Knowledge Review: Managing to Seeby Tom Ehrenfeld

from strategy+business issue 52, Autumn 2008 reprint number 08310

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isual management has be-come an essential disciplinefor managers today. Thepractice involves communi-cating with images, organiz-ing and directing workthrough visual controls, andcreating clear graphic depic-

tions of complex ideas — for exam-ple, to enable workers to see howtheir work fits into a value streamflowing directly to customers.

Never have such skills beenmore important. Our global econ-omy values images as the new linguafranca. Workers raised on the Inter-net have attention spans that requiremore evocative yet pithier messagesthat blend images with text. And ona practical level, the adoption ofPowerPoint as the common plat-form of a world dominated by slidesand decks requires managers tounderstand what makes a good vi-sual presentation good.

Several recent books add newideas to the existing literature aboutvisual management as both a tooland a broader form of managerialthought. These books and otherresources demonstrate that visualskills and awareness are ultimatelyvaluable for honing the mind’s eyeof the manager, including distilling

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by Tom Ehrenfeld

Managing to SeeHow visual tools andtechniques help managerslead with the whole brain.

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key ideas into the most meaningfulimages, charts, graphs, or maps; sell-ing projects and proposals witheffective images; and “mapping”business activities in order to seewaste and thus turn motion intovalue-adding action.

Unfortunately, the definitive re-source on visual management hasyet to be written. Many of the fol-lowing guides explain one thingvery well — be it a way to commu-nicate with pictures, produce greatslides for a talk, or teach workers away of codifying their work with avisual language that can help every-one make improvements together.Yet no one book or resource teachesmanagers the value and use of visualtools in a manner that illustratesthese principles visually, nor do anymerge theory and practice seam-lessly. So the following resources areall recommended as useful andinstructive, and with luck they havealso laid the foundation for morecomprehensive works to come.

A Question of MeaningThe subject of visual thinking hasstarkly different meanings depend-ing on the expert. Take, for exam-ple, consultant Dan Roam’s recentlypublished book, The Back of the

Napkin: Solving Problems and Sell-ing Ideas with Pictures. It has moreto do with generating insights,framing problems, and selling ideasthan with visual thinking per se.

Roam says that executivesshould get over their fear of sketch-ing out ideas, since developing vi-sual acuity has little to do with one’sartistic chops: Managers must learnvisual communication to improvehow they lead and get things done.

“One of the reasons that pic-tures are such a great way to solveproblems is that many problems arehard to see clearly, and a picture canhelp us see aspects of the problemthat might otherwise be invisible,”Roam writes. “Visual thinking helpsby giving us a way to see problemsnot as an endless variety of thingsthat go wrong, but as a small setof interconnected visual challenges,each one of which can be picturedmore clearly on its own.”

Roam approaches complexchallenges with a systematic set ofquestions that are loosely structuredaround forms of visual thinking.His book breaks down these ques-tions into six categories, each ofwhich correlates with a way of see-ing, or understanding, a problem:understanding the who/what, the

Tom Ehrenfeld(tomehrenfeld@comcast.net) isa freelance writer based inCambridge, Mass. Formerly awriter and editor with HarvardBusiness Review and Inc.magazine, he is the author ofThe Startup Garden: HowGrowing a Business Grows You(McGraw-Hill, 2001).

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how many, the where, the when,and then the how of a situation (thefirst five), which leads the managerto a deeper understanding of thewhy. Each section has specific strate-gies and tools for representing thismental approach on paper.

Here is where Roam’s book fallsshort, however. To help readers un-derstand and apply these principles,Roam has produced a Visual Think-ing Codex that lists the visual sensesand shows how they fit with eachof the associated thinking frame-works. Roam’s claim that this codexis “simple” reveals a flaw in this oth-erwise appealing book: There is adisconnect between what the authorknows theoretically and the designof his material on the page.

Ultimately, Roam doesn’t con-vince us that his methodology is thebest tool for the job. That said,his approach can help managers fac-ing a complex problem discover themost important elements to act on.I for one hope Roam takes on an-other book to translate these smartideas into a simpler guide.

