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by Dan Roam

  “Clara” and the Clear Idea

  To see how Vivid Thinking helps us evolve an idea, let’s do the popcorn exercise again, only this time with an entire organization.65

  Imagine that you and I work for a growing social media company called Clara. “Clara” is an acronym that stands for “Clean Living and Responsible Action.” 66 Our mission is to use social media tools to spread the word about responsible product purchasing. (Rather than buying any old product, we all benefit by choosing a product that is better for us and better for the planet.)

  Our founder chose the symbol of a tree as our logo because it represents nature, networks, and sustainable growth. Now it’s up to you and me to convey our mission in a vivid way.

  Clara: Clean Living and Responsible Action. Our mission: Use social networking to help consumers make better purchasing decisions.

  Let Your Fingers Do the Walking (Inward Evolution)

  Evolving a Vivid Idea means stepping back and forth between words and pictures, ac-tively guiding the idea’s direction while simultaneously watching the unexpected unfold. Here’s how we start: Hold up two fingers in the “V for victory” sign. The first finger means “words.” The second finger means “pictures.” This is our vivid evolution tool.

  Make a V with your fingers. One finger means “words,” the other means “pictures.” Put them together and V = “vivid.”

  Now point your hand downward, rest your two fingers on this book, and start walking.

  Now let your fingers do the walking. Words—pictures—words—pictures: the perfect path for an evolving idea.

  Sure, it’s an ungainly waddle, but this waddle means everything. When we write down an idea, we think about it one way. When we draw the same idea, we think about it another way. Shifting from one to the other forces both views to t Ridth qws to t he surface; over time, a better view inevitably emerges.

  Evolving Clara: From Mission Statement to Vivid Idea

  Back at Clara, we start with the words—and thanks to our boss, they’ve already been given to us:

  At Clara, we use social media tools to spread the word about responsible product purchasing.

  Next we draw a picture. That’s also been given to us: a tree.

  Okay: We’ve got some words and a picture of a tree. Where’s the “evolution”? Let’s keep V-walking to find out.

  Our next word step is to use words to describe the tree:

  A tree is a natural network, a collection of distinct components (bark, wood, branches, leaves, and seeds) all working together to create a single growing organism. A tree represents hope, stability, longevity, and growth. The tree is the perfect metaphor for our mission.

  And now let’s create a simple portrait to describe that:

  Let’s tie the tree portrait back to social media:

  Social media is like the tree because a single person is like a seed. Small but potentially powerful, that single person (with the right care and resources) becomes the starting point of an entire forest. With the technologies of today, Clara can help anyone become that seed.

  Now let’s draw a couple of parallel timelines to describe that comparison: seed versus person.

  Putting them together we’ve now got a vivid mission statement:

  Clara is your arborist: By providing you with fertile ground (a good idea with deep meaning and access to an established network), resources (social media tools, me Rpr qols, me ssaging concepts, a library of images), and the potential to grow (a limitless global audience), Clara helps you create your own forest of responsibility and opportunity.

  The waddle has paid off. By stepping back and forth from words to pictures, we’ve used inward evolution to create a visceral, memorable, and clear vision for Clara. And that’s not even the best part.

  Connect the Dots (Outward Evolution)

  We’ve come up with a vivid message for Clara—and, like our salted popcorn, we evolved it until we knew it was good. But also like our salted popcorn, our vivid message won’t mean anything if it doesn’t appeal to anyone else. Now it’s time for the second evolutionary step: outward. We’ve done everything we can; now we’ve got to find a way to let everyone else see Clara’s potential for themselves.

  What could be better than providing a framework and the tools necessary for our audience to finish it for themselves?

  Conceptually, we’re all familiar with this idea. Back when we were kids, many of us loved connect-the-dots pictures. The most engaging pictures in our coloring books weren’t the fanciest; they were the ones that we had to complete ourselves. Someone had laid out a sequence of dots and we connected them, revealing a hidden image.

  The best part of connect the dots was our feeling of ownership of the picture—and we didn’t even have to be any good at drawing.

  What might happen if we applied the same approach to engaging audiences with our Vivid Idea?

  Game Theory

  When Will Wright was young, he built lots of models: “ships, cars, planes—I loved to do that,” he told an interviewer in 2006. When he got older, Wright’s fascination with building models stayed with him, and he began to imagine what it might be like to use computers to create a living model of a city. No such city-building game existed, so Wright decided to create one. He called it SimCity.

  Unlike most games at the time, SimCity gave the player tools to build things rather than destroy them. Although SimCity debuted quietly in 1989, the game’s you-finish-it approach caught on, and it earned more than $230 million.

