Visual Thinking Expert Dan Roam: How to Solve Complex Problems with Simple Pictures
Season 2 Episode 3
Sometimes the fastest way to clarity is to start drawing.
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa Kay Solomon sits down with visual thinking pioneer Dan Roam to explore how simple sketches can bring clarity to complexity. Dan, author of The Back of the Napkin and five other bestselling books, shares how visual thinking strengthens problem-solving, communication, and our sense of agency in an uncertain world.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
Why drawing helps us slow down and make sense of complex problems
How Dan’s “six by six” framework supports clearer thinking and communication
What visual thinking has to do with personal agency and influence
Dan’s philosophy on AI and its impact on storytellers
Lisa and Dan trace the roots of visual thinking back to how our brains naturally process the world, then bring those ideas into real life. The conversation also looks ahead as they reflect on what visual thinking means in an era of generative AI, and why human judgment, ethics, and curiosity still matter deeply.
Links from the show
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas by Dan Roam
Blah, Blah, Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work by Dan Roam
Show and Tell: How Everybody Can Make Extraordinary Presentations by Dan Roam
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
Today’s guest is Dan Roam, someone who has had a huge influence on how I think about clarity and communication. Dan is the author of six international bestselling books, including one of my favorites, The Back of the Napkin. He’s worked with leaders across all industries and geographies to help them tackle complex problems with simple pictures.
In this episode, we talk about the power of visual thinking, why drawing isn’t about talent, and what it means to think clearly in a world that feels increasingly complex, especially in the age of AI. If you’re hoping to make sense of messy problems, change your outlook, and see more clearly, then let’s get started with Dan Roam.
Dan Roam, my dear friend, thank you so much for being here on How We Future.
Dan Roam: Lisa, thank you so much for inviting me. Every time over this last decade and a half, two decades, when you’ve asked me or presented me the opportunity to do something with you, it’s always been delightful, so I get to do it again, makes my whole day.
Lisa: Me too. You know what? I’m glad that you said decade and a half because I was curious when we first met, and I was able to trace it to an exact date. Which is because, secret to everyone listening, if they don’t know me, I may seem very-- why I’m organized, but I find everything interesting, so I save everything. Dan, my dear friend, I went back to one of my handy white binders that I have on visual thinking, and I returned to notes that I kept from the VizThink conference.
For those people that are not looking, this is 2009. This was the VizThink conference, the very first time I encountered your work on The Back of the Napkin on visual thinking. I felt like I had one of those moments where I was like, “I’m not going back. I’ve just seen Narnia. I’ve just seen color.” Everything just exploded for me, and so much clarity, and you were incredible. I remember saying to myself, “We’re going to be friends, and I’m going to keep learning from this extraordinary person.” That’s the date.
Dan: You pursued it, and we did become friends. If I’m doing the math correctly, we’re talking 16 years ago, which is a while, and we’ve had many adventures along the way. To be able to take this time, Lisa, and update each other on where we have been, but more importantly, where we think this is taking us, is just utterly fantastic for me.
Lisa: I’m so excited. In that time, you’ve had at least five books, many, many projects, new educational endeavors. We’re going to talk about all of them. Dan, in honor of our speaking, I brought my own whiteboard here to the party.
Dan: Yes, you did. Perfect.
Lisa: For those, again, that are not seeing it via video, this is a Venn diagram that articulates the overlap between our work. On the one hand, I have a circle, which is dedicated to me and my work, which is helping more people find agency in the world amid ambiguity, how do we build those skillsets, and your circle, which is around visual thinking and communication. I have this overlap, because I know you love to mark things in red, in black, of where we intersect.
The truth is, as I look at it, Dan, it’s almost-- This isn’t even accurate. It’s like the overlap is so much bigger. That’s really what I want to talk about with you today, which is your incredible work on visual thinking and how it helps all of us become, first of all, better thinkers, which I think is critical, and better communicators, which means connecting with others. A lot of ground to cover. Maybe we’ll start with just even visual thinking and defining it and making it more accessible to more people.
You and I have spent a lot of time with innovators and designers and entrepreneurs. My humble hope is that anybody listening to this, regardless of what they do and who they are in the world, will walk away from this conversation feeling more ready and inspired to pick up the pen, to make sense of their life, to figure out how they can influence a better tomorrow, because that’s what we’re trying to do here at How We Future. Maybe starting with visual thinking and what that is and why it’s not just about drawing.
Dan: Yes. Lisa, perfect way to set things up. The fact that you pulled out your whiteboard and you showed us a little Venn diagram, so two overlapping circles, and I understand that there will be a lot of people who are listening, so they’re not able to see our visuals. That’s okay, because we’ve been doing this for a while and realizing that this notion of visual thinking does not require any artistic talent whatsoever. In fact, it’s not really visual thinking, even about your ability to draw.
What visual thinking really says is the human brain is super highly optimized to be a visual engine. Roughly half of the entire human brain, if you think about the 70 billion neurons that are in the average human brain, roughly half of those have evolved to help us simply process vision. The idea that there is a visual, structural, colorful world around us, that we are navigating our way through, and every part of that goes through our eyes, every part of that, what we see, what the colors are, what the edges are, what we see moving in front of us, the shadows, all of it, the shapes, the people, everything occupies so much of our brain.
