Aside from that, I have to contest the statement from one commenter that “visual representations of complex ideas are far superior to written forms.” Not necessarily. I’ve certainly seen my share of incomprehensible diagrams that the “artist” had to spend an hour explaining. To purloin a famous old saying about the truth, crisp explanatory prose can get you halfway across the world while a diagram is still putting on its pants.

But that’s just me. I now have on my list to write a blog post about the old saw that a picture is worth 1,000 words. You can imagine my stance on that.

White boards! White boards! White boards!

I too find that the boxes and line approach can be very powerful to quickly communicate relationships and dependencies – I also believe that using a visual approach is more engaging, especially during planning and prototyping sessions.

I have a post along this same vein – using the power of three to get complicated points communicated quickly and effectively (visual included, of course!).

http://stantonmjones.com/2009/11/09/the-power-of-three

Keep up the terrific posts!

Indeed my compulsion has driven me to by a reasonably large one for my own home office. Whenever colleagues visit my home they ask “do you work at home?” The answer is yes, but not on “work work” but rather “personal work”. Basics such as writing the hit-list for cleaning the house, brainstorming the items I need to pack for my next holiday, etc.

Most people seem to think of whiteboards as an instrument of torture used during seminars, alongside their partners in crime, the flipchart (which are never as satisfying – there’s something fun about being able to “edit” with by wiping a finger)

In fact this post is most prescient, as I was thinking at work yesterday, that most people now seem to automatically produce slide decks for each and every meeting, when an “interactive session” with a whiteboard would be more appropriate and definitely more stimulating.

Whiteboard lovers of the world unite, unleash thy markers and prepare to show the world that the boardmarker is mightier than the mouse!

Given that approx 65 percent of the population are visual learners, I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that so many of us use visual methods, like whiteboards to communicate – either because it comes naturally to us, or because we have found it an effective way to communicate with others.

Great post!

@Robby – These are very much transient things. If we happen to come up with a drawing worth keeping, we’ll photograph it with our phone and email it around. Really useful items get turned into Visio or PowerPoint slides. But the idea of converting them (let alone creating them!) in a formal manner using those tools seems overwhelmingly difficult.

However, I’m always concerned when business leaders—especially CIOs—don’t explicitly mention their use of the industry standard schematic languages like UML and BPMN. Just drawing boxes and arrows may help you to verbalize your ideas, but they are not much help beyond the moment of conversation if they are not drawn using a standard format.