Blah Blah Blah

by Dan Roam

  The essential form of systems thinking: controlling what comes in and what goes out.

  The simple form of that spigot-bathtub-drain flowchart was so powerful that once it was understood, it could be used as the basis for modeling almost any complex system. Indeed, Meadows and her team used the model for everything from sequencing resource consumption to the dynamics of global capital. In 1973, they used the bathtub approach to develop “World3,” the first integrated computer simulation to model the impact of human activity on the planet. Reception to World3 was so positive that it prompted Meadows to write the book The Limits of Growth, which became one of the original calls to arms for today’s environmental-sustainability movement.

  Once the basics of the bathtub model are understood, they can be used to give visible form to almost any complex system, such as the “Economic Capital Constrained by a Nonrenewable Resource” model shown here.

  Vivid Quick Trick #6: Hear a Big Stew = Draw a Multivariable Plot

  Our bi R A>Our bi ggest information problem today is that we have too much of it. No matter what our daily work—calculating budgets, planning marketing campaigns, preparing presentations, designing software, studying new subjects—we rarely start with too little information. Invariably our first hurdle is figuring out what not to look at, an art that demands understanding the essential form of the incoming information.

  When we’re being overwhelmed with data and our verbal-visual triggers are all firing at the same time, our last-ditch hope is to create a single picture that shows everything and slows it down. So if we hear too many details bubbling up and it sounds like stew, Vivid Grammar tells us that the picture we draw is a multivariable plot, which we’ll shorthand here as an “MVP.”

  The MVP is the mother of all vivid pictures. By combining several distinct information variables on a common framework, an MVP reveals a more insightful picture than we would find by looking at the variables one by one. The purpose of the MVP is to give us a single pot in which to try46 to capture relationships that can’t be accounted for with any of the previous “form” pictures.

  A multivariable plot is a picture that superimposes multiple types of information onto a common framework.

  To see a couple MVPs in action, let’s go big. We started this chapter watching ancient thinkers struggle to find the form of the earth. Let’s close even bigger, watching other thinkers (some not so ancient) struggle to find the form of the entire universe. Along the way, we’ll meet a couple influential MVPs.

  We’ll start with something really big: the form of the universe.

  In 300 B.C., the Greek mathematician Euclid postulated that the shape of the universe could be mapped out and measured through the geometry of triangles and intersecting planes. For all practical purposes, Euclid turned out to be right, and for well over two thousand years we’ve learned to do math and to build things using Euclidean geometry.

  Two thousand years ago, Euclid showed that the universe could be mapped out and measured through the geometry of planes and triangles. For all practical purposes, he was right.

  Then in 1644, the French philosopher René Descartes noted that if we add the labels X and Y to a flat Euclidean plane, we cou Rso s A we cou ld mathematically describe the position and relationship of objects within it. For all practical purposes, Descartes was also right, and Cartesian coordinates provided the backbone for mapping out ideas from physics to algebra to philosophy to economics.

  Descartes showed that by adding X and Y coordinates, we could map out pretty much anything.

  Forty years later in 1684, Englishman scientist Isaac Newton showed that in our Cartesian universe, simple rules could be used to describe all motion—and indeed could be used to predict the outcome of physical events far in the future or far beyond the horizon. He was also right.

  Newton showed us that in a Cartesian universe, the motion of objects could be understood perfectly, and therefore plotted and predicted with extraordinary foresight.

  For the next 250 years, those three models pretty much summarized the physical state of the universe. The universe had a form that was Euclidean, coordinates that were Cartesian, and motion that was Newtonian. The universe was consistent, solid, and predictable. What a relief.

  The Euclidean/Cartesian/Newtonian physical universe was consistent, solid, and predictable.

  Then in 1905 along came “stupid” Einstein with his special theory of relativity—and messed it all up.

  Einstein’s theory of relativity shook up the whole universe.

  Although Einstein’s theory of relativity remains almost impossibly resistant to verbal description, we need look at only two MVPs to understand the essence of what Einstein saw.47

  The first multivariable plot illustrates how the universe was believed to work in the centuries before Einstein. It does this by mapping together five variables: three physical objects (for our version I’ve chosen a hummingbird, a fox, and a ball), time (represented as seconds), and space (represented as distance, here measured in yards).

  Our five variables: physical ob Re. T Aical ob jects (a hummingbird, a fox, and a ball), time (in seconds), and distance (in yards).

  To create this Newtonian MVP, we lay out distance as the horizontal axis and time as the vertical axis. Then we map in the fox, hummingbird, and ball at a common starting point of zero time and zero distance.

  MVP 1: At time zero, the fox, hummingbird, and ball all share a common location and are not moving.

