Blah Blah Blah

by Dan Roam

  101 The one big missing piece in the 6x6 is emotion: what we feel about an idea. Emotions are mainly processed in what is called our “limbic brain,” a central core sitting below our cortex. As we all know, our emotional response to something frequently trumps our ability to think about it. Part of the purpose of the 6x6 is to remind us that we need to intentionally think about big ideas and problems if we really want to solve them. Which is the unspoken beauty (and challenge) of visual problem solving: Because pictures so readily provoke an emotional response, we can easily skew our perception of an idea by the choice of pictures we make to represent it.

  Table of Contents

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  INTRODUCTION: Half of What We Think About Thinking Is Wrong

  PART 1: The Blah-Blahmeter

  1 Exploring the Land of Blah-Blah-Blah

  2 Advanced Blah-Blahmeter Use

  PART 2: If I Draw, Am I Dumb? An Introduction to Vivid Thinking

  3 Two Minds Are Better Than One

  4 Together Again: The Fox and the Hummingbird

  5 The Grammar of Vivid Thinking

  PART 3: The Forest and the Trees: The Seven Essentials of a Vivid Idea

  6 The Vivid F-O-R-E-S-T: The Six Essentials of Vivid Ideas

  7 F Is for Form: Vivid Ideas Have Shape

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

  9 R Is for Recognizable: Vivid Ideas Look Familiar

  10 E Is for Evolving: Vivid Ideas Are Complete—but Not Done

  11 S Is for Span Differences: Vivid Ideas Include Their Opposite

  12 T Is for Targeted: Vivid Ideas Matter to Me

  13 Bye-Bye, Blah-Blah-Blah

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  APPENDIXES

  Appendix A: How We Lost Half Our Mind

  Appendix B: Connections Back to The Back of the Napkin

  Appendix C: The Complete Vivid Checklist

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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