to realize why this group is so capable at this type of thinking – our interests are so divergent that we continuously generate new and diverse types of stimuli. From sociology to human factors, film noir to robots, graffiti to gaming, and academia to ambient computing, this is an eclectic crowd with a very, very wide set interests.

The Problem with Dandelions

A (brief) moment of honesty – I used to be a really bad at brainstorming. Even worse, I thought I was phenomenal at it. If all you ever knew were dandelions, you wouldn’t realize your were missing out orchids. And when you work in an organization without a disciplined approach to great ideation, you lose the context that allowed you to discern what an original, quality idea looks like.

I used to be into dandelions in a serious way.

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but if your organization brainstorms infrequently, you are probably dandelion-lovers. If you only talk about your own business during these ideation sessions, you dig the yellow weeds. If the only people who attend your ideation sessions are senior managers – dandelions. And if you all reach consensus in the first twenty minutes of your brainstorms, you guessed it – dandelions.

Dandelions are what keep organizations from coming up with breakthrough ideas. And unfortunately, when you don’t know realize that you’re missing out, you’re unlikely to change. I recognize that a single post isn’t going to convince anyone that their organization’s brainstorming practices are flawed, but perhaps I can appeal to your sense of logic. Mastery is an elusive goal that requires practice and dedication. If you agree, then I think you’ll be willing to believe that there’s room for improvement in your brainstorming methods.

Get Stimulated

For experienced lateral thinkers, drawing on a lifetime of diverse experiences and interests to provide that stimuli that inspire creative ideas is natural. For those of us who aren’t quite as renaissance, a little help is always appreciated. It took some serious help from my good friend Matt Milan of Normative and a little orange box.

If lateral thinking is about connecting previously unrelated concepts, then the more concepts you can draw on the less expected the ideas. Teasing experiences out of our subconscious for use as stimuli is not always easy – especially when our peers, managers and clients are all (secretly) judging the quality of our ideas. Working with Matthew, I was taught that it’s okay to use external tools as stimuli in lieu drawing on past experiences to make connections.

And with this, an amazing thing happened – I relaxed, I experienced flow, and I saw orchids for the first time.

Where to Find Inspiration

I’ll re-iterate. Use external stimuli to brainstorm better. Even if you think you’re phenomenal at ideation, I guarantee that drawing from unexpected places will make you better. Don’t be shy or embarrassed about using external tools. Your team will forgive you quickly if you come up with a game-changing idea.

Here are three sources I regularly use when I need some brainstorming stimuli:

Use a randomized list of words. The little orange box I mentioned earlier is what I describe as my brainstorming crutch – a tool called ThinkCube. What is valuable about this tool is that it uses a curated set of words to spark connections (the dictionary is always another more laborious option). Terms like ‘Story’, technologies like ‘RFID’, and concepts like ‘Biomimicry’ injected at an appropriate time can spark completely new lines of thinking. During a previous ideation session, a card that said ‘Puzzle’ allowed my team to completely re-imagine how financial services products are sold.

Use images to spark your imagination. If you’re luck enough to have gotten your hands on our book No One Works Here, you’ll see some of the photographs that have inspired the Idea Couture team while problem solving. If you don’t have a copy, head over to Flickr, use a generic search term like ‘Unexpected‘ in slide show mode.

Crowdsource your stimulus needs. Wikipedia has consolidated the world’s knowledge into one location and introduced the killer lateral thinking tool – ‘Random Article‘. Visit Wikipedia with a problem and use whatever random content they provide as inspiration.

Lateral thinking is a skill that requires practice and inputs. Regardless of how good we think we are at it, there is always room for improvement. People who generate masses of truly original ideas are really just experts at accessing their historical experience. Using external tools featuring words, ideas and images can help level the playing field and help spark unknown connections.

We don’t all start out as ideation experts. If we’re willing to admit there is room for improvement, then we can begin to break out of old patterns of thinking and come up with the brilliant ideas that we are all capable of.  Explore new ways of making connections and shed your dandelion complex.

Part of the problem is that many “social media experts” confuse the ideas of participation and expertise. Having profiles on social networking sites doesn’t mean you understand the nuances of the distinct cultural communities that exist within these spaces. Posting a video to YouTube doesn’t mean you know understand the nuances of setting up channels for a business. And posting your company’s traditional marketing on social networking sites doesn’t mean you get social media at all (although it often results in you gaining the title “expert”).

Self proclaimed “experts” also run down the theory versus practice road. There is an incredible amount of information that has been written about how organizations should participate in social media available online, but understanding core principals is not the same as having practical experience planning and launching social media initiatives. Social media is a dynamic environment that is constantly changing. Theorists simply can’t keep up with the fluid nature of the social web.

The areas of Social Media expertise
My big problem with the term Social Media is the semantics of expertise. A self-proclaimed expert in social media positions themselves as someone who understands the nuances of taking a brand into the social media sphere. The vast majority of these practitioners are really social media generalists – they have a narrow understanding of how social media works, usually based on the fact that they were early adopters of the technology.

When you deconstruct the skills needed to really launch a social media strategy, you realize it’s impossible for one person to be capable of it all.

• Strategy – Defining the objectives of social participation and how to effectively measure performance.
• Anthropology – Understanding the cultural nuances of the communities in which you will be participating.  And these differ by social media platform.
• Research – Extracting insights from the myriad of data available.
• Public Relations  – Monitoring social media activity and understanding how to participate in a dialogue in the social realm, and how to plan in case things go wrong.
• Technology – Being able to understand the technical integration issues, API’s, etc. These also differ by social media platform.
• User Experience – Seamlessly integrating the social strategy into the current brand user experience.
• Mobile – Understanding behavior relating to the portability of your messages and communication on a small screen.
• Marketing Strategy – Being able to ensure that your messages are seen and optimized for the communities you are trying to reach.
• Content Strategy – Defining the voice of the organization in the social sphere
• Analytics – Measuring the effectiveness of social media participation.
• And the list goes on…

The need for self-selection
Social media experts are 2009’s version of the kid in his garage building you a website in the 90’s – he can get the job done, but it isn’t going to be pretty. Amazing social media experiences require planning and building by a team with a variety of expertise. Having all of the abilities required to make a social media project successful concentrated into one person is next to impossible. It’s ok to admit that you’re a generalist – your perspectives on social media problems are an extremely effective way to help an organization deal with the complexities of the cultural shift towards social participation. But don’t be the kid in a garage.

Don’t claim to be a one-stop shop. There are plenty of social media experts – measurement specialists, social media researchers, cultural experts and content strategists – who understand aspects of SM in a narrow and deep way.

When I first entered the Web Analytics world, I was often referred to as a guru, mostly because the industry was new and niche. As the industry matured, Web Analytics was deconstructed into several core skills – technical implementation, deployment, optimization, testing, analysis, governance, statistics, etc.  The idea that one person could be an expert in a practice that spans so many areas seems ludicrous to me.

So why do we look at social media in that way?

Social media experts do exist – they’re just experts at social media something. The idea that a single person can understand all of the intricacies of your organization’s social media participation is next to impossible. Let’s start focusing on real social media expertise and really start to create change.