by Dan Roam
Vivid Quick Trick No. 2: Hear Numbers = Draw a Chart
If we hear a series of numbers and want to find the form they signify, we draw a chart.
Numbers—long lists of them in particular—present a real processing challenge for most people. The problem isn’t that the human brain is bad at understanding numbers—it’s not: The innate math skills of most of us are surprisingly good. The problem is that if we can’t physically see the amounts in question laid out side by side, it’s exceedingly difficult to get a sense of their relationships, especially when comparing vastly different amounts in quantity or over time.41
That’s why, if we’re hearing or thinking about an idea and lots of number triggers start firing, we should pick up a pencil and start drawing a chart. Otherwise we’ll very likely miss the essential form of the idea—and come away believing that we’ve understood something numerically important when in fact we haven’t got a clue.
In an article discussing the 2010 tax cut debate, New Yorker magazine economics correspondent James Surowiecki wrote the following:
The fight on Capitol Hill over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts is about many things: deficit reduction, economic stimulus, supply-side ideology. But at its core is a simple question: who counts as rich?
That introduction makes the tax decision so R Asion so und as if it boils down to simple numbers—which is encouraging for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion. But then Surowiecki continues:
Between 2002 and 2007, for instance, the bottom ninety-nine per cent of [American] incomes grew 1.3 per cent a year in real terms—while the incomes of the top one per cent grew ten per cent a year. That one percent accounted for two-thirds of all the income growth in those years. People in the ninety-fifth to the ninety-ninth percentiles of income have represented a fairly constant share of the national income for twenty-five years now. But in that period the top one per cent has seen its share of national income double; in 2007, it captured twenty-three per cent of the nation’s total income.
Wow. It’s clear that Surowiecki has done a lot of research and discovered something critical to the tax debate, but from reading this I have no idea what it is. I hear time periods, years, income groups, income amounts, percentages, and growth—all solid, apparently meaningful numbers. But strung together like this, they have no coherent form. To his credit, Surowiecki sums everything up later by stating, “There’s a yawning chasm between the professional and plutocratic classes, and the tax system should reflect that.” But from the stream of numbers he laid on me, how would I know that—and what does it mean, anyway?
If I really wanted to grasp the form of Surowiecki’s idea, by his second sentence my hummingbird should have recognized that his fox wasn’t making any sense, and should have started drawing a chart. Since Surowiecki began by stating percentages of income, my hummingbird would begin by simply drawing one hundred American incomes, representing the proportions Surowiecki identified: the bottom 99 percent (including a subgroup of 95–99 percent) and the top 1 percent.
My hummingbird’s pictorial response to Surowiecki’s fox would begin by simply showing one hundred American incomes: the bottom 99 percent and the top 1 percent.
Then I’d add the income growth figures he cites for each group during the 2002–7 period: 1.3 percent growth for the bottom ninety-nine and 10 percent growth for the top one.
Next, my hummingbird would add the income growth figures: 1.3 percent for the bottom ninety-nine and 10 percent for the top one.
Looking at this, I think I’m beginning to detect the form of Surowiecki’s idea: that the income at the top has grown ten times more than at the bottom—but then he shifts units, from income growth to total share of income, making it even more difficult to see what he’s getting at. So I’ll add his further details, including the verbally confusing and nonparallel units of “two-thirds,” “ninety-fifth to ninety-ninth percentile,” “twice the growth,” and “twenty-three per cent.”
Adding in the remaining units gets to the point: While ninety-four incomes show a reduction in total income share and five show no change, the top one income by itself accounts for two-thirds of all income growth—and twice its share of twenty-five years ago.
Now that we’ve really looked at the numbers by making a chart of them, we can fi-nally see the essential form of Surowiecki’s idea: The income difference between the “poor” and the “rich” isn’t growing much—but the difference between the “rich” and the “super-rich” is growing fast. In pulling together his article, Surowiecki relied on words alone, which meant we had to take his conclusions on faith. Now that we see it, his idea has clear form—and by paring our chart back to only its essentials (which is the O of the next chapter), we make his idea vivid.
The vivid chart of Surowiecki’s idea: While the income difference between the “poor” and the “rich” isn’t growing much, the income difference between the “rich” and the “super-rich” is growing fast.
Vivid Quick Trick No. 3: Hear a List = Draw a Map
As we recall from quick trick number 1, when we hear a name we draw a portrait, and when we hear two names we draw two portraits. But what do we draw when the names keep on coming—how do we find the form of everyone in the Old Testament, for example, or—equally confusing—everyone on late-night TV?
The answer is we don’t. When we hear four, five, six names or more, it should dawn on our fox and our hummingbird that this idea isn’t about the differences between all the players but about the relationships between them. And as we further recall from the Grammar Graph, when we want to find the form of the relationships between multiple nouns (people, places, or things), we draw a map.
