VBQ: Pop-Up Pitching with Dan Roam

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Welcome to the first interview for Visibly Brilliant Quarterly (aka, VBQ). What’s VBQ? It’s a multimedia newsletter packed with visual tools and techniques for clearer and more effective communication. You can subscribe here.

In the VBQ interview series, I talk with big thinkers and doers in the world of visual storytelling and B2B communication.

Dan Roam

Below is a condensed excerpt of my interview with Dan Roam, one of the Godfathers of visual thinking. He’s been getting the business world to solve problems and tell stories with simple sketches for decades. He’s also written several bestselling books about visual storytelling along the way — you may be most familiar with The Back of the Napkin. In his latest, The Pop-up Pitch, Dan explains how to spend 2 hours creating 10 pages that will transform your audience in 7 minutes, no matter what story you need to tell.

This interview has been condensed and edited. View the full, 30-minute interview here.

Kelly Kingman: Before we get into the material of the book, who is the Pop-Up Pitch for and what was the seed of inspiration for it?

Dan Roam: I've been drawing pictures all my life. I was just one of those weirdos (as perhaps many of us are) that, once I got into the world of business, never gave up on the drawing part. That made me the person in the meeting who was a little bit of the problem child. Because I'd often say to people, “Well, that thing you just said didn't actually make a whole lot of sense to me. Do you mind if I try to draw it out so that I can understand it?”

What I found is that by drawing something out, the whole temperature in the room would change. The real contentious stuff would wash away, and what you’d be left with was the simple sketch that people could look at and say, “Actually, if that's what you think I said, I understand where you're coming from, because what I meant was…” And that's the moment you give the pen to them and say, “Go ahead and draw it out, too.” And magic happens.

Business culture still seems like it’s lacking in visual tools. That type of thinking just isn't taught in business school. Nor for the most part, is it taught in the education of people in business. So the origin story is that I wanted to give everyone in the business world a very quick tool to help them be more visual. But even beyond that, how to just tell a really good story.

For so many parts of business, the templates are already in place. And yet there are no business templates for how to tell a story. Most business people spend most of their time trying to figure out how to tell a story. So I said, Why don't I take what I've learned over these last decades and turn it into a very simple storyline?

If you've got a really important presentation to give, please don't make this capital investment of weeks of sweating into some really over-thought PowerPoint. Why not make a minimum viable product that you can create in two hours and then present in about seven minutes? I call this the 10-page pitch. You could think of it as 10 slides, but it could be 10 paragraphs, 10 sentences, or 10 frames in a storyboard. But the 10 are very specific.

1. The first one is simply your title. You just establish clarity.

2. You then build trust by establishing some kind of common ground with your audience. Something that says, “I understand you” without being patronizing.

3. Then the third step is you kind of pull the rug out from under someone and you say, “We both know there's a giant problem coming up.” We evoke the strongest of all human emotions, which is fear.

4. Now you give hope and say, “On the other side of this problem, that's coming, imagine how awesome it's going to feel when this problem has been solved?” This turn is really important, it grabs the heart.

5. That's when the bottom falls out, because we say, “Well that beautiful hope that we want to achieve, we cannot get it using the things that we've done up to today.” This is the sobering reality that really takes us down to the bottom.

6. This is where we say, “But as miserable as things might seem, we are not going to let them kill us. We are going to make a bold move,” (gusto)

7. ...which will lead to a shared sense of courage.

8. We will then commit and realize that by even taking the first few of those steps...

9. ...there will be an immediate reward of some kind.

10. And then we will, as we continue, reach this true aspiration, which brings us up to a much better place than we've ever been before.

KK: This seems to focus differently than some of your past work — it seems you could end up focusing just on the words with this piece. So how do you get your clients out of the PowerPoint mentality and into making visuals that speak to that storyline?

DR: You just brought up something really interesting. The first hour [of the Pop-Up Pitch process] is all about the drawing part. The second hour then is all about adding the words.

I am a giant believer that you can unleash the power of someone's visual mind — anybody, the most recalcitrant businessperson, the person who absolutely believes they haven’t got a visual molecule in their body. What we’re going to say for the first hour is, “Suspend that disbelief. I am going to give you some very basic tools.” And in the case of my book, I call it the Visual Decoder. It’s a very simple toolkit that helps someone who's never drawn before unpack the story that already exists in their visual mind onto a sheet of paper in about 15 minutes.