  With that success behind him, Wright focused deeper into his simulated cities. Now he imagined what it might be like to let players create a single home and then manage the lives of people who lived in it. This time his you-finish-it approach caught fire. The Sims was released in 2000 and went on to Rht=" qt on to become the best-selling game in PC history.

  Twice emboldened, Wright began work on the game he’d dreamed of since he was a kid. Spore gave the player the tools not just to create a city or a house but to create life. Although the game reflected many of Wright’s favorite concepts—the evolution of organisms, life on other planets, interstellar travel—his greatest design insight was that the game would be best if he left it up to the players to create most of it by themselves. Because he gave players an underlying game framework and several simple creation tools, Wright didn’t need to finish it; the players would.

  Spore launched in September 2008. Within six months, players would upload more than ninety million pieces of user-created content. Once again, Wright was right: When people have the ability to finish a nearly complete idea themselves, the success of the idea not only is more likely—it often becomes inevitable.

  Connecting the Dots with Clara

  When last we left Clara, we had inwardly evolved our idea until we had a vivid verbal + visual mission statement. Now let’s engage a potential Clara member by letting her connect the dots as we introduce the concept step by step—in six steps.

  Step 1: First we expand our mission statement picture into an almost fully evolved map. We do this by adding necessary details—and, more important, by removing any specific references to our member. (These she will fill in herself.) Thus we begin our introduction with a map outlining the essential framework of our idea—and a blank circle where we invite our potential member to imagine herself. We give this incomplete map to the potential member.67(Go ahead—draw yourself in!)

  Outward evolution Step 1: We almost complete the tree picture—then remove audience-specific references.

  Step 2: Now we explain that the purpose of Clara is to help the members connect the right products to the right people. We let the potential viewer select from a range of sample products, draw them in, and connect the dots back to herself.

  Step 2: We invite the viewer to select sample products and connect the dots back to herself.

  Step 3: We introduce the social networking tools that Clara uses to spread the word about products. We let the member select her preferred tools, dra
w them in, and connect those back to herself.

  Step 3: The viewer selects her preferred social networking tools and connects herself to them.

  Step 4: Since the goal of Clara is to help our member to connect the right products to the right people, we invite her to draw in her own contacts and connect the entire tree from bottom to top.

  Step 4: The member draws in her own contacts and connects the tree from bottom to top.

  Step 5: Our potential member has now completed her own diagram of her own Clara network. Because she “evolved” it herself, Clara is now vivid in her mind. She not only understands the essence of Clara; she now sees exactly where she fits in it.

  Step 5: Because she “evolved” it herself, our potential member now has a vivid image of Clara.

  But that’s not the last step. As we know, Clara is all about social networking, using online tools to create an ever-expanding network. As a last picture, we show our potential member what happens to her network whe

  n her own contacts join: Her single “tree” becomes an entire “forest.” When she connects those dots, the potential of Clara becomes . . . well, vividly clear.

  Enter Lady Gaga

  One last thought on Edwin Land and Polaroid. Master of evolution though he was, not even Land could see the digital photo revolution coming. Long after Land’s death and after years of struggling to counter digital technology, the Polaroid Company finally failed and declared bankruptcy in 2001.

  But that’s not the end of the Polaroid story. In 2010, a reborn Polaroid company announced that it was hiring pop sensation Lady Gaga as creative director. In a way, it’s the perfect next step: The company founded by the man who invented dark sunglasses gets taken over by the woman who is (currently) most famous for wearing them.

  The evolution continues.

  CHAPTER 11

  S Is for Span Differences: Vivid Ideas Include Their Opposite

  o far, each stop in the forest has shown us how to make our idea more vivid. But what if our idea feels incomplete? How does a Vivid Idea account for options we haven’t yet considered, variables that might undermine it, and the differing opinions of others?

  Vivid Ideas address those opposing ideas by spanning outward to include them. The second-to-last stop is S, which stands for “span differences.” This stop shows us that ideas become most vivid when they openly account for their own opposites, differences, and limitations.

  Ideas are most vivid when we span their differences.

  This isn’t a new idea. F. Scott Fitzgerald, America’s favorite Jazz Age author, wrote in Esquire magazine in 1936 that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

  Vivid Ideas do just that: They show us one idea more clearly by showing us the opposite. If the original idea is sound, illustrating its limitations doesn’t undermine it—on the contrary, it makes the idea even stronger.

  Yin and Yang

  That was far from a new concept even back in the Jazz Age. It’s just the restatement of an ancient idea, an idea dating back two thousand years to the oldest of classic Chinese texts, the I Ching and Tao Te Ching.68 Among many other ideas, those texts described the essence of all things as yin and yang—two opposites that must fit together to make a single whole.

