One page of my visual notes from Dan Roam’s excellent workshop in SF – the pilot for The Back of the Napkin. I appreciate that Dan’s putting visual thinking front and center in the business world. It helps me keep MY day job, too. See the rest of the visual notes here.

The first bits of coolness around SXSW Interactive 2010: a baby graphic giving some insight into the contents of our Visual Notetaking Panel. The panel, Visual Notetaking 101, is on Monday, March 15 at 3:30 pm, so join us for a conversation on how to stop taking notes that look like punishment. I’m joined on the panel by my co-author Dave Gray, and by sketchnote masters Mike Rohde and Austin Kleon. Visual thinkers, come out of the closet. And be rewarded with excellent content when you do.

Producing TEDx Austin felt like birthing some kind of gigantic baby. I think I can speak for the entire team – Nancy Giordano, Jen Spencer, Kelley Burrus, Shannon Mehner, Chris Justice, Mary Baird-Wilcox and Stacy Weitzner – when I say that it would be impossible to capture the experience in one word. There were triumphs, frustrations, elation, teamwork, tough decisions, and absolute overjoy at what we were putting together. And through it all was the undeniable knowledge that Austin, TX needed and deserved a killer TEDx. That our little town is growing up, transforming into a big city with a big heart, a big brain and ideas that are big beyond belief. I have to give thanks to my graphics team, composed of Honoria Starbuck and Austin Kleon, but if I started thanking all of the other heads and hands that were involved, you would probably stop reading this blog post. (We all know that in this day and age, people want pictures.)

Some personal highlights for me:

• Seeing the program designed by the Butler Brothers and the video that showed its creation. One of those ‘wow’ moments.
• Establishing a relationship with Shiny Object – a film production company whose work I admire and enjoy.
• Connecting with Philip Berber and his wife Donna of the Glimmer of Hope Foundation.
• Hanging out with a freaky astronaut and a sexy firefighter.
• The fact that we had 10,000+ individuals who watched the livestream (29% of which were in New Zealand!)
• Working with a team of women who were indomitable.
• NOT working during the event itself. I so often graphically record or contribute to the group process in some live, visual way that I just wanted to be present and enjoy the birth of our big ole idea baby. (The graphic architectures above were created by me beforehand and the audience populated them with content over the course of the day.)
• Being thanked on stage for our efforts and feeling how much the crowd really did appreciate it.
• Going to the TEDx Rejects party at Conjunctured afterward. Word up, rejects.
• Slowly absorbing long after the event was over how truly incredible it was. Is it too dramatic to thank God for the TED people? I mean, it’s not just an event they’ve created. It’s a humanitarian movement. And I think that’s worth saying thank you for.

Onward to TEDx Austin 2011.

On Feb. 3rd, I held another VizThink Austin community meeting for our ever-growing group of visual thinkers and visual learners. The rare and brilliant bird Austin Kleon hosted, taking the group on a comedic and informative journey about visual thinking for writers. A powerful topic considering that few people are aware of the symbiotic relationship between words and pictures. (Don’t let the blinking cursor get you!) Austin has attended virtually every VizThink session since the beginning, so it was high time he hosted one himself. He’s a natural visual communicator as well as a writer and you’ll see how he combines the two in his forthcoming book with Harper Collins, Newspaper Blackout Poems. And, since I know people love free content, you can also see video modules from the session itself. Attendance was impressive considering the dangerous….um…drizzle (Austinites panic when driving in the rain) and it was another excellent evening with our impressive community of minds. So if you’re reading this post and you want to join the VizThink entourage, contact me. I am always open to another inquiring mind.

As I mentioned to my client Todd Zaki Warfel of Messagefirst, I am exceptionally proud of this NYU Study Abroad infographic. It took a sizable amount of production time and brain power, and were it not for the acumen of my stellar design team (and the teamwork and cooperation of Messagefirst), this poster-sized piece would have never seen the light of day. So, a colossal thank you to Cameron Ewing, a stupendous illustrator and designer, and Chet Hornung, an uncannily savvy data geek. Together we were the Holy Grail of information design and data management. And thank you, Jamie Thompson and Todd, for your faith in BrightSpot i.d. and for a project that shifted our boundaries of what’s possible.

Jessica Mullen and Kelly Cree of The Popular Podcast – among other exploits – make it a point to interview panelists and performers coming through Austin for SXSW. Since Dave Gray (Founder and Chairman of XPlane) and I were on a panel together, they invited us to join them for a brief and…um..deliberately informal interview. Dave, being the good sport that he is, and I, wanting to see my new hairdo on camera, agreed. This interview doesn’t do what my normal interviews would do: it doesn’t describe visual thinking; it doesn’t talk much about my background; it doesn’t discuss learning or group process. In fact, I’m not sure if it hurts or enhances my reputation. But no matter – it’s a fun one. And I look forward to the next Popular Podcast at SXSW 2010. Minus the references to poo.

