This blog summarizes the book titled, “Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work”, written by Dan Roam.

Dan Roam presents his main ideas in three parts. Given the nature of the book, it is best that I summarize the book via visuals rather than words.

The following visual communicates the main idea of the book

We are drowning in blah-blah-blah world which makes us difficult to see the forest from the trees. We need to follow to two pathways, words + visuals to get to our destination. Only words will not help us. It is only when the words are fired up with visual imagery, that we can recognize the main ideas/communicate our ideas.

The intro part of the book has an interesting story about the phenomenal rise of Dr. Seuss cartoon books. As the author narrates, it was an article by John Hersey that inspired a textbook editor to reach out to Dr.Seuss to write a book for kids that combined text and visuals; the result - “The Cat in the Hat”, a book that used 236 words and a ton of visuals. This book changed the way teachers taught, how schools bought texts, how publishers thought about education- and how people connected words and pictures. These books teach us that best way to learn is to reach out to our visual and verbal minds.

Part - I: The Blah-Blahmeter

The first part of the book introduces the reader to blah-blah meter

We are engulfed with words, be it written or spoken, in our lives. Some of the ideas communicated by the words, we immediately get it. But not all. The above visual says that there are many reason why we don’t get it. The tool mentioned in the above visual is meant for us to sieve through the content and categorize them as

  • Blah: The idea might be presented in a complicated fashion
  • Blah Blah : The idea itself is missing and the words are merely trying to showcase something where there isn’t something to talk about
  • Blah Blah Blah: The main intention of the speaker or the writer is to divert attention and pitch a rotten idea

Part - II: If I Draw, Am I Dumb? An Introduction to Visual Thinking

Dan Roam uses fox and humming bird to symbolize verbal thinking and visual thinking. He argues that most of us have spent a lot of time in our lives honing our verbal thinking skills and use it for most part of our thinking. In a sense, there is a skewed proportion in the usage of these thinking skills. Somehow most of us seemed to forgotten, relegated visual thinking in background and do not use it often.

The author makes a case for a balanced approach where visual thinking and verbal thinking can reinforce each other and ultimately help us get out of the blah-blah land.

He introduces the phrase vivid thinking to mean: VIsual Verbal InterDependent

One can accomplish vivid thinking by following three rules

  1. When we say a word, we should draw a picture
  2. If we don’t know which picture to draw, look at the vivid grammar
  3. To make any idea vivid, we turn to the seven vivid essentials

The second part of the book goes in to the various components of vivid grammar

The author tries to map out the verbal grammar elements to the above visual grammar graph, thus making it easy to remember and related both the grammars.

Part - III: The Forest and the Trees

This part of the book introduces the main tools to move from blah blah world to the destination that separates forest and the trees. The author mentions in an easy to remember fashion, by doing an interplay of the words FOREST(Form-Essentials-Recognizable-Evolving-SpanDifferences-Targeted)

Form

The reader is introduced to six vivid quick tricks

The key idea is to engage fox and hummingbird parts of our brain to map various verbal cues to visual cues.

O: Only the Essentials

This is a step where you need to make use of words and visuals in succession, so that you prune all the words and visuals that take up the initial conversation. to a few simple words and visuals that symbolize the essence of the idea. Once this stage is reached, one can expand on the core idea to create more visuals and words so as to communicate the core idea in many ways, expand the core idea in various domains. Unless the core idea is communicated or internalized properly, whatever be the context, the words will overwhelm us and we will forever remain in the blahblah land.

R: Recognizable

This chapter urges the reader to make ideas recognizable so that they take up a greater mind share among the intended audience. Visual metaphors are abundant nature. One should pause, pay attention to these metaphors and use them intelligently in making ideas recognizable

E: Evolving

This chapter talks about the importance of iterating the initial word-visual combination. There are many examples quoted in the chapter that highlights the importance of repeated iteration with the audience playing a part in the evolution of the idea, story, brand, product (you name it)

S: Span Differences

This chapter talks about the importance of exploring different sides of any idea that you might have. Ton of examples of successful ideas show that it is often a combination of two seemingly disparate ideas, that give rise to a hit.

T: Targeted

This chapter talks about the importance of analyzing your intended audience and then working backwards. Knowing the way the audience thinks and their prior assumptions, one can tweak the communication so that all the elements of FOREST can come together in an effective way

Takeaway

The toolkit introduced in this book can be applicable to a wide variety of tasks. Here are some questions to consider ?

  • Once you have read a book, do you think about the core ideas of the book in terms of vivid thinking?
  • Do you use vivid thinking in any of your presentations to your clients, customers, internal teams ?
  • When you come across an idea(most likely in words), do you take some time to reflect on the visual that can go with words ?
  • Do you practice improving your visual skills on a daily basis ?
  • Do you consciously spend time to cull out main ideas from the blah-blah world, and then try to visualize it in your own way?
  • Math symbols are in a way a fantastic means to summarize the way world works. Is there a way you can combine vivid thinking with mathematical symbols ?
  • Have you ever documented your code/software work, using visuals and words ?
  • How often have you taken an situation in extremes ? If so, did it help you in getting a better perspective of the problem ?
  • Noticing the importance of data visuals, how often do you spend time in practicing and developing skills in that area ? Can you look at a data and create a visual in R, Python, Java Script or any of the wonderful visualization packages out there?
  • Do you actively keep track of visuals from books, presentations, articles, that you find inspiring, educative ?

The key idea of the book is that we have not been using visuals in our thinking. We have spent too much time of our lives using words to communicate ideas. There is inherently nothing wrong in that approach but we are not utilizing the other important mode of communication - visual thinking. The book gives interesting examples and introduces a toolkit that one can use to get started in Vivid Thinking. Since the book has a ton of visuals, one can read this book in a short amount of time. Of course, the main idea of the book is blindingly obvious after reading the book.