  Let’s now click a stopwatch, unleash our hummingbird, and throw the ball all at the same time—then wait ten seconds and see what happens.

  After ten seconds, our fox hasn’t moved an inch (perhaps he’s still tired from running through the forest), our hummingbird has flown ten yards, and our ball has traveled twenty yards. We can easily show that in our MVP: we shift everything up on the time axis by ten seconds, shift the hummingbird ten yards to the right, and shift the ball over twenty yards.

  MVP 1 at ten seconds: Everything has moved up the time axis by ten seconds. Along the distance axis, the fox hasn’t moved at all, the hummingbird has moved ten yards, and the ball has moved twenty.

  This multivariable plot illustrates the predictably stable Newtonian universe. Although the fox and hummingbird have different perspectives on who has moved (the fox sees the hummingbird fly away, the hummingbird sees the fox drift back) they both agree on the speed: one yard per second. But, because they are moving at different speeds relative to the ball, they do not agree on the ball’s speed. To the fox, the ball is moving away at two yards per second, but to the hummingbird, it is moving away at only one yard per second.

  Who is correct? Both are—and we can see why: in a Newtonian universe, the fox and hummingbird are moving at different speeds, so of course they each perceive the ball’s speed differently.

  Now let’s use a second multivariable plot to show the universe after relativity. To do that, we need to change just one variable: if we substitute light (in the form of a photon) for the ball, the entire universe changes.

  Now we add light—and everything changes.

  Einstein knew two funny things about light. First, light is the fastest thing in the universe. Second—and this is the part that troubled him—light’s speed remains constant48 Rost A>48 to any observer, no matter how fast that observer is traveling. Let’s use our second multivariable plot to show why that’s a problem.

  The second MVP starts like the first, but with a couple changes: first, we replace the ball with a photon of light. Second, because the photon is so fast, we’ll keep the same time and distance axes but strip off the units. (The numbers get so big they’re almost impossible to draw in.) As before, everything starts at time zero and distance zero.

  Other than substituting a photon for the ball and stripping away the units, MVP 2 starts just like MVP 1.

  Just as before, we click a stopwatch, release the hummingbird (who now flies at half the speed of light), and throw the photon (at the speed of ligh
t). Then we wait ten seconds. As before, everything moves up the time axis, the hummingbird shifts to the right, and the photon shifts twice as far to the right. But something is wrong: even though the fox and the hummingbird are moving at different speeds, they both see light moving away at the same speed. How can that be?

  No matter how fast the hummingbird moves away from the fox, they both see light moving at the same speed. How can that be?

  How can that be? Einstein had the answer: it can’t. And that’s where relativity comes into play: the answer, said Einstein, is that the universe tilts. The stationary fox’s universe tilts just enough to keep the speed of light constant to him. To the faster hummingbird, however, the universe has to tilt more to keep the speed of light constant. For each observer, time and distance tilt differently. Other than the speed of light, there is nothing stable about the universe at all.

  For any observer, no matter how fast they are going, time and distance tilt just enough so that the speed of light always remains constant.

  That’s it for now. Of course that’s just the tip of the relativity iceberg, but it’s enough to see the essential form of relativity and how it bends the universe, which is all we need for now. As Einstein said, “All physical theories, their mathematical expressions notwithstanding, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description that even a child could understand them.”

  The Form Factor

  In this one chapter, we just covered a huge range of big ideas: the shape of the earth, computer marketing, tax breaks, late-night TV, the history of money, system dynamics, and the theory of relativity. Because we did it vividly—when we heard this, we drew that—we did it without learning a thou R0322 A a thou sand new facts and without having to memorize anything.

  That’s the power of finding the form of an idea.

  CHAPTER 8

  O Is for Only the Essentials: Vivid Ideas Fit in a Nutshell

  he next stop on our tour of the Vivid FOREST is O, which stands for “only the essentials.”

  Two years ago, I went to Washington to give a talk to the New Policy Committee of the United States Senate. After the talk, the director of New Policy for the Democrats told me, “The reason the Republicans win on policy is because they always find a way to fit their message into a nutshell. The reason Democrats fail is because we feel compelled to include everything we can think of.”

  He was right. Vivid Ideas do fit in a nutshell. They have to: With all the things we need to think about to get through the day, there simply isn’t space in our minds to let every idea run wild. Sure, with infinite patience, budget, and time, we could fix anything. But we wouldn’t: With all that freedom, we would find too many other things to do.

  In truth, it’s the constraints we face every day that force us to be innovative and creative. If we want our idea to be vivid, our real task is to limit the size of our paper. That doesn’t mean we have to edit every idea into a sound bite and jam every concept onto a napkin; we only have to do that if we want anybody else to pay attention. “Only the essentials” means we get someone’s attention with the basics. Once they’re intrigued, we can add all the details we need.

