Hold Their Attention with Dynamic Cycling

Most presenters are losers: they gradually lose most of their audience. In addition to losing them, many presenters also try to add psychic trauma with text-laden PowerPoint or Keynote slides . . . read in a monotone voice . . . in dimly lighted rooms. Fading yet?

Dynamic cycling saves your presentations by holding your audience’s attention. Dynamic: shift concepts and trigger emotions. Cycling: 6 to 10 minute periods. With dynamic cycling you move from concept to concept every 6 to10 minutes with something in between that triggers emotion in your audience. This allows for 7 to 9 concepts per hour.

Our brains naturally pay close attention to new or surprising information. It helps us avoiding danger and learn. We also need to be this way simply to function. You weren’t paying attention to your shirt until I mentioned it. Paying close attention to everything would paralyze us with too much sensory information. The dynamic part of dynamic cycling taps into these attention-focusing brain systems.

Connecting your concept transitions to emotions makes them memorable. It did us no good being able to pay attention to dangerous and tasty things if we forgot about them. Our brains store content linked to emotion longer and with greater ease.

Use dynamic cycling to hold your audience. Introduce a new concept tied to emotion every 6 to 10 minutes and your audience will stick with you, remember more, understand better, and be more likely to engage with what you’ve shared.

Multitasking Myths

You, me, and everyone we know cannot multitask. Yes, it is a myth.

People may appear to be doing may tasks at the same time, but our brains can only pay attention to one thing at a time. When someone is simultaneously on the phone, listening to music, sending instant messages, checking email, and writing a report they are not multitasking. They are sequentially switching their attention from one task to the next very rapidly, and this would be fine but for some nasty consequences.

1. Interruptions cause errors and waste time. Interruptions force your brain to jettison one set of task-related rules for another and scrap your working memory. It is what generates that frustrating shoot-where-was-I feeling when you’ve been interrupted in the middle of writing a paragraph or planning a product launch. Give yourself blocks of time that are interruption free (hide if you have to). You’ll get things done, faster, and with fewer errors.

2. Good Decisions Require Focus. Working memory is what we use to hold information while we analyze it. Visual thinking tools free up, and in a way expand, working memory by holding some of this information. Spreading working memory across several tasks means we can consider less information per task during the analysis that leads to good decisions.

3. Memory requires attention. Attention, especially when combined with strong emotion, helps our brains to decide what to store in long-term memory. If you’re working on something you’ll need to remember, disconnect and focus on it.

4. Unfamiliar tasks require full attention. Much of what happens in the brain involves pattern recognition. Unfamiliar tasks demand more attention and consideration because we don’t have many patterns to draw from memory and adapt to the task at hand. Problem solving and other creative activities transform familiar tasks to unfamiliar tasks.

Solutions: Organize tasks for one-at-a-time completion. Turn down the world and minimize interruptions by switching off programs, devices, and, um, people unrelated to your task. Novel tasks need more of your brain so save your rapid sequential attention switching — misnamed multitasking — for familiar tasks where completion time and error rates don’t concern you (a fairly short list when you think about it).

Getting the most out of your Visual Thinking sketches and tools

Sketches and images. You have sketchbooks or notepads full of idea maps, visual explanations, process diagrams, grid maps, and all manner of visual thinking sketches. You have pictures of you whiteboard wizardry, graphic recordings, and collaborative adventures with sticky notes. Great.

Making them improved your understanding, solution, and/or your ability to share with others. What now? How do you get the most of visual thinking tools you’ve created?

Part of the design thinking process is constantly reviewing your ideas and making improvements and generating new ideas. You can tape your sketches and images to the wall, stick them to your whiteboard, or make a project space using rolls of poster-size paper. You can review a few visual thinking sketches you’ve done each morning to jump-start your day. A mix of these process-related techniques will keep you actively creating and solving problems in the background.

What if you have 50 sketches and images in your catalog? Or 500? Or 5000? Many will contain ideas, questions, or creations you don’t want to forget. Most people don’t have space to put up 5000 items. If you travel, you’d often leave them behind. You need a portable solution, and preferably one that is flexible and automates when you see your sketches and images.

The Anki Solution. Anki is a cross-platform, open-source software program that is very popular with language learners. Anki uses a spaced-repetition algorithm show you a flashcard just when you are likely to forget about it. Repetition helps us remember, but it turns out that we form stronger memories if we are exposed to something just when we are beginning to forget about it. Anki keeps track of the forgetting curve for each card in a subject deck and you can have multiple decks.