We do a tremendous amount of incredibly sophisticated thinking, often at a very subconscious or unconscious level, about how that entire visual world around us is impacting us and what’s unfolding in front of us. We do that without the use of words at all. Now, I love verbal thinking. Lisa, you mentioned, yes, I am a writer. I love reading. Words are fantastic. As a mechanism, as you and I are using right now to communicate an idea, words are absolutely extraordinary. To push the analogy, they’re not the whole picture.
There is far more of our brain that is actively processing the visual world than is processing the auditory or verbal world. What I’m trying to do, and what many, many people have been doing for a long time under this notion of visual thinking is say, you can be smarter, you can be more creative, you can have a much stronger sense of your own, Lisa, to your word, your own sense of personal agency when you make a little bit of effort to understand what it is that you’re seeing in the world, how you might record that in order to make things that are overwhelmingly complicated more clear.
Then by virtue of having created some visuals, some simple sketches, some drawings, you now have something that’s very clear to share with someone else. You’ve now completed the whole loop, that sense of the world is confusing, but I look at it. My mind helps me make sense of that based on what I’m seeing. I can decode that. I can record that. I can clarify that. Then I can play it back in a dialogue or a conversation with someone else, and now we’re seeing literally the same thing. That’s how it works. Does that make sense?
Lisa: Oh, it’s extraordinary. It’s so powerful. First of all, that we’re all wired that way. This notion that our human brains, we are first wired to take in the world visually. We learn to speak because we practice it, but we naturally take in the world through our vision. That we can learn practices of using that natural ability to see more in order to become better problem-solvers, in order to become more capable of sifting through all of the noise to get to the signal, and to then be able to communicate that with others. It’s so powerful. Every time I hear your work, Dan, and hear you talk about your work, I get so excited.
Then I’ll just be honest because we’re friends here. Then I get a little mad. I get a little mad, not at you, Dan, but I get mad at our systems. I get mad at our schooling. I get angry that we essentially communicate to our youngest learners and leaders, probably by the age of second grade, that if they’re good at drawing, they should be relegated to art, and that the visual thinking tools that you share in your wonderful books and programs and presentations can be practiced earlier on. We would all be so much better for it if we had facility and fluency in some of the visual thinking methods that you bring forward to the world.
Dan: Lisa, can we take a second and just ground this in examples, just make it very, very real for people? Again, I want to use your word of agency. To be fair, I didn’t know that was going to be your kickoff word today. I love the fact that it is agency. How do I, individually or as part of a group, find a way to make my message clearer or more understood or be able to make decisions about what I need to do or we need to do, often in spite of an overwhelming number of forces that seem to say, “No, you don’t have the ability to do that”?
I want to give a very good example, just riffing off of what you’d said. I want everybody to picture back when they were a young kid, probably kindergarten, first grade, to the ability that you can. The best way to think about that time is when you were in school and think maybe you hated going to school, maybe you loved going to school, but for the most part, school was aimed to try to be fun. It was trying at that young age to try to encourage us to be curious and to have nice structures and frameworks and tools that would help us embrace this wild world that we now found ourselves in.
I want you to picture yourself back at that time, and the critical element would be before you knew how to read, before you knew how to read and write. As you mentioned, Lisa, you’re dead-on right, typically, there’s a lot of alphabet work done in kindergarten. By the time you’re in 1st Grade, you’re doing your ABCs, and maybe you’re starting to do some reading. Second grade, you’re encouraged to do more reading. Think about it. You spent a lot of time in school before you could read and write, still learning.
One of the most amazing tools that happened for all kids was you drew. You drew simple little cartoon stick figure-type things with crayons. Yes, Lisa, again, to your point, especially for the younger kids, there isn’t yet a sense of “I’m not good at this.” It hasn’t been burned into you yet that even that drawing that you made of a dog that doesn’t even look anything like a dog, you don’t yet know usually that that’s terrible. Until about second grade, a teacher comes along, or a friend, sadly, or a colleague, a classmate, and they say, “That’s the worst dog I’ve ever seen. That doesn’t look at all like a dog,” and now you give up on the drawing.
This is kind of the example. You’ve lost agency in wanting to communicate, in this case, about a dog. Now you say, “Okay, I’ll wait till I can learn to read and write about it.” Then the teachers get very excited because they say, “Okay, kids, now we’re moving on from our drawings. We’re going to put away our picture books and we’re going to move to chapter books. We’re going to purge our education of the visuals that have gotten us this far.” Lisa, I agree with you. Get mad. Why would we do that? It is insane to throw away the very frameworks and tools we used to become communicators to say, “Oh, we don’t need them anymore. They’re juvenile. Leave them behind.” It’s wild.
Lisa: It’s wild. On the flip side of that, again, your work is so accessible and empowering. Your very first book, The Back of the Napkin, which is really about how to solve complex problems with simple pictures, has this opening framework of six different ways to better understand a problem and to better then communicate a potential solution for it. One of the things I learned from you early on was this notion of, once you know the problem, you can draw the picture. Again, that’s a very empowering stance of giving you a wider set of tools to take in whatever problem is coming your way, and not just stand there, fight or flight or freeze, but be able to say, “Wait, let me go through it. What kind of problem is this?” I wonder if you could talk about your six by six.
Dan: Oh, absolutely. It is the critical framework for how do we convert these simple pictures into thinking. It’s really interesting, Lisa, because this little tool-- We’ll talk through what the six by six, the six pictures is in a moment. What’s really interesting about it is it’s simply a model or a framework that works both ways. You just said if you can define the problem, you could draw it. Here’s a set of tools that help you say, “I’ve identified the problem. Now I’m going to break it down into its component elements to clarify it.” Let’s call that direction A to B.
