Chapter 7
Drawing on Graphics for Thinking
IN THIS CHAPTER
Mapping ideas with charts
Seeing graphical tools in action
Discovering powerful tools for thinking
It’s lucky that there are more ways to try to understand things than by using reason alone. The human mind is actually very good at grasping complex relationships expressed in pictures and diagrams, for example. But how do you get an issue usually addressed in words and sentences to become one expressed graphically? This chapter is about how to do exactly that — and to draw upon maybe unsuspected powers lurking within you!
Take “mind maps” and other kinds of concept charts to start with. These extract ideas from your head and turn them into something visible and structured. Sounds good, right? Well, they are, but here’s the catch: Although you can dash off the simplest charts fairly effortlessly, the more useful ones require a lot of thinking. Not only that, but they require a lot of different kinds of thinking. Hence the huge difference between a good chart, a useful chart, and a bad one that sheds no light at all. We all know this from dashed-off newspaper or TV news graphics.
In this chapter, you not only find out how to ...
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