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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.
The first one is simply your title. You just establish clarity.
You then build trust by establishing some kind of common ground with your audience. Something that says, “I understand you” without being patronizing.
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.
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.
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.
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)
...which will lead to a shared sense of courage.
We will then commit and realize that by even taking the first few of those steps...
...there will be an immediate reward of some kind.
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.