“In mathematics, the sudden occurrence of an idea that seems to come out of nowhere is often the signal that you are missing an image.” –David Bessis
I’m frustrated. We’ll come back to the quote, but first let me explain why. It is a beautiful Sunday evening, and instead of sitting outside reading a book, I am here punching away at my computer writing the August newsletter. I should have written it yesterday, but I spent a large chunk of the day working to unravel issues with one of our projects. What’s wrong with this project? It seems that every week we discover something new about a new process deployment that no one predicted or planned for, and now the project is behind schedule. This takes us back to the quote.
We are discovering new requirements for the process because the future process was never visualized and shared. There is no shared visualization of the future state.. There is no future-state process map, no data flow diagram, and no value stream map — just to name a few useful visualizations.. So, each day we are learning something new. I like learning, and mathematics teaches us that we can learn faster when we can imagine a concept in our minds, and then draw the thing that we don’t yet have but believe to be true. This is exactly what my project needs. So guess what my team will be working on this week…
Visualization is powerful because it creates shared understanding.. After all, we are visual creatures. In the May newsletter, I told the story of Dr. Richard Marcellus, who told me, “All of math is visual, it’s imagination and visualization.” I can also thank Dr. Marcellus for introducing me to Edward Tufte’s work. This very simple pamphlet enhanced much of my thinking: Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions
If I have not made a strong enough argument, I encourage you to read some of Edward Tufte’s work.
When I don’t understand something, I draw a picture. Of course, I am trained to draw process maps, fault tree diagrams, and cause-and-effect diagrams, but sometimes I just freehand a picture based on what is in my head. It doesn’t always make sense, but it becomes a starting point for understanding. And not just my understanding, but a shared understanding that can be aligned around and executed. Great companies know this. Companies with tough problems to solve put whiteboards in their conference rooms and break areas. They encourage their teams to visualize problems. We draw to understand.
For some of you, this may feel obvious. If so, why didn’t the project team in my example recognize that they were missing an image that would help them understand the future state? I don’t know for sure, but I have a theory. In my humble opinion, much of society treats math and science as if they are not creative endeavors. In fact, I think much of our education is taught in a way that suffocates creativity. As if creativity can only exist when it is unhinged from fact, and is therefore an unserious endeavor. We section off creativity into your art class, music, and maybe some writing. Sure, we spend preschool and kindergarten drawing and coloring to improve our physical motor skills, but as we progress, especially on the STEM side, we stuff all of that into a corner, never to be revisited.
“Mathematics is the science of imagination.” –David Bessis
I need math to solve problems, and if David Bessis is right, I also need imagination and creativity to identify and execute solutions. Exploring that imagination requires creative visualizations of things that we don’t fully understand. And through these visualizations, we create understanding not just for ourselves but for the people that we are collaborating with.
As with my project, this is an area that we all need to improve. This needs to be integrated with our formal education system. Our organizations should be full of whiteboards where teams can visualize their thoughts, discuss them, and align their thinking. Yes, thinking is a process and all processes can be visualized. For any new effort, we should start by creating a visual of the future state.
If you are like me and have a project that is running into surprises or missing key ideas, ask yourself: are we missing a visualization? I will bet that you are. Stop now and build it before you find yourself catching up on work on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.