What’s also interesting is the very same tool works the other way around, from B to A, meaning, I have no idea what problem I’m facing right now. Something is overwhelming me and maybe I’m trying to address it over here on this side and it’s not working at all. What would happen then if we took a pause and say, instead of identifying the problem first, what would happen if I just started drawing the very discrete elements of what is coming at me and let the problem emerge from the pictures that I’m drawing? What’s beautiful about this little tool, which we’ll talk about right now, is it goes both ways.
I know the problem and I want to communicate it to someone else. I’ll break it down according to these six very different types of pictures that I can very easily draw. Path A, or I have no idea [chuckles] what’s coming at me, but I know I need to try to take it apart so I can address it. I’ll draw it first and then the problem will emerge on the other side. Super abstract. Let’s talk about this six-by-six tool. Lisa, I’m so glad you brought it up as the starting point.
Let’s go back in our minds to when we were that kid back in school and now let’s move on to maybe third, or fourth or even fifth grade where we’re starting to get much more advanced writing. Every one of us will remember at some point in our writing class, in our English class, a teacher said to us, “I’m going to ask you to write a five-paragraph essay. I’m going to ask you to write a piece, and it’s going to talk about a topic that’s of interest to you. What I need you to do is I need you to make sure you cover the who, the what, the where, the when, and the why.”
Your teacher may or may not have said, and the reason why those are important, is because if any of you grow up to become journalists and go work for the New York Times or the Washington Post, I can tell you right now that your editor is going to say the story is not complete if it doesn’t include in the first graph or two, the who, the what, the where, the when, the why. In fact, if that’s all you tell, then someone will be able to understand your idea pretty clearly just based on those underlying elements.
Guess what? All I did is realize in working through the research of others, standing on the shoulders of giants, many, many people, especially in the cognitive sciences, especially in the visual cognitive sciences, who had started to map out this miracle of vision, this engine that we have that occupies half our brain, how does it actually work? What is it really doing? If we take a step back and just kind of abstract out what vision is, vision is the near miraculous, at least, magical process by which our brain converts light into meaning.
All vision is, is billions, trillions of photons of light that are coming from the sun, that are reflecting off of objects in front of us, or if we’re indoors, the same light is coming from a light bulb or artificial lighting. Fine, but our brain is going through burning enormous amounts of calories, doing all kinds of crazy calisthenics and exercises, turning light into meaning. In our first example, turning light into a dog. Well, that’s one thing. Now, imagine I keep watching that dog for a while and I realize that that dog is chasing a bird. Then I start watching that bird.
Then I realize a whole story is starting to unfold in front of me, no words necessary, of watching the dog, reflected light, chasing a bird, reflected light, over time as the dog and the bird dance around in the playground or wherever they are, until finally the bird flies away and the dog is so upset because he didn’t get what he wanted. A whole story has just played out. How did our brain do that? Here’s where the pieces are going to start to weave back together.
What our visual system has evolved to do, at kind of a mechanical level, and this is true for all people who have vision, so 95% of the population of the planet right now, people who are not visually disabled, people who are not blind, so all the rest of us who have vision at all. What our brain is doing is as light comes in, right away, our brain is trying to identify what are the objects that I’m looking at? “Oh, I see that shape over there or those colors or those edges. That’s a dog.” Now, to be fair, it’s only a dog in English.
If I spoke a different language, that same object would have a completely different name, but to all of us, the dog, the shape, the color, the edges, the movements look the same, regardless of what we call it. We recognize that. That’s only one of the pathways in our visual system. The neurobiologists and the cognitive scientists name that pathway literally as the “what pathway.” One part of vision is just identifying what I’m looking at. If I was to draw a picture of that, before I got any deeper into my story of the bird and the dog, I might just draw out, sketch out a little dog, a little icon of a dog. Okay, I’ve seen a dog. Beautiful. I note, “Then I saw a bird,” so I might say another one, a bird.
Now, imagine again, we’re looking at this scene, we’re sitting at the park and the dogs and the birds are chasing each other around. There’s more than one. There are actually multiple dogs. Maybe there’s a dozen dogs and maybe there’s 100 birds. Maybe there’s a dozen dogs and only one bird. Even just using those simple pictures, imagine a dozen dogs chasing one bird. You have a scene in your mind. Now, imagine a dozen dogs chasing 1,000 birds. Same dogs, same birds. What’s changed is the quantity.
It turns out there’s another pathway in our visual mind that works really, really well in identifying, not the objects, but how many there are in front of us. This is pathway number two.
There’s another pathway and this is building. You can see this process of vision. This is why it takes so many calories and it takes a moment for our brain to kind of catch up. Another pathway is literally called the “where pathway.” Now, that one is our visual engine, not recognizing the dog, not recognizing the bird and not counting them.
That job’s already been done by other parts of the brain, but saying, “Where are these objects? Where are they in relation to each other? Even more interesting,where are they in relation to me? Is the dog at my feet or is the dog way, way over there on the other side of the park? Then, are the dog and the bird in the same place? Are they immediately next to each other or are they very far away?”
This is another pathway. I know I go on, Lisa, but what I hope people are able to imagine as you’re just listening, this is the process by which our brain mechanically, structurally converts light into meaning. It identifies the things that are in front of us. It identifies how many there are. It identifies their location relative to each other and relative to us. Then it does something really amazing. We’ve got basically a cast of characters, we’ve got their numbers, and we’ve got their positions. We haven’t applied a word yet.
