TED - Want to Give a Great Presentation? Use Ugly Sketches | Martin J. Eppler | TED

how can we use the power of pictures at work how can you visualize what you think what you know and make that accessible for others to improve collaboration I have been obsessed with this question for 30 years in 20 books in 200 articles in more than dozens of experiments and what I found are amazing benefits that happen when you use visualization software when you sketch when you doodle you boost your creativity you improve collaboration and communication have better conflicts and you also improve your decision quality when you visualize the information that you have but what I also found was that many of us don't use the potential of visualization at all we stick to old ways of presenting of discussing can I ask you this who among you still loves standard presentation slides with bullet points who loves to sit through that okay we have four people for the rest can you give me alternatives what can you do instead of bombarding people with slides what would be a visual way of working storytelling what else prototyping yes sketching what else mind mapping whiteboard right there are many ways when you invite people to visualize with you to co-create what you're actually doing and this is the first of many visual metaphors to come you're sort of laying out a mini red carpet to invite them to shine it's also a red thread that the conversation has when you invite others to visualize with you so what I'd like to share in the next five to six minutes with you are three practices that help you to invite others to visualize together but first can I take you back just a minute to my very first high-stakes presentation, not as a university professor but in my former life as a consultant. A client had asked us to analyze if they should enter a new multi-billion market and we worked very hard to analyze this market and I had produced about 40 data-driven slides to show the client that we had worked hard and that he should not enter this business. Just as I was ready to go and bombard the client with those slides, my then boss said, "Martin, take a seat, hold your horses," and instead of me going through the slides he showed the perplexed audience one sketch, one visual metaphor, and it was this one. It was a fortress built on sand. This guy had just summarized all of my 40 slides in a single image, because he was right. This new market was like a fortress, very hard to conquer because of patent shields, economies of scale, contracts, and it was not even worth conquering because it was sinking into the sand, so to speak, because the technology was being replaced by another one. Of course the client then asked about details like the patent analysis I had done or the contracts and so forth, and I could show finally my slide with that analysis. But this leading with a visual metaphor really changed the dynamics of the conversation. It was much more collaborative: first the overview with this visual metaphor, and then the details on demand. I realized it's all about a conversation, and it's much better this way when you first show an overview with the help of a metaphor, which, by the way, the client picked up and used verbally too. That got me thinking as a researcher, and in many experiments with managers and students we found three practices that I want to share with you that you can use to really reap the power of pictures professionally. The first one might shock you, especially the designers among you. If you want visualization and graphic representations to work for you and for collaboration, make them ugly. Beauty is the enemy of collaboration. If something looks too nice, it looks like it doesn't need revision or improvement. I call this the museum effect: people just stare and say, "Yeah, that looks perfect," and the thinking stops there. So you want to use the power of provisionality. You want to signal with your drawings that this is work in progress and invite collaboration in this way. This is good news for all of us who are terrible at drawing, right? It's not a bug, it's a feature. The technical term is low perceived finishedness. It looks provisional, it invites collaboration, and by the way, banks, telecom companies and insurances have been using this all along. It's called pencil selling: instead of using shiny slides, you just sketch something with a pencil for a client, like a product. In our experiments we were able to show this actually is much better and leads to more sales. So if you want to harness the power of visualization for collaboration, make them look ugly, make them look provisional, use sketches and doodles. We've shown in our experiments that even little tweaks to software to make it look more sketchy boost collaboration and creativity. This brings me to the second advice I'd like to share with you. Like my boss, lead with visual metaphors. Don't just use diagrams, although they are powerful, or charts, or maps. Visual metaphors are magical. They access what people already know, they bring out new solution ideas, they make things much more concrete, like a mini red carpet or a red thread. Let me give you an example. In a study that we originally did for BMW Financial Services, and then published, we used the identical strategy of BMW and communicated it to different staff member groups. For one group we used standard bullet point slides, then we used a diagram, and for the third group we used the mountain trail visual metaphor, with the same content as the other two. And guess what: for the group where we visualized the strategy through the mountain trail, not only did they remember a lot more later on, they were also much more motivated to implement the strategy. Now, I've never used a metaphor I didn't like, but clearly not all metaphors are equally well suited. You want to make sure that the metaphor is simpler than what you're trying to explain, that it's concrete, and that people have a connection with it, and that is hopefully the right connection. I will never use again the volcano metaphor, as I did once for creativity in a country that is at risk of active volcanoes, so choose your metaphors well. If you do that, it will resonate with people, it will be much more memorable. It sticks like a red ribbon on the floor. Here's another example of such a visual metaphor. It can come from nature, it can come from technology, it can come from mythology, you name it. Here I used the bridge to visualize a few communication problems that I, as a professor of communications management, have seen. It's simple, also visually, and the beauty of this kind of visual, which we can learn from comic strips, is that it starts a series that people then want to complete. I think that's very powerful in collaboration. I call this third practice that I want to share with you, in conclusion, visual variation. You use a metaphor or a diagram and then you vary it: you repeat it but slightly differently. The magic that this does for collaboration is that people start to extend the series you're giving them. For example, here communication is one-sided because of a lack of listening, a one-way street, or the bridge is not aligned, there are misunderstandings, or it's too full, too many messages crowd out a key message. People automatically think of other communication problems through the metaphor of the bridge, like one are going off the bridge, maybe because the person is too emotional, or the bridge being shaky, maybe because there is no trust in the relationship. Visual metaphors spark the imagination, especially if they come in a series of images. This is, by the way, a very empirically validated theory. It's called variation theory, and it basically says that you do not understand anything until you understand it in more than one way. So if you ask me for advice on how to make visuals more part of your everyday work, I would say: start a series, start a simple image, it doesn't have to be sophisticated, and invite others to build on that. Here is my final example. As a university professor, we often advise students, and many of our students still have this stereotypical career path in mind, that it only goes upward in terms of salary or hierarchy. I drew this visual variation to invite them to think about alternative career trajectories, so the career doesn't have to be linear. In fact, I find, I don't know about you, that the most intriguing careers are often nonlinear and different from this upward staircase model. So in conclusion: go forth and visualize, or vanish. Use the power of pictures, and when you do that you will see it boosts your creativity and improves decisions, especially if you use images that signal they're work in progress, that invite others, like a red carpet, to shine together and co-create something new. Especially if you don't just rely on abstract diagrams or charts but use the power of visual metaphors to activate what people already know, and thirdly, of course, if you don't just use a single image and overload that one, but start a sequence that your colleagues can build upon. Thank you very much.