A Mission of EleganceIn all fairness, few visual languagegurus share their ideas with simpleelegance. This can be said even of

Edward Tufte, the best-known fig-ure in information design. The cele-brated Tufte was anointed as “theLeonardo da Vinci of data” by theNew York Times. He gives roughly35 sold-out talks per year to audi-ences of up to 500 individuals, withwhom he shares his thoughts onexcellent graphic design.

Tufte’s ideas have certainlystruck a chord. For the past 20 yearshe’s been on a crusade to help peo-ple clean up and fundamentallyimprove the charts and graphs theyproduce to share information. Fartoo many graphics end up as missedopportunities, says Tufte, who revelsin pointing out charts that are mis-leading, confusing, or purposeless.

“At their best,” writes Tufte,“graphics are instruments for rea-soning about quantitative informa-tion.” He focuses on how individu-als can create charts and graphs thatare powerful, clear, and effective.Like Roam, Tufte sees the final charton paper as a building front ratherthan a Hollywood set: The commu-nicator sifts through data, derivesmeaningful conclusions, and thenpresents those conclusions withtechniques that fit the message.

Tufte also argues that graphicexcellence can be boiled down to

a handful of essential principles thatenable anyone to use charts, graphs,and the like to make sense of datato communicate a powerful messagewith clarity and elegance. “Theprinciples of information designare universal — like mathematics,”he states.

In his book The Visual Displayof Quantitative Information (nowin its second edition), Tufte drawsfrom a wealth of examples to illus-trate how masters of this craftreveal data through artful design.His “principles of graphical excel-lence” are compelling in themselves;for example:

From such simple principlesTufte has been able to build a vastfollowing. Over the last 25 years,he has self-published four books,which altogether have sold morethan 1.5 million copies.

Part of his broad appeal rests inhis ability to create great heroes, and

villains, in the world of informationdesign. One of his vilest enemies isPowerPoint, which he cites as anevil, authoritarian form of commu-nication that elevates format overcontent, prevents rich data analysis,and essentially turns every presenta-tion into a sales pitch. In his essay“The Cognitive Style of Power-Point: Pitching Out Corrupts With-in,” which he has published as asmall book and sells on his Web site,Tufte says PowerPoint’s process ofsqueezing data into a series of pre-fabricated slides invariably degradesthe information. “The rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies, indifferent tocontent, slice and dice the evidenceinto arbitrary compartments, pro-ducing an anti-narrative withchoppy continuity,” he writes. Tufteshows how blind obedience to thisformat produced, in the case ofNASA engineers studying data onthe space shuttle Columbia, a failureto read the looming danger sug-gested by the data. (The shuttle dis-integrated in flight in 2003, killingseven crew members.)

Tufte’s books, especially thefirst two (the second is EnvisioningInformation), are recommended tomanagers who care to learn theprinciples of excellent graphic de-sign by example. His books containpowerful illustrations of terrificgraphics — charts and maps andgraphs for which the designer se-lected the right data and presentedit in a way that elegantly made apoint that could not otherwise bemade (in much the same way that agreat painting or song expresses anidea or emotion in a way that noth-ing else can).

The centerpiece of Tufte’sbooks is his reverential decon-struction of a map by famed illustra-tor Charles Minard that depicts the

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• Graphical excellence is that whichgives to the viewer the greatest num-ber of ideas in the shortest time withthe least ink in the smallest space.

• Graphical excellence is nearly alwaysmultivariate.

• And graphical excellence requirestelling the truth about the data.

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movement and dissipation of troopsin Napoleon’s Russian Campaignof 1812 (“It may well be the beststatistical graphic ever drawn,” saysTufte). This map, which appearsin his first book and is the subjectof an entire chapter in his fourthbook, is indeed a masterpiece. (SeeExhibit 1.) Tufte passionately ex-plains how Minard compiled thebest data and incorporated numer-ous graphic techniques, each oneprecisely chosen, to convey a com-pelling and complex message withclarity and elegance.

