“Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.” — Michelangelo (not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle one)
Today we had fun in our KEEN School of Engineering Book Club discussing and drawing (literally) from the book, “Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate with Your Visual Mind”, by Dan Roam. Our KEEN Book Club this semester is focused on visual thinking and communication. Why? To be innovative and to teach our students to be innovative, we need to tap into all that our brain has to offer to be creative and solve problems. Drawing allows us to connect ideas and create and communicate value, things vital to having an entrepreneurial mindset. And much of what the brain offers us in our innate creative conceptualization abilities through drawing, we often underutilize and fail to reach our ability to fully think and communicate in visual terms. According to the book, 90% of the information on the internet is visual, 90% of the data that ever existed was created in the last 2 years, and 90% of knowledge workers don’t know how to effectively use visuals.
Don’t Be Scared to Draw
In our book club, we talked about as kids, we used to draw all the time or have kids who are keen on being extra observant and engaged with illustrations and images. But somehow when we get older, we compare our scribbles and doodles with others and think, we don’t have the “gift”. But through Dan’s books, I’ve been discovering personally the power of using stick figures to not only communicate big ideas, but to allow them to form before my very eyes. I’ve made two presentations to big groups of professors (one on AI and another on mentoring) using stick figure drawings inspired by Dan’s book. I received comments and encouragement that they were drawn into (no pun into) the talk because the ideas were simple, clear, and uniquely presented.
What Makes a Good Drawing
As Dan says, good images are meaningful pictures that:
- trigger deep thoughts,
- clarify complexity, and
- inspire insight.
For the last few years, I have attended meetings, listened to sermons, and journaled with handwritten text and images. Not only does it allow me to work through thoughts in my head or create designs, it allows me to engage and retain information better and longer. Dan talks about how we often “draw” in our minds and bodies without a pen and pencil. You’ll have to get the book to learn more about that.
Drawing in the Classroom
One of our faculty in our club, Dr. Gafar Elamin, pointed out that for his mechanical engineering senior design class, he has the students sketch five different sketches that show the concept of their potential design. Soon the five sketches turn into twenty sketches, as they inspire new ideas and connections. Another faculty, Dr. Deirdre Ragan, said her honors students were making a presentation and apologized that their drawings weren’t that good. But when she told them, “artisticness” (my own choice of made-up word), isn’t what mattered. It was the ability of the drawing to communicate the idea. After that, the student perked up and “went to town” and excitedly explained their ideas.
Make it Practical
Instead of just verbally communicating our thoughts and ideas in our book discussion, we took time to practice what we were reading. For those who were “non-drawers”, we started with the Mike Rohde and Dan Roam approach of drawing and labeling a dot, circle, triangle, square, and line. Then we showed them Mike’s simple drawings of a fish, hamburger, dog, camera, and others, and allowed them to see how those simple shapes were building blocks to create drawings labeled with words (i.e. sketchnotes). Our faculty remarked how they were having fun drawing, even the one who initially said she couldn’t draw.
More Fun to Come
Our club will explore other “visual mind” books such as the SketchNote Workbook by Mike Rohde and Pencil Me In: The Business Drawing Book for People Who Can’t Draw, by Christina Wodtke. Dan Roam has written many books on the subject of drawing for visual thinking and communication. I was fortunate through my LinkedIn and real life connection with Mike Rohde (author of the Sketchnote Workbook) that I heard about his Back of the Napkin book. Grant Wright was the one who LinkedIn with me after I wrote a blog post about the Kindle Scribe vs. the Remarkable 2 and then later talked about Dan’s “Back of the Napkin” book. As in life, drawing helps us to create connections with people, ideas, and innovation.
Picture: Our KEEN Book Club in the School of Engineering. For the image observant, we ran out of hard copies of the book but have orders for more on the way.
About the Author: Andrew B. Williams is Dean of Engineering and Louis S. LeTellier Chair for The Citadel School of Engineering. He was recently named on of Business Insider’s Cloudverse 100 and humbly holds the designation of AWS Education Champion. He sits on the AWS Machine Learning Advisory Board and is a certified AWS Cloud Practitioner. He is proud to have recently received a Generative AI for Large Language Models certification from DeepLearning.AI and AWS. Andrew has also held positions at Spelman College, University of Kansas, University of Iowa, Marquette University, Apple, GE, and Allied Signal Aerospace Company. He is author of the book, Out of the Box: Building Robots, Transforming Lives.
In Search of Innovation 