Which gives us quick trick 3: If we hear a list of names, objects, or concepts, we draw a map.
Here’s an example. In mid-2010, two of the leading late-night comedians on American television switched time slots. In a simple move executed so seamlessly that few viewers even noticed, Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno changed showtimes.
Well, not exactly.
In his book The War for Late Night, Bill Carter tries to explain:
Robert Morton had been David Letterman’s producer at both NBC and CBS, from 1982 to 1996. He retained many Rof c Ad many friends in the late-night world, but none closer than Jeff Ross, Conan O’Brien’s producer. The two men shared the shorthand of warriors who had been in the trenches. Morty, with Letterman, had experienced the tumultuous ride from 12:35 to 11:35. Now, as 2009 was drawing to a close, his good buddy Jeff was in the middle of the same bumpy transition with Conan; naturally they had much to talk about.
Oops, my Blah-Blahmeter is twitching: Too many names are coming at me too fast. In one paragraph, Carter has introduced more characters than I can keep track of. My fox has to reread this just to figure out who is talking with whom. Hummingbird—you there? Better start with a map of the names we’ve heard so far: Robert Morton, David Letterman, Jeff Ross, Conan O’Brien, and Morty.
My map shows the relationship of the five names introduced so far: Letterman, his former producer Morton (“Morty”), Conan, and his producer Jeff.
Okay: I see who is who so far. But that’s just the first paragraph. Carter continues:
It had been only six months since Conan assumed the host chair at The Tonight Show, the culmination of a five-year wait that began when NBC unexpectedly invoked term limits on Jay Leno in 2004, ordering an end to his long run at Tonight to make room for Conan, then following Jay on Late Night . . . NBC, fearing the financial consequences of Jay’s likely move to ABC, came up with an alternative at the last minute: relocating Leno into prime time.
Hold on—let me see if I got this: Conan got his Tonight Show on NBC from Jay, yet Jay has to make room for Conan or else move to ABC? Now my fox (no pun intended) is really losing it: This expanding cast of characters overlaps various networks, shows, and time periods. Before I get much further, I’m going to need a playbook.42 I’d better read ahead43 and add all the names to my map.
Reading ahead and taking names, I expand my map to include the entire cast of Carter’s unfolding late-night drama.
Now I’ve got it: From Johnny Carson (the patron saint of late night) to CEO Jeff Zucker and his staff, all the characters are nailed down. The next step is to align them according to network and role. Reading ahead again, I note each character’s various affiliations and time periods. When I superimpose those coordinates, I get a complete map of the underlying relationships that make up this story.
With network affiliations and time periods superimposed, my map shows the underlying relationships that make this an epic TV drama worth reading.
With this map in hand, I can now go back and enjoy the tears, broken hearts, and tragicomedy that make this an epic TV drama worth reading. Knowing that I can keep track of who is stabbing whom in the back has more than just entertainment value; it means that I can finally find the form of Carter’s essential idea. Which is this: The “deciders” at NBC felt compelled to make Conan an offer he couldn’t refuse. Because it was an offer that Conan believed would ruin his reverence for the iconic legacy of The Tonight Show, he did refuse. Rather than fight and destroy his dream, Conan left to start another show on another network, TBS.
With my final map in hand, I can see the form of Carter’s idea: Conan believed he had to leave NBC for TBS. Given the deal NBC offered him, it was the only way to not destroy his reverence for the iconic Tonight Show.
Vivid Quick Trick No. 4: Hear a Story = Draw a Timeline
A history is also a list, but instead of a list of names, it is a list of events. The point of history is to identify the things that happened in order to learn from them. If we can discern the form of the events and the patterns between them, we hope that we might repeat the good ones and avoid repeating the bad ones. To make that possible, the first thing any history must do is show us the events in order. Therefore, if we hear a story, we find the form by drawing a timeline.
In 2008, the world economy came near to a complete shutdown. As wealth disappeared overnight, people the world around demanded to know what had happened—both to stop the financial hemorrhaging before the planet bled to death and to make sure it never happened again.
In his highly praised 2008 book The Ascent of Money, economic historian Niall Ferguson set out amid that chaos to make sense of the financial history of the world. Ferguson believes that the meltdown had more to do with history than anything else—or, rather, the lack of history. He states in his introduction, “I believe that today’s crisis is in some measure to be explained by the ignorance of financial history—and not only among ordinary people. The ‘masters of the universe’ also paid far too little heed to the past, preferring to pin their hopes on elaborate mathematical models that proved to be false gods.”