Unfortunately, Tufte’s booksoccasionally contradict his own ar-gument that visual presentations ofdata should be clear, precise, andefficient — for at times he seemsto favor aesthetic beauty over func-tional design. Tufte writes that hedesigned the books himself so as tomake them “self-exemplifying.” Hebrings an obsessive intensity to hislush, creamy self-published books,which are the ne plus ultra inbusiness/nerd coffee-table tomes.Indeed, they tend to evoke the same

drooling awe from geeks and de-signers that doughnuts inspire inHomer Simpson.

Alas, the writing can only bedescribed as prose that a designerwould love. When parsing a medicalchart, Tufte writes, “These reportsfall under the influence of diagnos-tic fashions prevailing among doc-tors and coroners in particularplaces and times, a troublesomeadulterant of the evidence purport-ing to describe the already some-times ambiguous matter of the exactbodily site of the primary cancer.”Communications guru, heal thyself!

Moreover, Tufte’s fabricatedlanguage for insiders (his shorthandincludes words and phrases likechartjunk and avoiding flatland ) andcrowd-pleasing repetition of hisfavorite tropes can all too easilyrepel the managers who would ben-efit from his ideas.

Wisdom from ComicsWhat would it take for leading vi-sual teachers to make their craftmore useful to managers? A huge

step forward would be to marrysubstance with style — to packagea theory about visual language ina book that is equal parts showand tell. That’s why ScottMcCloud’s Understanding Comics:The Invisible Art merits inclusion inthis review. Please, dear reader, donot discount this book as a juvenileguide to comic books. McCloud’sbrilliant work — a comic book thatlimns comics — is really aboutlearning to see, read, and fully real-ize the dynamics of words coupledwith pictures.

Like Tufte, McCloud hasformed a loyal community of fanswith his tremendously popularbook. Although McCloud’s appealin the early days may have been lim-ited to comic book collectors andwannabe graphic novelists, today,business thinkers recognize thatUnderstanding Comics is a conciseand perfectly realized resource forhelping individuals put words andimages together meaningfully.

“It’s considered normal in thissociety for children to combine

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Exhibit 1: Charles Minard’s Map of Napoleon’s 1812 Russian CampaignEdward Tufte calls this depiction of troop movements possibly “the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” The width of thelines shows the ever-decreasing size of Napoleon’s army as it advanced on Moscow (tan) and retreated (black).

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words and pictures, so long as theygrow out of it,” McCloud notes.A book called Understanding Comicsmay not seem to have a great dealof direct “payoff” for managers.Yet anyone open to the idea ofvisual management should read thisbook for the simple benefit of beingforced to reexamine his beliefsand habits regarding communica-tion in general.

McCloud explores many of thetechnical aspects of visual story-telling. He shows how, for exam-ple, a visual sequence that jumpsfrom one perspective to anotherinvites the reader to fill in mean-ing; he takes us on a tour of howliterally (or not) artists can repre-sent their subjects. This lovinganalysis of the craft enablesMcCloud to accomplish his chiefgoal: to show how visual story-telling can create meaning in waysno other storytelling method canand thus evoke a powerful responsefrom the reader.

McCloud, an accomplishedgraphic artist, ingeniously uses themedium to explain the medium.He marries form and content, andthe resulting integrity of his bookmakes it a great foundational readand a lexicon for visual language.

McCloud isn’t the only thoughtleader to integrate ideas and images.For a terrific daily exercise in how toshare complex ideas with simplesketches, visit the blog Indexed (athttp://indexed.blogspot.com/). Thisingenious exercise in visual alchemyshould inspire any manager whoimmediately turns to decks to pres-ent his or her ideas. Blogger JessicaHagy, whose recent book, Indexed,pulls together the best informationgraphics from her site, uses simplegraphs, Venn diagrams, and otherforms of visual shorthand to make arich point through clever combi-nations of words and graphics. In-structive by example.

