In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, developed a low-tack, reusable adhesive. For years, he promoted it within the company in the hope of turning it into a product. The adhesive was strong enough to hold papers together but weak enough that they could easily be pulled apart without tearing. He promoted it as a spray, or as a surface for bulletin boards where papers could be attached and removed without the use of pins. Silver was not having much luck promoting his invention until he ran into Arthur Fry, who sang in his church choir and was frustrated that the small slips of paper he used as bookmarks kept falling out of his hymnal. Fry realized that the adhesive was perfect for keeping his bookmarks attached to the hymnal without damaging the book. And thus the Post-it and many sticky-note progeny were born.
The sticky note is one of the most useful tools for knowledge work because it allows you to break any complex topic into small, movable artifacts—knowledge atoms or nodes—that you can then distribute into physical space by attaching them to your desk, walls, doors, and so on without wreaking total havoc. This allows you to quickly and easily explore all kinds of relationships between and among the atoms, and to keep these various alternatives within your visual field while you are working.
It's easy to see the value of being able to distribute information into your environment in this way by looking at all the ways people use sticky notes in their daily lives. Want to remember to bring something to work? Leave a sticky note on the inside of the front door to remind you. Want to remember which items to pick up on the way home? Leave a sticky note on your phone. Need to remember how to get somewhere? Write the directions on a sticky note and stick it to your steering wheel. Want to leave a message for someone at work? Leave a sticky note on her computer screen.
Placing artifacts into the environment like this is a way to put ideas into context in a way that's dynamic. Combinations can stay fixed for as long as you want them to, and can also be shuffled or reconfigured at a moment's notice.
Artifacts like sticky notes and index cards have the same kinds of properties as a deck of cards. They can be spread out in various combinations. They can be shuffled into random order. They can be distributed into groups. Endless permutations and combinations are possible.
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In school we are taught that the fundamental things we need to learn to be successful in our society are reading, writing, and arithmetic. The first several years of public education focus primarily on these fundamentals. In an industrial world, where every worker functioned as a standardized cog in a corporate machine, this may have made sense.
But today's challenges aren't standard. As we have discussed, work today often must address unknowns, uncertainty, and ambiguous challenge spaces where solutions are not clear or standard, and where the ability to create and discover is more important than fitting a standard mold.
Our world has a rich history of creation and discovery. We have discovered the shape of the world, the elements of matter, and the laws that govern the movements of the stars. We have created technologies that can make us fly, allow us to talk to each other and see each other from anywhere in the world, and can move information at the speed of light. So, it's not hard for us to look at the people who have discovered and created these miracles and ask, "What methods did they use?"
Yes, reading, writing, and arithmetic were instrumental in many of these monumental achievements. The written word and mathematics are both powerful tools. They are languages that we can use to make conceptual models, think about the world, and convey complex ideas to each other. But there is another language that's equally powerful, and we don't teach it in schools—at least, not consistently and not very well. It's called visual language, and it's the language we use to make ideas visual and explicit.
The great voyages of Columbus, Magellan, and James Cook would not have been possible without advanced map-making capabilities. The mathematical advances of Euclid, Descartes, and Newton would not have been conceivable without the use of pictorial diagrams. The inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Tim Berners-Lee—the man who invented the Internet—were possible only because these people had the ability to visualize and draw their ideas. Nearly every human endeavor, when examined, reveals evidence of the importance of visual language. In legal proceedings, visual aids help juries decide complex cases. Filmmakers create storyboards to help them bring screenplays to life. Medical illustration helps surgeons and other medical professionals learn their trade. The road signs we navigate by, the interfaces on our computer screens, and the logos that help us find the stores and brands we like are all examples of visual language in action. Even your driver's license would be useless without the image that represents you and confirms that, yes, the person in the picture is in fact the person this card identifies.
We've listed sketching as one of the 10 essentials of gamestorming—it's an important element of creative thinking, and anyone can do it. You don't need any special skills. You can start with a pen and paper. That doesn't mean it's easy, any more than reading, writing, and arithmetic are easy; you will need to apply yourself. But we have found that the biggest hurdle for most people is confidence. If you can bring yourself to dive in and start drawing, the rest will take care of itself. So, with that in mind, here are a few concepts and exercises that you can use to start building some basic drawing skills. Once you are familiar with these concepts you can use the same exercises to bring colleagues and other groups quickly up to speed.
Now, grab a pen and a piece of paper and let's do a few exercises.
~~Gamestorming -by- Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo
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