Our verbal mind has not even begun to describe the situation to us at this point. This is all visual. In fact, this is all pre-verbal, everything that I’m describing. Now our visual mind makes a giant leap and it says, “Based on what I’ve just seen, I’ve seen a dog in motion which seemed to be triggering a bird to move in a particular way.” This played out over time. I can start to draw out some models of cause and effect in my mind. I’m now seeing the how. How does a bird and a dog interact?
That’s number five. Then it takes us to the last one, the last of the six, which is why. What my mind is trying to do, what my visual engine is trying to do is make sense of the world in front of me. That’s why as infants, although our eyes are open and we’re beginning to process the visuals, they don’t yet make sense to us. We need to see them over and over and over and over again, millions of times before our brain is able to say, “I am now understanding how the world works based on what I see,” and that gives me the why.
Why does any of this matter? Why might I use this to my advantage? Why is this consequential? Why can I play a role, or how and why can I play a role in that story? Lisa, I went on very long. I hope that the verbal description landed. How does this make sense to you?
Lisa: Oh, it makes so much sense. Dan, I’ve heard you’ve been talking about these ideas for a long time. It’s getting me to rethink about the importance of breaking down what you’re seeing in these ways in a world that seems to be speeding up more and more. When I hear you describe them, what I hear you saying is, in a moment where we feel overwhelmed by fill in the blank. Whatever crisis or poly crisis is coming your way, instead of just getting flooded because you don’t know how to make sense of it, can you pause and break down and say, “What is happening here?”
“Which of these pathways can I utilize to my advantage to better understand what’s going on? Is this a who problem? Is this a when problem? Is this a how much problem?” Your earlier statement that you may not necessarily have the solution right away. In fact, we as designers absolutely love, and in fact, almost demand is a strong word, but urge that we are--
Dan: We demand it.
Lisa: Okay, we demand.
Dan: We demand it, Lisa. Let’s have some agency here. We demand.
Lisa: We demand to better understand the problem before solving the problem. If we’re solving the problem too quickly without going through these, at the very least, six questions around who and how much and where and when and how and why, then we might be solving the wrong problem. When I hear you describe it, I hear you giving people an opportunity to pause even for a second to ask different questions to ensure that, first of all, they’re not getting a solution handed to them that leads to a future that they didn’t want, and that they can be a part of at least participating in understanding what’s happening right now and how to come up with something better.
Again, it gives me huge excitement for people to hear this and be reminded, as you said from the beginning, we are wired this way. There are forces at play that are taking this away from us. A, as we said earlier, we haven’t been practicing enough. It hasn’t been made available to us. B, our tensions are getting spliced like crazy with technology and all the rest. C, the level of complexity of these problems demands that we are more fluid in knowing how to experiment along the way. We’re expected to be masters. We’ve never had a chance to practice.
All this is to say, I’m so thrilled we’re talking today-- Again, this sounds abstract, but just to make it concrete, particularly when you were talking about the where pathway and maps, I have this instant reminder that whenever we go to a new place, we need the map. You are here. You are here, the world is here. You are here. The fact that we are so ungrounded right now, we don’t have maps for this moment, that alone makes us feel so unnerving. Even if we have the capacity to just acknowledge, “I’m missing the map, that’s why I feel so ungrounded right now. That’s why I feel so unsettled. Could I draw the map?” That’s a gift.
Dan: When faced with an overwhelming problem, which, not to stretch the metaphor too far, but our visual system, the thing that we’ve been describing, is always overwhelmed. There is simply too much information in the universe around us for us to process it all. At the same time, what our brain has done over millions and millions of years has essentially figured out how to be a really good information triage machine. Of all the stuff that’s coming in, I don’t necessarily just want to revert to the basics of fight or flight.
That’s my brain doing its most limited emergency crisis response. We may or may not take good action at that point, but it certainly will not be thoughtful action. When faced with what feels like an overwhelmingly complicated problem, I agree with you completely, this notion of visual thinking and this six-by-six tool gives us a way to pause and go back to first principles of storytelling or first principles of cause and effect.
Is the thing that I’m witnessing that seems so overwhelming actually the thing that is happening, or is it intended as a kind of a diversion, or is it intended as a scare to throw me off my game? Am I seeing things that are truly overwhelming, or are they positioned to be overwhelming so that I will take action which maybe isn’t as thoughtful as I would otherwise do? The ability to be able to say, “Pause for a moment.”
In a crisis, it’s very hard, but it is worth the moment to say, “Okay, let’s go through the six one more time. Who are we actually talking about? What are they actually saying, or what are they actually trying to achieve? What are the measurements or the metrics by which this thing can be proven or disproven in a rational way?” Let’s get some numbers going in. Humans, we’re good at logic. We’re good at math. Maybe not all great at quadratic equations, but we’re pretty damn good at being able to say, “There’s a lot of this thing and there’s very little of this thing, and that has meaning, and I might want to try to balance it out or overwhelm the smaller one,” whatever it is.
Then I want to say, where are they actually? Are these things that are being thrown at me in positions that I can truly see? Are they hiding their position? Is their position intentionally obfuscated so that I’m not able to take thoughtful action? Once we do those, if we could draw, and the piece we missed, Lisa, as we were talking through the six by six, I was describing at a high level what is the nature of each of these pathways.