  Originally represented as the sun passing over a valley, yin literally translated as “shady place” and described the cool area in the mountain’s shadow, while yang translated as “sunny place” and described the warm valley below.

  In the original translation, yin meant “shade” and yang meant “sun.”

  Most famously represented by the taijitu symbol (or “the diagram of ultimate power”), yin and yang are simply the most vivid description of a truth we all know yet all too often forget: For any idea to be effective, it must include and compensate for its opposite.

  Ron toposid descr

  Something old and something new: the taijitu, the most vivid description ever of the need to span differences.

  While the taijitu is a wonderfully vivid representation of a concept that transcends time and culture, what does it have to do with creating Vivid Ideas today?

  How to Make an Electric Car Go

  Most problem solving today begins with the assumption that solutions are always a tradeoff. In the auto industry, for example, for a hundred years it’s been gospel that a car has to trade power for efficiency. You could either build a car with lots of power or you could build a car that got great gas mileage, but you could not accomplish both. Every car being made proved the point: A Hummer H1 could uproot a tree but drove only six miles on a gallon of gas, while a Smart car drove almost six times that far—but barely carried two people.

  The traditional auto industry tradeoff of performance vs efficiency: A Hummer could uproot a tree but got terrible mileage; a SmartCar got incredible mileage but could barely carry two people.

  The Tesla Roadster bypasses the tradeoff completely: It has the power of a supercar while running nearly five times more efficiently than a SmartCar.

  Vivid Ideas start from a different assumption: Like our fox and hummingbird, a Vivid Idea straddles a balance. It doesn’t begin with a tradeoff—it begins with a what-if.

  Vivid Ideas don’t begin with a tradeoff—they begin with a what-if.

  In 2000, two engineer friends with several successful technology start-ups behind them were looking for a new business to enter. They both liked cars but hated the tradeoff of power versus efficiency. So Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning asked each other, “Why can’t a car be both as powerful as an SUV and as efficient as a hybrid?” They knew the answer was found in the limitations of the internal combustion engine. Because that traditional engine burns gas to create energy (a relatively inefficient way to make something go), it was the original reason that all cars were designed around the Hummer-versus-Smart-car tradeoff.

  Knowing that was a pretty silly answer, given the power and efficiency of modern electric engines, Eberhard and Tarpenning decided to start an electric- Rre siTar"1ecar company. While looking for the simplest electric engine designs to work with, Eberhard and Tarpenning came across the original plans for a powerful alternating-current electric motor created in 1882 by the eccentric Serbian-American scientist Nikola Tesla.

  Eberhard and Tarpenning were so impressed by the possibilities of this 120-year-old design that they decided to name their company after the mad scientist who’d designed it, and Tesla Motors was born.

  As of last year, Tesla had sold more than 1,500 pure-electric Roadsters, each with the performance of a supercar and fuel efficiency five times higher than even the Smart car. Because the Tesla was designed around performance and efficiency (not performance versus efficiency), the company has become a business success in a way no previous electric car ever had.

  The Mad Scientists’ Club

  Well before Tesla (the man or the car), the central idea of modern chemistry was born when another scientist decided he didn’t like tradeoffs either. The youngest of seventeen children69 born to a rural Siberian family in the 1830s, Dmitri Mendeleyev became known for two things: his wild beard (which he trimmed only once a year) and his ability to see patterns that “normal” people could not. Mendeleyev was crazy, all right, but he was crazy like a fox—and a hummingbird.

  Dmitri Mendeleyev: crazy like a fox (and a hummingbird).

  Prior to Mendeleyev, scientists had listed the earth’s chemical elements in two unrelated ways. The first list arranged the elements70 according to their chemical properties: They were acidic or basic, gaseous or metal, etc. The second list arranged the elements by atomic weight, a complexly calculated number that compared each element’s weight relative to a single gram of oxygen.

  These two lists were useful for keeping track of elements in a rudimentary way. Using the first list, a chemist could see that hydrogen was a gas and aluminum was a metal, for example. Using the second, unrelated li
st, a scientist could see that a given number of aluminum atoms weighed more than the same number of hydrogen atoms—which was interesting to know if you were a chemist but didn’t mean much to anybody else.

  Prior to Mendeleyev, scientists sorted chemicals according to two unrelated lists. Mendeleyev did not like it.

  These two either/or lists bothered Mendeleyev. Since both listed the same elements, he was convinced there must be a way to combine them. Copying both lists onto cards, he unleashed his hummingbird. According to legend, Mendeleyev occupied his Rid derdi"Chaparr hours of train rides across the endless Russian steppe by playing with his cards, sorting them this way and that, looking for patterns.