“I can’t draw, but…” echoed in my head and I realized I needed to experiment with incorporating visual thinking into my life and blog outside of the “art box” that I unconsciously had it in.

It began when Rob commented a few weeks back with a suggestion that my blog could use a few photos for a bit of flavor.  I liked the idea, but didn’t want to spend time looking through photo archives for appropriate images.  I thought - I am an artist, so maybe I could generate my own images.  My usual medium is too slow and I can’t draw representationally very well, but I could try to cartoon.

As I was mulling that idea over another part of my brain realized I’d heard part of that phrase recently.  “I can’t draw, but…” is at the center of Dan Roam’s visual problem-solving philosophy in The Back of the Napkin and I’d been playing around on his web site before I decided to go ahead and buy the book.

And it clicked.

To meet my goals, I need to expand my thinking ability by adding visual tools and methods.  I’m so close to the idea already.  Although I do most of my thinking verbally, I do it by writing out in long-hand, adding in the visual and the tactile.  This should be a small step for me.

So - drawings.

Today’s is actually a slice of a sketchbook page from my art blog done as part of an exercise from a book called Keys to Drawing with Imagination by Bert Dodson.  The exercise involves applying deliberate variations to improvisational forms.  Sounds like problem-solving to me.

I read the case.  I came up with a possible solution, essentially the obvious one that the writing and discussion within the case had been leading to.  And then I read the experts’ opinions - and found a much better version of the obvious solution, a couple very interesting twists, and an equally important opposing viewpoint.

The temptation to spend $149/year for a magazine subscription and access to online archives of past issues just increased dramatically.

In March and April the Harvard Business Review made the entire content of their current issue available for free online.  Previously, only a select few articles were available each month, and not the cases, so I didn’t know how useful they were in this format

We’ve only done a little bit of case work in my MBA program, at least through the first five classes.  The action of working through the case in groups is supposed to be at the heart of the experience, and it definitely was an effective learning tool. 

But as a team, we didn’t come up with the wide variety of answers that are shown in the Harvard Business Review.  And the “best responses” that the teacher shared with the entire class tended to all take very similar approaches to the problem, ones which matched what we had already come up with.  That may change as we move forward into the second year.

I hope so.

Examining the potential solutions offered by executives and leaders in the areas discussed in the case was very illuminating, showing me points that I missed, and how reasonable the different options could all sound.  Some solutions required industry knowledge I didn’t have, but I could have asked questions that pointed in those directions, if I had thought of them.  Having the answers helped me understand new ways to approach the question.

I just met these words, even though I’ve been keeping company with the concept my entire career.

The Words

Systemic, or systems, thinking focuses on the connected nature of any problem, concept, or situation.

Interconnecting elements are the reason I chose to go into materials science.  My undergraduate education at Virginia Tech emphasized how a material’s measurable properties, its internal structure, and the process by which it was made were all dependant on each other.

Realizing that a corporation is composed of interconnecting elements on a larger scale is what drew me to become interested in business, an outcome I didn’t expect a decade ago. 

If I look back at the goals I set myself, which were the trigger point for this blog, then I see that they could be combined into a simple statement of “think more systemically.”

The Meeting 

I started following Steve Roessler’s blog All Things Workplace a couple months ago and he’s currently in the middle of a series about systemic thinking.  It didn’t register at first, not until I wanted to comment on one of his posts.  When I went back over the recent material, to make sure I was answering intelligently, the term clicked in my head.  A quick google search revealed how much material was out there.

I’m a firm believer that the way we are able to describe things, whether verbally, visually, or otherwise, changes the way we perceive them.  I’m looking forward to seeing where this discovery of a new term - and the paths that it opens up for me - leads.

This surprised me, yet now that I go to discuss it, it seems so obvious.

When I first followed a link to www.e-strategies.co.uk from the Squarespace developer boards I blinked in surprise at the first page.

We build beautiful, modern websites that you can edit yourself and which have advanced features that enable you to market your business without having to rely on anyone else.

Or - we set up and design a Squarespace website for you. 

Throughout the site there was similar language.  Two examples are “We have partnered with Paypal”  and changes for updating the website “are instantaneous and completely free of charge.”  The first is something anyone can do and the second is a standard part of the Squarespace package.  In many places they restated Squarespace’s benefits as ones that E-Strategies provided.

And they do.

They just use Squarespace as the tool to get there.

And the average customer isn’t interested in that.  They just want to see what the benefits are to THEM. 

The writing on the website does a fantastic job of presenting the benefits to the potential customer, blending together those provided by the tool and the extra value added by the designer, which includes being a coach to teach the customers to maintain the website on their own.  The company even offers classes on various aspects of web usage.

It seems such an obvious approach now that I see it.  Yet my first reaction was something along the lines of “that’s sneaky” and “why?!”.  As I looked more closely the value of the services and how reasonable it is to make the path to the final tools transparent made a lot more sense.  The approach didn’t seem sneaky at all, but instead helpful to both the customer and the company.

It made me wonder which other services are presented this way, so that the store front I interact with isn’t necessarily the direct provider of some of the benefits, but instead uses them and adds to them to reach me. 

Freon was a wonder chemical before it was found to be a bane of the ozone layer.  Automobile drivers are more reckless around bicyclists wearing helmets.  Renewable biofuels may actually be less environmentally friendly than fossil fuels due to hidden costs.  These are three well chosen examples in the article by Ivan Amato published in the March 24, 2008 Newscripts of Chemical and Engineering News.

The idea is very familiar as the law of unintended consequences.  Some of the more interesting examples that turned up at the top of a basic search for the term include:

• An entry in the Encyclopedia of Economics
• Thoughts on the government regulating obesity
• An opinion piece on Megan’s Law
• A note on game graphics and password security

But Ivan’s wording is striking.  The thought process of looking at a solution and asking “How could this become a problem?” triggers a different chain of thought, at least for me, than looking at an action and saying “What might be the consequences?”  The solution/problem wording of the question seems to be a more useful tool for strategizing and planning ahead.

Although that could be just negative and short-term thinking on my part.  After all, not all unintended consequences are bad.  Some are innovative, as Cory Doctorow points out, and those are the ones that will probably make the greatest difference in the long run.

When the shape and size of the box changes, the mind starts coming up with new ideas on how to change what goes in the box.

I was reminded of this while checking out the new developer forums for Squarespace, the service I use to host and design my art website.  Between a note in one conversation about certain changes that were already coded into upcoming version 5 of the site building software and a link to an “examples” page that had changed since the last time I saw it, my options for presenting my content expanded considerably.

Ever since I got over the first blush of excitement at having a website I had been bumping into constraints in the site building software.  No matter how much I could do, and did, there was always something I thought to try and it didn’t work.  I accepted this because I only wanted to spend so much time learning web development skills, either to build my own from something closer to scratch or to more fully customize Squarespace’s platform.

So I wasn’t surprised that looking at others work and learning of upcoming options gave me new ideas on how to present my art and information about it.

I was surprised that it helped me to define what content I wanted to have.

It was as if I’d mentally gone from a document sleeve with a couple pockets to a briefcase with sections and pen holders and such.  I kept trying to stuff more into the document sleeve, but couldn’t figure out how to use what I have because I couldn’t easily reach all of it.  When I started looking at the briefcase I realized how this could go there and that could go here, but I also was able to say that this calculator I’ll use all the time, now that I can find it, and this cheat sheet, which was more accessible before, doesn’t even need to be here, because other tools serve the same purpose better. 

Now I have some project ideas to file away for later and some adjustments to start playing with…