It's amazing when you give people the structure of what to draw and you tell them, “I don't care about the quality of your drawing. The drawing we’re talking about is not an artistic process, it's a thinking process.” Some sort of clearly articulated visual overview — that’s all we need. Again, it's like storyboards. These are the ten simple drawings, and these are the 10 statements that are going to accompany each of those drawings in this sequence. That's it, that’s your presentation. The idea being, we’re going to get you to the simple storyline, and you’ll be ready to tell it. It will be one of the best presentations you've ever given because of that emotional visual evocation that goes through it.

KK: For the people who give it a try and pick up the book, where would they get stuck? Is there any little place you've seen people tend to struggle that maybe we could help them avoid?

DR: Yeah, there's the person who's terrified to even get started. Here's what I would say to them: The way to begin anything is just draw a circle, and label it yourself. Then say, “At the beginning of every opportunity or every problem, there's me.” If you can just manage to draw the first circle and call it “me,” and then just start to think, what would be the next one, and what's the next one? Before long, you will start to have a story that is unfolding on your drawing that will jumpstart you toward clarity. Just draw a circle and give it a name — that starts everything.

And then the second one is the trap that I often fall into, and certainly most people that I've seen, is I really do think that the product that I'm here to represent or the product that I've created — I think the sale is about my thing, and it’s not. It never is, and this is the trick: It's about the problem that someone else has that our product uniquely can help them solve. So when you start to tell your 10-page pitch, your product is going to be the solution and the solution doesn't even appear in your story until page 6. The first five are about this person and the problem that they have.

For the full richness of my conversation about the Pop-Up Pitch with Dan Roam, check out our 30-minute cut of the interview here.

You can download the Visual Decoder template at danroam.com, and buy The Pop-Up Pitch wherever books are sold.

If you’d like more great interviews and insights on B2B visual communication, subscribe to Visibly Brilliant Quarterly.

3 Keys to Designing an Awesome Experience

Turns out we’ve been planning things all backwards. 

Says who? Well, experiential designers Jenny Gottstein and Olivia Vagelos of IDEO Play Lab. In case you’re wondering, experiential design is about creating events that are transformative, time-bound experiences. The transformation can be small or large. The experience itself can incorporate elements of game design, like a cyber-attack escape room for a mayors’ conference. It can also be very simple and subtle, like handwritten notes and an ice-breaker activity for wedding guests. 

Gottstein and Vagelos broke down the design steps in their recent webinar, How to Prototype An Awesome Experience: From Board Meetings to Birthdays. Check out my handy visual guide to their process 🖌️

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Start with the humans, your audience.

Too often we start with the activities or content we want to pack into an event. The IDEO Play Lab team suggests that we start with the feelings, move to a theme for the event, and then define the activities that a group will participate in.

Whether it’s getting people to understand a concept, encouraging them to share, or giving them a sense of calm, ultimately it’s about trying to change the internal state of a human being — and that’s the place we need to start. You can’t just tell someone to feel something, we have to inspire the feeling.

So to get a handle on your audience, it helps to spend time thinking about where they’re at and where you want them to end up, from an internal perspective. Here are three questions to help frame your understanding:

1. Who are they to one another? 

   Do they know each other? Are there roles or power dynamics that might set the stage?

2. Why are they there? 

   Why did they come? What are the needs, motivations and expectations?

3. What do I want them to FEEL? 

   Get clear on what you think that emotional shift could be.

Design for the key moments.

We can’t design every second of an experience, and we shouldn’t. Participants tend to remember key moments, especially when they evoke a feeling. The Play Lab team suggests investing lots of time making your start and end moments special and not just an afterthought.

Opening Moments

An opening moment can set the tone and the "rules of engagement” for your experience. It helps people transition in and orient themselves to what the experience will be about. In game design, the term for opening moment is “entering the magic circle.”

For opening moments, ask yourself:

1. How can you help your audience feel included and then connected to each other?

   Example: A wedding couple gave everyone a bag with cards that had a fun but obscure fact about another wedding guest. Everyone then had to find the person that matched their card, giving guests a way to get acquainted with each other.

2. How do you give it pizzazz, but with purpose?

   Example: An investor pitch for an oral care product opened with a “brushing competition” via zoom. It created a visceral experience tied to discussion points in the pitch, and a more personal connection to the product.

Closing Moments

Humans love patterns, and a good closing makes for a more satisfying experience that feels “like a puzzle piece falling into place.” A good closing will also reinforce the value of the group’s work and create an emotional connection that helps solidify the transformation.