Describing the history of money as the ongoing process of creating wealth where before there was none, Ferguson lays out a set of six clearly defined historic steps that gave rise to today’s integrated global economy: the rise of credit, the creation of banks to support that credit, the creation of bonds to extend that credit to nations, stocks to extend credit to business, insurance to extend credit to groups, and real estate to extend credi R
These six steps take us from an ancient time when money equaled metal (and wealth was limited to the few who possessed copper, silver, and gold) to our modern times, when money equals trust (and wealth is available to anyone who proves they can pay it back). “Credit,” the world-changing invention at the heart of this monumental shift, is the critical mechanism in the spreading of wealth in ever-larger circles.
Yet clear as this model is (there is no question that The Ascent of Money is well written; even in the most detailed chapters, my Blah-Blahmeter barely twitched), it is not vivid. Although our fox is kept happy as Ferguson spells out and refers frequently back to his six steps, there is nothing for our hummingbird to see. Our ability to grasp the importance of what Ferguson has discovered is left to only half our mind.44
This is a shame, because in writing this enlightening history, Ferguson has already uncovered the essential form of his idea—and the visual aspect is right there, an idea ready to be seen. He just never drew it out.
Setting our own hummingbird to work, we will draw it for him. Recalling the six steps, we can easily create a timeline, an all-at-once picture that shows us the historic progression and lets our eyes dance across the entire idea in an instant. With this timeline, we don’t have to remember exactly what Ferguson said three hundred pages back—all we have to do is look!
Letting our hummingbird take a shot at Ferguson’s six steps gives us a timeline we can see all at once. With this in hand, we don’t have to remember every detail that came before as we learn more. We just look!
Of course, any history, no matter how important or well structured, is boring without the people who lived it and the adventures they had. Ferguson knows this better than most historians, and that’s what makes his book so readable. In the banks section, we meet the Medicis, who funded the Renaissance by giving credit to kings. In the bonds section, we watch as the Rothschilds extend credit to nations and bet the world against Napoleon—and win. In the stocks section, we meet John Law, the first man to conceive of the market bubble. We don’t want to lose these people; they are what makes the story come alive.
And now, with our timeline intact, we won’t lose them; on the contrary, we now have a place to draw them in. (Remember “portraits”?)
The form of money. Our hummingbird’s visual take on Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money.
Putting it all together by combining his fox with our hummingbird—Ferguson’s six steps, the stories he tells, the characters he introd R/p>Credit well managed is the creator of wealth; as credit extended from the few to the many, wealth spread around the world. Poverty doesn’t come from nasty bankers stealing. It’s just the opposite: Poverty comes from people’s inability to access efficient (and trustworthy) financial institutions.
The Vivid Idea: As credit has extended from the few to the many, wealth has spread around the world.
Vivid Quick Trick No. 5: Hear a Sequence = Draw a Flowchart
If we hear a cause-and-effect sequence, we draw a flowchart. Visually drawing out the interactions of the players in an event (or the components of a process) gives visceral form to the underlying causes and results.45
Any parent, teacher, or babysitter who has pried apart two battling children knows the universal lament “I hit him because he hit me”—and also knows the inevitable outcome of the process if it’s left unchecked: more hitting, until everyone is in tears. The picture we draw to map out such a sequence does not need to be complex, but it still gives the sequence form: a spiraling loop with an unsurprising result.
The inevitable sequence.
Even if we don’t have time to draw the portraits (or believe we can’t—remember the “words in a circle” fallback option discussed in Chapter 5?), we can still see the form of the sequence with a more basic flowchart.
Even reduced to the most basic “words in a circle” picture, the flowchart shows clearly the essential form of the sequence.
Donella Meadows and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a more complex set of events they wanted to sequence: how our world works. In the early 1970s, many scientists and academics had begun to view the earth as a set of interlocking systems, from weather patterns to resource consumption to human dynamics. The result of this integrated approach to looking at the planet as a single big picture was given the name “systems dynamics,” and Donella emerged as one of the new discipline’s most insightful leaders.
In the early days of systems thinking, the entire approach was limited by the ways people talked about “systems.” Since words were linear Ran>
Working with her husband, Dennis, and MIT colleague Jørgen Randers, Donella came up with something she called “the bathtub model” of systems dynamics. Her model said that we could look at any comple
x system as a “stock” (the bathtub) with an inflow (the spigot) and an outflow (the drain). The essential resources needed to fill the stock—water in the case of a bathtub, money in the case of a business, energy in the case of manufacturing—originate from some source, pass into the tub for some use, and eventually drain out into some dump (which, she was quick to point out, could well become another source for another tub).
Donella Meadows’s breakthrough model of systems thinking presents systems as a bathtub-like flowchart in which all inputs, outputs, and “stocks” are visually linked.
This simple flowchart gave simple form to the incredibly complex concepts behind global systems dynamics and served as the breakthrough that brought systems thinking to the fore in environmental planning—and remains the foundation of today’s emphasis on planned sustainability.