Anki works just as well with images as it does with words. Scan your visual thinking sketches. Size the images to about 1000 pixels wide. Set up a deck in Anki. Drop your visual thinking sketch scans and pictures in, and let Anki do the rest. Add a piece of scheduling software (like Scheduler for the Mac OS or Windows Task Scheduler) to automatically schedule Anki launches, and you’ve have a great design and visual thinking software solution running quietly in the background.

Combining Anki with your visual thinking sketches and images helps you remember important ideas, keeps your creative and problem solving processes active, and leaves you free to focus on new challenges and ideas.

What is Visual Thinking? (definition 1.0)

Visual thinking, broadly defined, is the use and exploration of images as tools for communication, understanding, creativity, problem solving, and explanations.

Foundation. Visual thinking is founded on our ways of seeing the world. Studying visual perception, neuroscience, color theory, graphic design, media theory, visual storytelling, and information design allows visual thinking practitioners to use and create visual thinking tools built from our natural ways of understanding the visual world around us.

Visual thinking practitioners. Graphic facilitators, graphic recorders, information designers, presentation designers, innovation and creativity facilitators, trainers, teachers, communication consultants, business consultants and coaches, teachers, . . . anyone who systematically uses visual representations to teach, understand, and explain.

Visual thinking tools. There are as many visual thinking tools as there are people who use them. Every person has their own way of seeing and invariably moulds the visual thinking tool according. Common visual thinking tools include idea maps, process maps, transaction maps, flow charts, timelines, schematics, diagrams, many wonderful grids, graphic recording, sticky note clustering and arranging, whiteboard drawings, sketches, kinesthetic modeling, prototyping, and many others.

This is visual thinking and this is not visual thinking. At its core, visual thinking involves connecting people with their personal ways of seeing, understanding and explaining.

Helvetica: Font, Film, Hegimon?

What does Helvetica, the typeface and font, have to do with communication? Well, Helvetica is everywhere. Billboards, logos, print ads and the internet are awash in Helvetica. When the Hass Type Foundry in Switzerland gave us Helvetica in 1957, they had no idea that advertising and personal computing would make it ubiquitous in advertising and design.

Helvetica, a documentary film by Gary Hustwit, brings together typographers and graphic designers from around the world in a discussion about Helvetica’s influence on how we communicate. Helvetica is the preferred typeface for governments and corporations. It communicates a clean, friendly authority. Helvetica is the typeface of gentle command and firm request. Most designers respect its perfection and balance, but some see it as the design world’s fast food.

Hustwit’s film wonderfully introduces the power of type. Hustwit manages to bring together three dramatically different designers in the same film: Erik Spiekermann, the designer of the Meta typeface; David Carson, who gave Ray Gun Magazine the signature style adopted by the grunge design movement; and Massimo Vignelli, a rather minimalist Italian designer who gave American Airlines its timeless logo.

Hustwit’s Helvetica shows designers talking about how type affects meaning. Helvetica offers an enjoyable way to learn about how type choices can strengthen or weaken your communications.

Patterns, Prediction and Visual Thinking

Jeff Hawkins is better known for giving us Palm Computing, but he is also pushing the boundaries of neuroscience.  His book, On Intelligence, describes his memory-prediction theory of intelligence and posits that intelligence is fundamentally predictive.  The patterns and sequences of information rushing in through our senses are understood and used based on our constantly making predictions and testing them against our model of the world comprised of stored patterns and sequences.

Many visual thinking techniques focus on revealing patterns and tapping into our innate pattern completion systems.  I’m looking to neuroscience to develop and validate visual thinking tools.  Reducing the time and effort individuals and organizations need to see patterns, means they are able to tackle tougher problems in less time.

Finding a solution to a problem is literally finding a pattern in the world or a stored pattern in your cortex that is analogous to the problem you are working on.  If you are stuck on a problem, the memory-prediction model suggests that you should find different ways to look at it to increase the likelihood of seeing an analogy with past experience. p.189

Hawkins’ work, though not directly related to visual thinking, suggests that creativity and problem solving involves working with analogies to patterns we have learned or are experiencing.  Visual thinking tools can make patterns easier to reveal and experiment with.

Welcome to Better Thinking

Better Thinking is where Fluid Hive shares information about design thinking, visual thinking and communication.

We’ll post book reviews, tips, images, event suggestions, and other information for people interested in learning more about how design processes and visual thinking and communication techniques enhance thinking, creativity, problem solving, and explanations.

Cheers.