Black Pen, Yellow Pen, Red Pen:

• The garage sale principle: Everything looks different when we can see it all at once. 
• Regardless of how well organized all the stuff in our garage may be, laying everything out on tables in the light of day yields a completely new perspective on it all. The s...

1. Collect everything we can to look at—the more the better.

2. Have a place where we can lay out everything and really look at it all, side by side. 

3. Always define a basic coordinate system to give us clear orientation and position.

4. Find ways to cut ruthlessly from everyt...

The SQVID is just a series of five questions that we walk our initial idea through in order to bring it to visual clarity and to refine its focus.

• QUESTION 1: SIMPLE OR ELABORATE? 
• QUESTION 2: QUALITY OR QUANTITY? 
• QUESTION 3: V...

• The human brain is a remarkable problem-solving device: More often than not, we already know the solution to our problem—usually because we’ve seen it somewhere before—but it’s locked away just out of grasp.
• When we see our problem mapped out in front of us pictorial...

1. Who and what ?

2. How much ?

3. When ? 

4. Where ?

5. How ?

6. Why ? 

The 6 W’s are used as coordinates for almost every descriptive picture we’re likely to...

1. First take a pen and a paper (/napkin), draw a circle and label it with me or health or business or whatever.
2. Then, ask the 6 questions (6W) in proper order for your problem then draw with imagination 💭 and label it . Once you finish all 6 questions , you get clarity about your prob...

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

The point of a good picture isn’t to eliminate words; it’s to replace as many as possible so that the words we do use are the important ones. So as you work through your picture, make a point of describing—even if it’s only to yourself...

• Strategic, financial, operational, conceptual, personal, and emotional: It doesn’t matter the nature of the problem we face—if we can imagine it, we can draw it.
• By drawing it we will see otherwise invisible aspects, and potential solutions will emerge.
• Drawing our problem is...

1. a PORTRAIT for a “who” or “what” problem;
2. a CHART for a “how much” problem;
3. a MAP for a “where” problem;
4. a TIMELINE for a “when” problem;
5. a FLOWCHART for a “how” problem; or