Revenge of the Right-brainedMany successful executives havebased their performance on a linearmind-set. They are driven by num-bers, they communicate (and direct)through written memos, and theywork hard to focus on attainingstated goals. In a hierarchical, rela-tively structured, command-and-control organization, this approachpays off.

But today’s changing ways ofmanaging call for something differ-ent — an approach that relies moreon skills tied to visual management.

A nice way of framing this approachcan be found in Daniel H. Pink’sA Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Pinkargues that the global outsourcingof jobs, the automation of work thatonce provided a healthy wage, andthe sheer abundance of our currenttime have eroded the value of posi-tions based on a logical, single-minded approach. To thrive in thenew economy, individuals and man-agers must think with both the leftand right sides of the brain, Pinksays. “We are moving from an econ-omy and a society built on thelogical, linear, computer-like capa-bilities of the Information Age to aneconomy and a society built on theinventive, empathic, big-picture ca-pabilities of what’s rising in its place,the Conceptual Age,” he writes.

This shift requires people todevelop a whole-brain approach towork that is artistic, holistic, empa-thetic, and sensory. Understandingvisual language and its role in storiesplays an increasingly important partin this new form of thinking, Pinkwrites, because making meaning isthe key to making money. And thekey to doing so lies in being able tosee work from a broad and holisticperspective: “Seeing the big picture

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Visual maps of a productionsystem provide a way to identifywhere work is being delayed anderrors are being created.

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is fast becoming a killer app in busi-ness,” Pink says. Indeed, that’s whyhe wrote the first business book pre-sented in the Japanese comic formatof Manga. Johnny Bunko, the heroof his new illustrated career guide,The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: TheLast Career Guide You’ll Ever Need,learns six insights about workthrough his encounter with an ani-mated career guide.

Seeing with the mind’s eye isbut one way for managers to makemeaning. Honing one’s vision canalso start with developing a keen eyefor how things get done and howthey can be improved. This ap-proach is embodied in the Toyotaproduction system, codified andknown as lean management. In thissystem, based on the principles ofeliminating waste and engaging em-ployees by aligning all actions withthe understanding of how one’swork creates customer value, visualtools have enormous leverage. Indi-viduals use visuals to communicatekey facts about the workplace, andleaders use them to ensure thateveryone sees how they fit into theoverall work system.

One of the most widelyadopted applications is value-streammaps. In 1998 the Lean Enterprise

Institute first published a modestworkbook titled Learning to See.This resource was designed on asimple premise: that Toyota builtpart of its success through the orga-nizational practice of mapping thestreams through which informationand materials travel from first stepsto customer value. The authors, leanexpert Mike Rother and Toyota vet-eran John Shook, knew from experi-ence that people could monitor theflow of goods and the health ofprocesses by creating maps compar-ing the ideal state with current prac-

tices. By analyzing the gap betweenthese two conditions, individualsworking together could greatly im-prove the processes, and see whereand how their work fit with others.

“Whenever there is a productfor a customer, there is a valuestream. The challenge lies in seeingit,” write Rother and Shook. Theyargue that the real intent of theworkbook is to enable managers tocreate flow — the seamless currentof products through the organiza-tion to the customer (which was,incidentally, the ideal of the early

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Visual Management ResourcesWorks mentioned in this review.

Gwendolyn D. Galsworth, Visual Workplace, Visual Thinking: Creating EnterpriseExcellence through the Technologies of the Visual Workplace (Visual-LeanEnterprise Press, 2005), 244 pages

Jessica Hagy, Indexed (Viking Studio, 2008), 96 pages

Matthew E. May, The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation(Free Press, 2007), 256 pages

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (HarperPerennial,1994), 216 pages

Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future(Riverhead Books, 2006), 276 pages; The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The LastCareer Guide You’ll Ever Need (Riverhead Books, 2008), 160 pages

Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas withPictures (Portfolio, 2008), 288 pages

Mike Rother and John Shook, Learning to See: Value-Stream Mapping toCreate Value and Eliminate Muda, Version 1.3 (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2003),112 pages

Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed.(Graphics Press, 2001), 200 pages; Envisioning Information (Graphics Press,1990), 128 pages; The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out CorruptsWithin (Graphics Press, 2006), 32 pages

Ford production system). Visualmaps of a production system pro-vide a way of realizing this state,helping people identify where —and then why — work is beingdelayed, inventory is backing up,and errors are being created. Askingpeople to participate in creatingthese maps pushes them to assesswhere, and how, they participate ina sequence of events that results in aproduct valued by a customer.