  “Only the essentials” means we get someone’s attention with the basics. Once they’re intrigued, we can add all the details we need.

  No organization on earth is as focused on efficiency as the U.S. Navy. Everything the navy does, from training to fighting to eating, has to fit on a ship. While the navy’s chessboard49 is as big as the planet, most of the playing pieces are smaller than a city block. When a few thousand people live and work on such a floating village, efficiency is mandatory: There simply isn’t room for anything unnecessary—including words.

  I recently led a series of workshops for the navy, helping the Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College look for ways to utilize simple pictures in strategic planning. The workshops were eye-opening for me, not only because I got Secać0to share words and pictures with a roomful of smart and accomplished people but because of what I learned from them: most memorably, how to “BLUF.”

  BLUF is the military’s acronym for how to get your message heard: State the bottom line up front. Does an admiral in the midst of battle want to know every detail that every one of her officers knows? No: She needs the bottom line. Does the corpsman need to know every detail of a sailor’s medical history to treat a bullet wound? No: He needs the bottom line. The way to get your message heard is to state the bottom line up front. This simple approach gets the essentials of the idea across first, leaving it to the recipient to decide whether he or she needs to know more.

  BLUF = bottom line up front— how to get heard in the navy.

  BLUF is a great presentation concept, but how do we apply it to our own ideas? After all, isn’t stating the bottom line up front kind of like putting out a fire before it starts? How can we know the bottom line until we’ve been through it? That’s precisely the point: We can’t state the essentials of an idea until we’ve run through it ourselves.

  Vivid Thinking as Distillation

  Every idea starts with many parts—usually more than we can keep track of, and certainly more than anybody else wants to.50 To ensure that we understand our own idea well enough to share it with someone else, we have to find a way to distill the idea to its simplest essence: What is it really about, and why should anyone really care?

  “Idea distillation” is the process of finding the essence of our idea so that we can strip everything else away. It’s how we remove everything that distracts from the essentials.

  “Idea distillation” is the process of finding the essence of our idea—so that we can strip everything else away.

  That’s how we make BLUF happen: When we begin exploring an idea, we must think about and capture everything that comes to mind. At this early stage, we don’t want to hold anything back. The thoughts should come fast and furious. But fast and furious is the last thing we want when it comes time to share.

  That’s where BLUF comes in: When it’s time to present the idea, we offer only the essentials.

  The secret of BLUF is to offer only the essentials at the first meeting. If the essentials are vivid R>

  Details, counter-arguments, variations, possible points of failure, potential unintended consequences—all of these are critical aspects of any idea, but not in the first presentation. If the essentials of our idea are vivid, they will buy us enough time with our audience to get all the other issues heard. It’s recognizing that we’re looking at trees that matters in this part of the forest.

  This is nothing new. The “elevator pitch,” the “marketing spin,” the “talking points”—they all say the same thing: If we want to quickly share our idea, we must strip away everything that’s not essential. That’s a great sentiment—except that elevator pitches, marketing spin, and talking points rarely work as well as we hope they will. Because none of them are vivid, they all have an ever-diminishing chance of cutting through.

  That’s because we’ve been taught to distill ideas through writing, editing, talking, listening, and note taking; in other words, relying entirely on our fox has become our only option. But our fox alone can’t cut the blah-blah-blah anymore. From now on, we’re going to have to draft our hummingbird as well. As we balance words with pictures, we’re going to actively switch from writing to drawing (and then go back and forth) to force the essentials of our idea to the surface.

  The Vivid Two-Step

  Here’s how “vivid distillation” works. Our fox writes down everything he can think of related to our idea. (So far, nothing unusual.) Hopefully, it’s a long list—far too long to quickly summarize with carefully constructed sentences and linear thinking. So (and here’s where the vivid part kicks in) we then send our hummingbird in to draw a picture visually summarizing what those words signify.

  How? By using Vivid Grammar, the Grammar Graph, and the Six Vivid Quick Tricks. We’ve got the tools now to turn any word into a picture, and this is the time to use them.
Our first picture may be a mess (no: it will be a mess), but at least we’ve engaged the part of our mind that sees the whole. Then we hand that picture back to the fox, who writes a description of what that picture shows—and so on. This sifting back and forth becomes the mechanism that distills our idea to its essentials.

  Write, draw, write, draw—it doesn’t take more than two or three handoffs before the essentials of our idea appear.

  Now We Add a Twist . . .

  Okay, so we’ve got this messy vivid process going, words reflecting pictures and vice versa. Our idea is becoming clearer—it might not look like it, but it is—yet at the same time, our paper51 is becoming cloudier. What to do? Simple: We stop and reduce the size of our paper by half. And then we start over. What do we carry across? Only the essentials.