What you picked up on and I did not yet share is that when you’ve identified that you’re thinking about who and what, or when you’ve identified that you’re thinking about how many, you get to draw a very different picture. We drew a dog to symbolize a dog. We might draw a chart, something that you would generate out of a spreadsheet, how many dogs versus how many birds over time. Then if we want to talk about where they are, you nailed it, we would simply draw a little map, and it doesn’t have to be anything more complicated than the Venn diagram you kicked this show off with.
It was a map that showed there’s two different ideas. There’s visual thinking and there’s agency. For the purposes of our conversation, we’re going to put them in the same place. What do they have in common? We could have a very different conversation, Lisa, if you said, “I really want us to have a conversation of agency, completely independent and far removed from visual thinking,” and that would be a different map. The picture that you draw for who and what is a little icon.
Think about it as a little emoji or a simple icon or a little portrait. The picture that you draw for when you’re thinking about how many things do I have is you draw a simple little chart, a little bar chart. This is how many dogs I have, and this is how many birds I have. When you’re thinking about where they’re located, you draw a simple map. The dogs are over here, the birds are over here. When you’re thinking about that when, you draw a little timeline, step A, step B, step C, step D.
When you’re thinking about, okay, how do they interact? What’s the cause and effect? Now you amp it up. You draw a little bit of a flow chart. We start with dog over here, goes over here. If dog sees bird, dog runs to bird. If dog does not see bird, dog doesn’t move. Sort of a cause and effect diagram. Then the last one, the sixth one, the why, is actually the simplest picture of all. I like to think of it as, using our mathematical terms again, as a little visual equation. Something very simple, just a couple of symbols that might say, “Dog, heart, bird. Bird, not heart, dog.”
In the end, I’ve spent all of these calories, watched all these dogs and birds, and I’ve come away with this operating principle, the why dogs love birds, but birds don’t love dogs. Now I’ve got a good why model that I can take with me into the future. Again, it’s simplistic, but the process that we are describing can literally, and I mean that literally literally, be used to describe anything that the human brain has the ability to conceive of. Anything. You want to talk about quantum mechanics? We can break it down. You want to talk about political shenanigans? We can break it down. You want to talk about economic variables? We can break it down.
The beauty of it is, once we’ve started to create a set of our simple line drawing sticks and arrows and boxes and stick figures and circles, we start to create a library that we can begin to amplify and begin to describe increasingly complex problems or opportunities or scenarios using the same elemental building blocks. You talk about agency, you talk about education. We have those simple visual artifacts shared among us, I would argue that in many ways they’re even more powerful than a shared language of words to make sure that we are cogitating on the same thing.
Lisa: I totally agree with that. I want to make this even more concrete for folks in one of my favorite stories about you, Dan, which I think dates back to the Obama years when Obama was trying to pass the Affordable Health Care Act. As many large policy changes happen in the real world, in Congress, they end up with bills that are hundreds if not thousands of pages long. You did something extraordinary in that time to try to make that bill, which was causing huge political division at that time, more accessible to more people using these tools.
I wonder if you could share with us that story because here we are, fast forward to what is causing a huge schism right now in our government, 2025, health care. It doesn’t have to be health care. Can you just share a little bit of that example of what you decided to do to use visual thinking tools to break down what was at the time hotly contested, hugely emotional, and very divisive policy, and what happened as a result?
Dan: It’s a great story. It’s very timely, Lisa, that you bring it up now because some of the debate that is going on now in the Senate has to do with legacy items coming out of the same drawings that we were making 16 years ago. You can make a nice-- If we were to draw a timeline of some of the political shifts that have taken place, a driving force through many of them would be some of the same things we were working on a decade and a half ago. The simple version of the story is this.
When President Obama came into office in 2008, the first thing he had to deal with was the 2008 financial crisis and the bailout of the government. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that the first thing the new president’s going to do is allocate some funds to try to repair the fundamental economics of the nation. Then the second thing, which also shouldn’t have been a surprise because it was one of the things that he’d been promising to do when he was running for office-- again, this is ancient history for many of us at this point now-- was to try to reform the healthcare system in the United States.
He was not the first president to try to do that. Going all the way back to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, believe it or not, of the Republican Party, they had back in the 1970s tried to take a swing at reforming the American healthcare system in very similar ways. What was happening 16 years ago was as the Affordable Care Act started to make its way into the public, it started to be debated. The media, rightfully, would pick up on this debate and talk about it in lots of articles.
I was not employed by any of the parties at that time, not the political parties, nobody in healthcare. I was working as an independent contractor on completely other industries. I was personally interested when I would read the news stories, I noticed that they would amplify the political divisions being surfaced by the debate around healthcare, but they didn’t talk about what the reform bill actually said. There was almost nothing that I could find, not in any of the usual suspect media, big-time media, that said, “If the Affordable Care Act passes, here’s what’s going to change. Here are the levers that are going to be pulled.”
I and a friend of mine who does know the healthcare system very well, Dr. Tony Jones, a Johns Hopkins MD and Harvard MBA, we said, “Let’s go into the bill itself and do the thing that traditional media isn’t doing. Let’s describe what is actually being discussed.” We did, and it’s a 1,500-page government bill. Then I took and drew a series of very simple pictures. Just like, Lisa, what we’re describing now. For those of you who can see my whiteboard, it’s very simple things, just circles and say, this person is a doctor, and I’m drawing a little bottle of a pharmaceutical product here, so I’ve got a doctor and I’ve got a pharma thing here.