For closing moments, ask yourself:

1. How can we return or close a loop?

   Example: Bring back a joke or a question from the beginning, or even have people return to the same physical space.

2. How can we honor what has been accomplished or celebrate a transformation?

   Example: IDEO led scientists through guided visualization about the long-term future impact of their work. They wrote a headline that could appear in a future newspaper article. Months later, the IDEO team mocked up a newspaper with headlines photoshopped into articles. Tears were shed!

Create prototypes and “play” test.

“We have ideas that fall entirely flat,” said Gottstein, “but they get cut in prototype stage.” We need to strike a balance between overplanning every moment and underplanning the ones that really matter. A good way to find this balance is to test, test and test again.

“Don't just plan it, PLAY it.” - Olivia Vagelos

Play testing an experience can actually reveal some surprisingly valuable information when things go wrong. For instance, the IDEO Play Lab tested an immersive spaceship experience for 4th graders using tablets for each kid. When half of them broke during one run-through, the experience designers realized that sharing tablets actually helped the kids think out loud and reason through the experience together, making it better.

IDEO Play Lab’s tools for prototyping an experience:

1. The brain dump doc: Gather ideas for all of the possible elements of the experience. Build a rough outline for what could happen in this experience in the allotted time.

2. Turn it into a “run of show.” Guestimate how much each "chunklet" of an experience will take and divvy up responsibility for the elements if you’re working on a team.

3. Practice, practice, practice! “Face plant, enthusiastically!” encourages Vagelos. You want a few VBRTs (“vee-bert”), stands for Very Bad Run Through. Everyone does their piece and you time your team or yourself. Once you’ve made some adjustments, invite a few test audience members to a VGRT (“vee-gurt”) and get feedback. 

But does this work for virtual experiences?

Yup, say Vagelos and Gottstein. “Challenge people's assumptions about what they expect,” says Vagelos. “If the audience expects everyone to behave in X, Y, Z way, begin to poke at those assumptions. Look at each and ask, which can we flip?” Just don’t forget to test, test, test.

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The webinar was hosted by IDEO U @IDEOU and is available to watch via Facebook. You can find the full audio on the Creative Confidence Podcast.

3 Kids Books for Sketch-Curious Adults

I’ve taught workshops for corporate leaders at McKinsey & Co., for MBA students at MIT Sloan, and for cross-functional teams at biotech companies. Each time, there’s some hemming and hawing about not being able to draw, or not being “artistic.” Then I tell them that if we do this right, it’ll feel like they’re back in kindergarten.

Kindergarteners don’t draw something and then give you all sorts of disclaimers about how terrible it is. Around first or second grade, we start to overthink the whole drawing thing. Before that, we’re open to experimenting.

So when I want to encourage folks to experiment with more visual communication — whether it’s on a whiteboard during a meeting or in personal sketchnotes — I look to books that are made for kids.

In honor of International Children's Book Day, here are three of my favorites:

Ed Emberley's Drawing Book: Make a World
By Ed Emberley

I owe such a debt of gratitude to Ed Emberley for teaching me that if you abstract it enough, anything can be represented with a set of simple shapes. Using only a handful of lines, he shows you how to make an entire world. This simple visual vocabulary is an incredible foundation. From there, you can branch out and play with color, organic shapes. He unlocks a universe with a tiny set of keys that we all have access to.

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Draw Here Activity Book
BY Hervé Tullet

Hervé Tullet has my number — he revels in the beauty of three primary colors and lots of circles and lines. Instead of representing the visible world, he opens your imagination with abstraction — demonstrating how to capture gestures and rhythm with just lines and color. Tullet’s particular magic in this book (he’s made dozens of amazing children’s books) is inviting you to mix your own magic with his, in a collaboration of color and form. There’s also the side benefit of getting to draw in an actual book, which feels pretty exciting to me.

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Cute Drawings: 474 Fun Exercises to Draw Everything Cuter
By Yooco Takashima

I’m not sure if this book is geared to kids, or just anyone who wants things to be CUTER, now! But what I love about it is how clearly it breaks down objects from daily life into super-simple, iconic characters. The exercises are easy and fun, with lots of room to add your own variations.

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Those carefree images we draw as kids are about expression. And we still have those tools as adults! By adding some simple sketches to your repertoire — whether it’s for the office brainstorming session or your own inspiration — you can give shape to your ideas.