amazon highlights: Draw To Win / Dan Roam / 2016

Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind / Dan Roam / 2016

Three Data Points That Point to Pictures 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. —IBM, “WHAT IS BIG DATA?”

 

The first was from IBM, saying that 90 percent of all data collected in history has been generated in the last two years.
The second was from Cisco, saying that 90 percent of all data transmitted online today is visual.
The third came from my own work in corporate training, where I see that 90 percent of businesspeople have no idea how to effectively use visuals in their business.

Drawing isn’t an artistic process; drawing is a thinking process. Drawing is not art; drawing is thinking.

There are seven basic building-block shapes: dot, line, arrow, square, triangle, circle, and blob. They are all easy to draw. Practice the simple shapes and combine them to create the six essential business pictures: objects and people, charts, maps, timelines, flowcharts, and equations.

We are all magnificently visual; more of your daily energy burn goes to looking at the world than to anything else. When you understand how vision works, you can hijack the process to inspire, motivate, and guide other people. Vision is predictable. When you draw the right pictures in the right order, you can command attention for a long time.

TAKEAWAY: Lead with the eye and the mind will follow. The longer you give your audience something interesting to look at, the longer they will give you their mind. If you want to engage your audience’s mind, show them people. If you want to engage their heart, show them themselves.

Show them where they fit into your idea. If you can make something look like a face, you’re guaranteed that people will see it. For a story to capture someone’s interest, it must have a hero, the hero must have a conflict, and that conflict must be a singular.

First, everyone loves to be part of a quest; second, the canon of great quests is small; and three, the first two rules have been true since the beginning of time.

What is your quest?

1. Trying to get back home

2. Striving to win the prize

3. Seeking to exact revenge for a previous humiliation

4. Fighting to slay the dragon

5. Working to be reborn as a better person

6. Laboring to climb the mountain

7. Searching for true love

To create your team’s mission patch, you will need two things: first, clarity of destination, and second, a picture to express it. As a leader, your number one job is to provide vision—and that requires a picture.

Getting yourself off your chair requires a decision, discipline, and habit. Getting someone else off their chair requires sales.

First, you create a simple picture that summarizes the problem and the common ground you share with your prospect. Then you change the picture to show the result; what things will look like when the problem is solved. Sure, the win isn’t guaranteed, but one thing is absolutely certain: If you can’t see what the after state might look like, you will never get there.

Sales is the art of getting someone to take a new action; a picture creates the ideal mind-meld. Learn to draw your prospect in by drawing your thoughts out.

To make sales magic, use the 75–25 rule: Draw 75 percent of your picture in advance and 25 percent during your pitch. Plan to Succeed, but Prepare to Fail

The ideal visual story contains these six pictures, presented in this order:

1. Who and what are involved. Open every teaching story with a visual summary of the people and things you are going to be talking about.

2. How many are involved. Next, provide a quantitative measure (or many measures) of the people or things. Changes in number (trends) are particularly revealing.

3. Where the pieces are located. Present a map illustrating the relative positions of these people or things according to geographical or conceptual coordinates.

4. When things occur. Next, show a timeline that illustrates the sequence in which these people or things interact, or the steps required to bring them into alignment.

5. How things impact each other. Provide a flowchart that adds cause-and-effect influences superimposed on any (or all) of your previous pictures; show the change and how you will achieve it.

6. Why this matters. Complete your visual story with a concluding visual equation that summarizes the keep learnings, takeaways, or action items triggered by the previous visual insights.

Training isn’t a time drain; training is a knowledge gain.