Pictures no more complicated than that. Just drew some arrows between them and was able to map out the fundamental architecture as it existed at that point of the American healthcare system, and the key players that were in that system. To be fair, there were only three of them, so it’s easy to draw out. There were the doctors and the hospitals, basically the people called the providers, people who make money off of keeping us well. Then there are the payers.
These are the insurance companies, people who make money off of managing the flow of money throughout this financial system. Then the third character is just us, the people who are paying the taxes and are getting the healthcare. It’s not hyper complicated. There’s only three main players. I drew them out. I showed this is the way the system works now, and if you really break down the Affordable Care Act, here’s the way the system will work in the future.
We don’t need to talk about the details of how it shifted, but what was important was it became so clear over this series of very simple drawings. I took this handful of simple sketches that each one had a written narration with it, so it was one sentence and one drawing. It probably took something like 30 of those, but it was very easy to read. You could read through the whole thing in maybe three minutes. I posted it online. In those days, you might remember, Lisa, there was this thing called Slideshare.
Again, ancient history, but it was a way to post your PowerPoints and slideshows online. What was remarkable is here was a PowerPoint presentation about healthcare reform, which you’d imagine is really boring, but we got 2 million downloads within the first month and then 5 million within the next few months, and it truly went viral. For a moment in time, back again in the past, this series of drawings became the most downloaded PowerPoint on healthcare in Slideshare of all time. I got contacted by Fox News in New York.
Fox News, mind you, Fox. They said, “Dan, based on what you’ve drawn, clearly, you’re one of the leading thinkers in healthcare. Would you come on air in New York and explain to our viewers how the Affordable Care Act is actually structured?” I came home, and the next day I was contacted by the White House, who said, “Would you be willing to come over to the White House Office of Communications and share with us effectively what magic trick did you do to decomplexify things we’ve been working on for years and make it something discernible in a few minutes?” That led to an engagement working with the White House Office of Communications, and it was fabulous. Incredible experience that had impact.
Lisa: Huge impact, which goes back to why that Venn diagram of visual thinking and agency, I think, is so powerful, Dan. Here you are, with great respect, one of the most talented communicators that I know, not with an MD in the back of your name, that is now getting heralded as one of the most influential health experts in the country. Invitation to go on Fox at the time, hugely powerful vehicle for reaching millions of viewers, and then you get a call from the White House.
One of the things we’ve been exploring on How We Future is this idea of figuring out how some of the conversations we’re having with our wonderful guests can help expand our circle of control to be more powerful on our circle of influence to have a positive impact on our circle of concern. That story just captures it all. You were not paid by a client to do this. You had a concern. You noticed that, wow, the conversation about this critical issue called our healthcare is not going that well. We’re not actually having debates about the thing itself.
We’re getting caught off and manipulated and distracted by, remember, the death panels and all of the hyperbole of what was going on. Here you stepped up and said, “Wait a minute, maybe there’s a better way to understand this.” Now we’re dealing still with healthcare, but we’re also dealing with so many complex issues. Dan, we could talk for hours, but I would be so remiss if I didn’t fast forward to just hearing some of your thoughts on where we are today where we have this incredible technology called AI that seems to be doing a lot of the visualizing for us.
I’m going to make a big leap here, but I really just want to make sure I hear some of your perspectives around what we’ve been talking about, which is visual thinking as a thinking prompt, not just visualizing where are we going on the future of visual thinking in a world where we just type a few words and boom, the thinking seems to be done for us and the visual seems to be done for us.
Dan: Lisa, you’ve introduced the 800-pound gorilla, and I am prepared for this because I appreciate you setting it up this way. I realized two years ago, this is coming, this tool. I have a choice as a creative person who makes my living off of essentially drawing pictures and telling stories. I have a choice. I could choose to say, “No, I don’t want to engage with this new tool because it has elements that I don’t like,” or I could choose to embrace it and say, “Before I start maligning this tool around which I know so little, maybe I should start to work in it,” or some hybrid in between the two.
Being the enthusiast that I am, I decided, hell, I’m going in. I have spent lots and lots of time playing with generative AI, and I want to be very specific. I am referring to an area that I’m starting to learn about, which is specifically within the field of generative AI, so the AI receiving a prompt of some kind and using that prompt to then generate a new piece of art. I’m specifically also focusing on visual generative AI. You could go into your ChatGBT, or you could go into your Cloud, and you can have a lovely conversation with the robot, and it can tell you all kinds of interesting things.
Hopefully, you go and you fact-check. Hopefully, you don’t offload your thinking to it, but as a research engine, my gosh, what we have available to us is remarkable. I’m not referring to that in the work that I’m interested in. Those are interesting pieces, but I’m more interested in what happens when we work with the robot to create the pictures. It is an incredibly rich landscape that has incredibly powerful good things and incredibly powerful bad things. I do need to bring some judgment to it. We’ve been here before, and you said a moment ago, it feels like a world without a map right now.
We feel rudderless because this is also new. We have no maps. My reaction to that, by nature of who I am, is to seek out maps that have been drawn in the past that smell something like what we have now. I’m going to dust off an old map where something that feels similar to today’s stirrings may have happened before. It’s not the same as the past, but there are valuable maps that we can look at from the past, conceptual maps that lend themselves towards giving, in my mind, some structure to where we are today.