Managers have responded tothis simple idea. This workbook hassold more than 250,000 copies andbeen translated into 11 languages. Itprovides clear, powerful, and simpleways for managers to use this tech-nique to see sources of waste, and toimprove the process of productionfor the customer.

Yet there is a bigger opportu-nity: learning to see in the work-place is a form of fostering sharedmeaning. This message comesthrough in the recent book The Ele-gant Solution: Toyota’s Formula forMastering Innovation, in whichauthor Matthew E. May identifiespowerful ways that managers bene-fit by learning to see. First, he sharesa basic principle of the Toyota sys-tem, which is to begin all problemsolving by intensely observing thework itself. Going to the workplaceand doing nothing but observing,carefully and patiently, reveals factsto the manager, who can thenaddress the scientific reality of workwithout being affected by politicsor altered by agendas. Learning togo and see the work itself (regardlessof the setting) enables individualsto propose actions that directlyaddress the problems that arerevealed. On a deeper level, Mayshows how lean managers “think inpictures” by sharing their findingsin a clean, visual, and commonly

understood format that promptseveryone to understand and act onthe problem together.

Visual ToolsInterestingly, one of the best re-sources on visual management ispossibly one of the least known.Gwendolyn D. Galsworth’s VisualWorkplace, Visual Thinking: CreatingEnterprise Excellence through theTechnologies of the Visual Workplaceis a self-published book whose suc-cess is built on a community ofpractitioners.

Galsworth’s guide shows howvisual tools support a more power-ful, effective, and aware workplace.All work can be broken down intothe technical standards of what oneworks on and the procedural stan-dards of how one integrates thiswork into a value stream, Galsworthexplains. Employees can — andshould — capture and communi-cate this second set of actions.

Her book succeeds by illustrat-ing precisely what she means by “avisual workplace.” Through photosand case studies, Galsworth sharessimple visual techniques, such asclearly labeling where parts go ona factory workstation, charting keygroup metrics on a visible board,or marking the best route for prod-ucts or workflow through simplevisible paths.

A visual workplace is distin-guished by cues that indicate whenmaterials are running low or byunderstandable categories for com-monly used materials. It displaystimes for pickups and dropoffs,boards with critical metrics forproject success. These devices guidework and transform culture byuncovering and sharing criticalinformation that would otherwisebe hoarded by managers, protected

by workers, and simply lost in thegrind of getting the next project outthe door. As individuals find visualways to share their standards of get-ting things done, “the workplacespeaks, able at last to tell us wherethings are, what needs to be done,by when (or for how long), bywhom (or by which machine ortool), in what quantity, and how,”she writes. And this principle appliesas much to white-collar office workas it does to manufacturing.

Regardless of the setting, saysGalsworth, visual tools become theshared language of work. “The vi-sual workplace is about making thetruth hold still long enough for usto see it, assess it, make a sounddecision, and then take timelyaction,” she argues. Again, these arenot abstract ideals, but operationalpractices; she speaks of specific toolssuch as visual displays, productionboards, and other commonly under-stood cues for shared action.

And although Galsworth’s aspi-rations for the visual workplace maybe lofty, they can ultimately apply toany useful approach in this field: “Inits fullness, an implementation ofthe visual workplace will changeeverything. Everything. In its full-ness, it represents the creation of anentirely new set of competencies forpeople, process, and leadership.

“To tell by looking. To telleverything by looking. To put anend to motion by liberating in-formation that has long beenimprisoned in the binders, reports,books, computer files, and data sys-tems of the company — and in thehearts and minds of the workforce— and in the process to liberate thehuman will.” +

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