As many of you know, Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) is preoccupied with the pursuit of a little thing called happiness. He studies it, he gives presentations about it, and he successfully incorporates it into Zappos’ best practices for corporate culture. Since I met Tony, Alfred Lin and Brian Kalma at SXSW 2009, I’ve had the privilege of working with Zappos on various visual-thinking-related projects. The latest, what you see above, was a design project to create images for Tony’s forthcoming book, ‘Delivering Happiness.’ The specific graphics above won’t appear in the book – the project had to be handed to another illustrator because I was on my own sadistic book deadline – but they were used as a creative catalyst for the images that will be published. I’ve processed the emotional letdown by shaking my fist at God. I think I’ll be fine – especially after I read a good book on happiness.

HMSA (Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Hawai’i) has risen to the top of my client list due to the nature of the projects we’re involved with and my deep respect for the efforts of the leadership and the Innovation Team. They are transforming the organization in service to their customers and I’ve been lucky enough to become a part of their team, partnering with them on visual thinking training, graphic recording for leadership meetings, design consultations on presentations and workshops and a large history mapping project in the making. My projects with them are always rewarding and I appreciate the partnership. I also appreciate that I get to go to Hawaii to work with them. Nothing wrong with doing the hula while you work.

BrightSpot had its first international invitation this year, to attend the CLIC Conference at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India. The conference was hosted by the Centre for Leadership, Innovation and Change and it gave a forum to CEOs and other high-level execs to discuss business and spirituality – yes Americans, I did use them in the same sentence. Each presenter in his or her own way described the possibilities for overlaps in those two fields. It was very inspirational content and I did my best to graphically capture it given that I’m not a cultural native and the acoustics were, ahem, insane. But I was so happy to be invited to work for the Indian School of Business that I could have gotten a parasite and still felt it was worthwhile. Click here to see the murals I created as well the conference itself. And Namaste to you and yours.

The way humans gain the lion’s share of what we know is through a slow process of gathering informational knowledge – accumulated layers of additive information based on years of exposure and experience. For example, my knowledge of Spanish is informational knowledge. I learned it through years of listening to Spanish speakers and eventually formalized it by taking multiple semesters at university, building up bits of knowledge to get a fairly complete understanding of the language. And along this learning path, I had an anticipated outcome – fluency. I would eventually know enough verbs, conjugations, vocabulary, etc. to present myself as a Spanish speaker. But nowhere along that learning curve did I create something rather than just accumulate it. Spanish was already there; it was just a matter of me methodically crawling through it, adding to my increasingly large pile of information.

And this is how most of us approach problem-solving – by applying informational knowledge. We think of a problem (or perhaps create one!), get a sense of its magnitude, reference relevant information we know and then apply it as a solution. And there are many situations in which this is a perfectly appropriate plan of attack: you see someone choking in a restaurant, you hurriedly scan your knowledge from the past, you perform the Heimlich. Brilliant. But the shadow side to this type of problem solving is that it confines you to the boundaries of the smaller pieces of the pie chart above – the realm of what you know and the realm of what you know that you don’t know. So if you know the Heimlich (even half-assed), you try it. And if you know that you don’t know the Heimlich, you’re likely going to seek out someone who does and ask them to solve the problem. But it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to spontaneously invent a new move and liberate a choking gentleman from his hambone. That’s just not the way informational knowledge works. And if you impress yourself by actually inventing a new anti-choking technique, well, surprise. You’ve just entered the realm of transformational knowledge.

Transformational knowledge is knowledge that can seem to appear out of the ether. It emerges almost as a flash – a eureka moment – and appears most often when we’re either under duress or in a child-like state of learning.  But since most of us eschew being “child-like” – we do take ourselves rather seriously – rarely do we get access to the biggest piece of the pie chart. We spend almost all of our time vacillating between the two dinky realms of either ‘what we know’ or ‘what we know that we don’t know.’  So it’s not shocking that when we’re tackling problems – business or personal – we find our way to the same results. How innovative can we really be when we’re treading and retreading the same ground? But don’t misunderstand; we’re not at fault – we can hardly be held responsible for what we don’t know that we don’t know. But we can be responsible for actively trying to get access to that space. To that big, mysterious piece of the pie that’s hoarding almost all of the creative solutions.

Knowledge games, as set forth in our book, are powerful because they’re designed to help us move out of the familiar and predictable and into the uncertain and unknown – where creation actually lives. We’re including games and meeting processes in which the rules aren’t rigid, you can veer away from a directed outcome and you’ll often be surprised at how it all turns out. We’re giving you tools to create, not repackage. And this is important because, as Einstein understood, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”

Eureka.