One of the maps that I want to bring to help me avoid panic around AI is to take a pause. Same thing we did a moment ago. Go back to first principles. Say, we’ve seen this before. I was mapping this out in preparation for the call. I’m going to walk through a picture that, to me, helps ground why we don’t need to be as terrified of AI as it sometimes feels like we should be. I don’t think I’m explaining away the scary parts. I think I’m contextualizing them in a way that makes sense to me. I’ve got something drawn on the whiteboard.
I’m going to walk you through it. It’s a bit of a map. It’s a bit of a timeline that is a reflection of my personal history. All my life, I have been involved and engaged and interested in visual representation of things. As a kid, yes, I drew. Then I learned how to paint. Then I learned how to build models. I have always been, I guess you might say, a hyper-creative. I’m always making something. I’m not hyper-creative when it comes to writing. I’m hyper-creative when it comes to creating visual items, paintings, drawings, sketches, napkin notes, models, dioramas, you name it.
To me, they’re all various expressions of trying to convert what my eyes saw in the world into a recording of it to help me make sense of it. I started out, my first job was in graphic design because as a young 17-year-old illustrator, the only place I could get a job where I could earn some money to work my way through college was doing graphic design. It was a trade. I know it’s hard to see on the board, but I can shift this around a little bit. What I’d like to remind myself is there was a time in my life where there were no digital tools available to us to do any kind of visuals at all.
You used to do graphic design with pen and paper and glue and scissors and cardboard and cameras and film. We didn’t know it, but everything was analog. Everything was done essentially by hand. There were certainly industrial processes out there, but the prep work was done by hand. There was no option. Then we had a revolution in about 1984 where the Mac and the PC came out and they gave us something called a digital desktop. Wow, I now am working not on a piece of cardboard, but on a computer screen.
It can’t draw pictures, not very well, but it’s interesting because it can do some layout tasks. Then we got digital layout. For anybody who’s familiar, and forgive me for like the history of Silicon Valley right here, you had applications like QuarkXPress and you had digital fonts. For the first time, if you were a designer who’d been used to working with photographic plates and hand-drawn fonts and Letraset, rub down letters, and now you had digital fonts and digital layout, this was a revolution.
I want to make the point that one day, I’m in San Francisco, I was working for a newspaper in the late 1980s, it ages me, where our job was to digitize the newspaper. We were a small independent newspaper, but we were bleeding edge. We had people coming up on Silicon Valley, myself among them saying, “Hey, we’ve seen what you can do with computers, we could start to make the efficiency of the newspaper layout more digital.” We went from digital layout to then, whoa, blow us away.
I’m working for newspapers now, so photographers around us, they saw the first versions of Photoshop and digital cameras and were very upset. This is going to change. You can now manipulate images. Oh my gosh, what are we going to do? Then we shifted in, the technology advances, and now you start to get the very early versions of desktop 3D software, CAD/CAM software. You’re moving away from slide rules, you’re moving away from pantographs and hand-drawn tools, you’re starting to do 3D CAD/CAM, which then starts to bring us into advanced 3D, Autodesk, and things like that.
Then you start to get into CGI, computer-generated imagery. Then we now have AI. The point I want to make here is that we’ve been here before. Every evolution of the application of technology to the creation of a visual has brought with it new opportunity and new terror. I’m comfortable with that. I’m comfortable with the fact that is the way the world moves. I don’t necessarily like it, but it is the truth. That’s what is happening. I don’t know how your audiences are going to respond to this notion, but I find some reassurance in saying we’ve been here before.
By the way, anybody who’s been in the business world for a while knows that there’s been a parallel evolution of technology. Not just the arrival of the PC, but then the arrival of the internet, that changed everything. Then the arrival of cloud computing, that changed everything. The arrival of mobile computing, this changes everything. Now we’re seeing AI come in. Forgive me for going on and pontificating. I find this map. What did we learn from the arrival of transformative new technologies in the past that we can apply to now? I think we learned some really interesting things. I don’t know. How’s that land, Lisa?
Lisa: Well, a couple of things. One is oftentimes when we think about the future that feels unknown, we get untethered because we don’t have models for it. There’s no blueprints. I think what you’re saying is that actually history can teach us a lot. We can learn from patterns and we can try to become more informed about what has happened when not necessarily the exact thing. AI was not 40 years ago, but a disruptive force that fundamentally changed the rules of how things were done happened. What can we learn from that?
It reminds me of the great Mark Twain quote, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” All that is to say that it is a source of data that we can then use to try to become more informed about what is unfolding, to try to shape the future where we want it to go, to try to minimize some of the perhaps terror or threat responses by being curious. Another frame that we have talked about, and we spoke about this with one of my close colleagues that does a lot of future’s facilitation where he’s trying to help more executives and leaders have the kinds of thoughtful conversations that we’re having right now that they often don’t feel like that they can because they’re just racing against time, this idea of reflection in order to inform prospection.
Reflecting on what has been in order to inform where we might go, both good and bad, to try to get away from it. Again, what could be better than drawing it versus words, words, words, words? As you often have said, can we literally see the same thing at the same time? I see what you mean. Get alignment. Otherwise, we’re always, again, to add another visual metaphor, the seven blind men and the elephant. Somebody is looking at one part while somebody is looking at the other because they haven’t taken the time to lay out the map and to try to understand.
I think it’s so helpful. I think it’s often overlooked, and understandably so, when they feel so crunched for time. It’s just really helpful to hear someone who has been doing this for so long whose industry, visual communication, has gotten disrupted by that pathway you said, that yet on the other side, it’s not complete panic. It’s how might we be measured in thinking about where we’re going next. Importantly, let me lean in.
I have two choices. I could either say, “Oh, I don’t want anything to do with this,” or I can choose to be curious and lean in. I really appreciate that fantastic history to this moment. I know we are slowly running out of time here, Dan, but I would love to just hear that other part that you had said around where you think it’s going or how are we going to create visuals with the robots?
Dan: A couple of top-of-mind thoughts, and I really appreciate, Lisa, you giving me the extra time to share this because the story that you seek to tell is your story. Do not offload that to the robot. The robot doesn’t know your story. The robot doesn’t care about your story. The robot doesn’t actually know anything. The robot is basically a very, very fancy mad lip that’s filling in the blanks saying, “Based on the prompt that you just gave me, of the trillion of other prompts that I’ve read, the most likely probabilistic response is going to be this.”
The robot doesn’t know anything. What it is diving into is probabilistic behavior in the vast array of everything that it scanned on the internet, which is important to remember the story is yours. You have to tell that story. That’s point number one. Since you gave me permission to pontificate, I’m going to give another point. Point number two is there is great fear among the creative community that AI is going to put us out of work. The fear is not unfounded. There is legitimacy behind that fear, but I would like us to take a step back again and say, for people who are creative innately, whether you get paid for it or not, it doesn’t make any difference.
Look, I could probably train an AI to eat my dessert, but why would I do that? I like to eat my dessert. Just because there is a robot that can draw a picture does not in any way mean that I can’t. It’s taken nothing from me. In my ability to continue to create, there are severe issues around IP. Who owns the ideas that the robot has been trained on? The courts will decide that. I have my own opinion. My opinion is as someone who is incessantly creating something, simply knowing that there is a tool that is capable of creating something that looks like what I create, this takes nothing away from my ability to continue to create it.
I’m here to do what I’m here to do, and I enjoy the fact that there’s an increasingly broader rate of tools that allow me to do that in new ways. That’s point two. The last one, Lisa, and then I will stop, and I know this is one that is passionate to you, is it all comes down, every one of these terms, is it comes down, there’s no better word for it than ethics. You individually, your sense of agency, what do you choose to do with the capabilities of the tools that are now presented to us?
There’s nothing beyond that. Any one of these tools, Photoshop. I remember 20 years ago sitting with a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer of the Associated Press, and we were talking about digital cameras. He was saying to me digital cameras will never take hold because it’s too easy to manipulate the image. Someone find me a film camera today. Images have been manipulated by regimes since the beginning of visuals.
You go back and you look at the history of photography, you will find doctored images, illustrations that are not representative of the facts. There’s nothing new there. What is eternal, the map of comfort, the map that gives us some comfort, is ethically what you choose to do with the tools that are available to you. Thanks for letting me share that.
Lisa: No, thank you so much. Your voice is so critical at this moment. It reminds me, Dan, I’ll just maybe tie a couple of things together of incredible work you’ve done that may feel like in the way back machine, but feels as important today as ever. One is this idea of don’t outsource your problem-solving ability just because you can’t. Again, going back to one of the very first lessons I learned from you: the person that picks up the pen can solve the problem. At the time you said, “And gets the money.” I’m going to annotate that and say, “And can make a positive difference.”
If we can pick up the pen, be courageous, start with simple pictures, using, at the very least, that six by six that you shared with us to give us a way of being a critical thinker in a space of creative problem-solving, that’s foundational. Person that picks up the pen, solves the problem, can make a positive impact in the world. Then the second that we’ll make sure to link to is the three rules that you wrote about in one of your amazing books, Show and Tell, where you talked about this idea of rule number one, getting back to ethics, tell the truth.
If you learn how to pick up the pen and tell stories, tell the truth. Tell the truth about it all. Two, tell it with a story. We’ll also talk and link to some of your incredible maps of how to tell different kinds of stories. Three, tell that story with visuals. We’re at an inflection moment across many different challenges that we’re facing at our societal level, at our organizational level, even at our family level. Learning how to communicate more effectively through stories and visuals in order to create meaning and make tomorrow better than today, I think, is one of the most important leadership and human and citizen skills we can learn. I just want to maybe close, Dan, with how I think about this podcast, which is filled with gratitude.
Your contributions to the world are so foundational. I am so grateful for all that I have learned from you over this 15 years of cherished friendship and the kind of learning I get to do with you. My great hope is that everyone that listens to this picks up the pen and starts to say, “I have agency, even though the world feels overwhelmed. I know how to draw the picture. I know how to think more critically, and I know how to communicate in ways that other people can get.” I thank you from the bottom of my heart and from the bottom of my soul, Dan, for you and all that you do. I so appreciate your time being on How We Future.
Dan: It’s beautiful. Thank you, Lisa. I love the way you summarize it. Thank you.
Lisa: I’m really grateful for this conversation with Dan Roam, especially because of how grounding his work feels. There’s something calming about being reminded that we can slow down, look more carefully, and create our own clarity just by drawing stick figures. As you move through your week, here’s something to try. The next time a problem feels tangled, grab a pen and give yourself permission to think out loud on paper.
Don’t aim for perfect, aim for visible. You might be surprised by what you notice once the idea has some shape. If you found this episode useful, please consider rating or reviewing How We Future or sharing it with someone who’s navigating a complex decision. That small act helps these conversations travel further. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time.