sacha chua living an awesome life

Dan Roam (Back of the Napkin; Blah, Blah, Blah) was in Toronto yesterday to give a talk on visual problem-solving at the Rotman School of Management. I like to think that I was cool and composed during the post-talk book-signing, but really, the only reason I didn’t get a picture with him was because I was too busy trying to not hyperventilate about the fact that he recognized me from Twitter and said he liked my work. =)

I did ask him to sign this sketchnote, though.

“Whoever best describes the problem is the most likely to fix it.” That reminds me of SPI 046: Building a Lucrative Business with No Ideas, No Expertise & No Money with Dane Maxwell, a Smart Passive Income podcast that dove deeper into defining problems and building businesses around them. Nugget from that one: “If you can define the problem better than your target customer, then they will assume you have the solution.”

Check out my other sketchnotes for one-page summaries of business and technology talks. Look at Rotman’s upcoming events calendar for other cool speakers!

Text from the sketchnote, to simplify searching:

Whoever best describes the problem is the most likely to fix it.

Say more with less: ideas -> pictures (easy to share, easy to act on)

Stories:

• Best – Boeing: built in 17 countries; challenge: languages; solution: all communication is visual
• Worst – Politics: challenges: intentional obfuscation, outcome is so many words
• 1974 Dr. Arthur Laffer – taxes; If you reduce taxes, you might increase revenue. Napkin sketch.

We can solve our problems with pictures. Simple drawing is okay. 75% of brain = vision. We are highly visual people. But we teach linear, verbal thinking in school!

detail + big picture. We think detail is intelligence. Power on your visual operating system. You can recognize ~100% after delay. You can figure out time from simple images. Our memory uses images and then we translate

The six ways we see:

• who/what: portrait
• how much: chart
• where: map (how things fit, what’s missing)
• when: timeline; also, motion
• how: flowchart
• why: equation (now + change = new)

Maybe it’s enough to draw 6 simple pictures

Drawing – you don’t have to remember anything!

Why visual thinking? Run away from death by Powerpoint.

Tools: Tablet PC (can use mouse as well), PowerPoint – pen tool

Wong-Baker pain scale; maps: spatial relationships; time: we recognize the when through the change in the where in the what.

Update: Watch the videos / view the slides!

Sketchnotes from all the talks at Lean Startup Day 2012 (MaRSDD local content in Toronto + livestreamed talks from San Francisco!)

You can view or copy these notes from Dropbox or browse through the gallery below. Feel free to share the images under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence!

[Show as slideshow]

What Does It Mean to be Lean? (part 1) - a panel with Andy Yang, Janice Diner, Zak Homuth, and Satish Kanwar

What Does It Mean to be Lean? (part 2) - a panel with Chris Eben, Devon Galloway, Jared Gordon, and Mark Zimmerman

Lean Workshop

Startup Demos

Simulcast 01: Lean Government, Running Short Experiments During a Long Product Cycle

Simulcast 02: Ten Ways to Get Out of the Building, Innovation Accounting

Simulcast 03: Lean Startup at GE, Prototyping to Validate a Big Idea

Simulcast 04: Fast, Cheap, and In Control, I (Heart) Ugly

Simulcast 05: Secrets of Rapid Mobile App Development

Simulcast 06: On the Way to Lean Startup: Curvy and Working it Out, Failure is Great & Other Myths about Adopting Lean Startup

Simulcast 07: How Engineers Embrace Lean Startup

Simulcast 08: We Went to West Africa and Learned Our Key Assumptions Were Wrong, Moving Fast While Caring about Design at Hipmunk

Simulcast 09: Testing MVPs with Crowdfunding, Making Decisions by Ignoring Sales Metrics, Lean Content: Testing Marketing Copy

Simulcast 10: 10,000 Startups (Steve Blank)

Simulcast 11: Running a Lean Startup Sales Process, Bonfire of the Vanity Metrics

Simulcast 12: Innovation Accounting in Practice, Lean Marketing

Simulcast 13: How to Run a 5 Whys, The Challenge of Maintaining Disrupting Innovation When You Meet Success

Simulcast 14: Creating a Culture of Experimentation

Simulcast 15: One Year Later: Dropbox Answers Your Questions, Making the Call on a Platform Pivot

Simulcast 16: One Year Later: Lessons from Votizen, What I Learned: A Report From the Weekend Winner

Simulcast 17: A Conversation with Marc Andreessen

What people said:

Sacha really brings events to life RT @marsdd: Sketchnotes by @sachac Lean Startup Day, Dec 3, 2012 ow.ly/fQq9V

— Sandi Jones (@followsandi) December 5, 2012

Great work!!! RT @marscommons: Hey @ericries @ashmaurya ck out @sachac ‘s sketchnotes of ALL the talks @leanstartup db.tt/7RGBi68V

— Ignacio Castro (@icastrocr) December 6, 2012

Check out this awesome deck from MaRS Lean Startup Day, Dec 3, 2012 by @sachac on @slideshare slideshare.net/sachac/sketchn…

— Mihnea Stoian (@mihneastoian) December 5, 2012

Interested in Lean Startup? Check out the Lean Startup Conference or my other sketchnotes too. Other notes from around the Web: community notes, Trevor Lohrbeer.

Visual learner? Check out my other sketchnotes and visual book notes!

Event organizer or conference organizer? I’d love to help you help your attendees remember and share key points. Talk to me about sketchnoting your next event!

Sketchnotes from today’s pitch afternoon – 62 2-minute pitches from the different teams in Angel Hack Toronto. Lots of great stuff! Feel free to share these visual summaries under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

See the AngelHack Toronto presentation list for links to short descriptions.

Like this? Check out my other sketchnotes for business- and technology-related visual summaries. Want me to draw for you? Get in touch!

Nolin LeChasseur of Brainrider shared these 5 key elements of a B2B content marketing strategy:

1. Prioritize measurable objectives
2. Articulate the business you’re in using customer terms
3. Profile target customer segments
4. Identify content that’s working now
5. Develop content aligned with what your customer wants to know

Click on the image to see a larger version.

For more details, check out the slides and the video of a previous talk!

Like this? Check out my other sketchnotes for business- and technology-related visual summaries. Want me to draw for you? Get in touch!

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Got an awesome idea? Every month, the Awesome Foundation Toronto trustees get together and award $1,000 in a brown paper bag to the coolest idea and team!

Congratulations to Lovecraft TO – good luck with your project.

Check out Awesome Foundation Toronto or my other sketchnotes!

This talk is part of the free MaRS Entrepreneurship 101 series (webcast and in-person session every Wednesday). Feel free to share this! You can credit it as (c) 2012 Sacha Chua under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada licence. Click on the image for a larger version of sketchnotes.

Check out my other ENT101 sketchnotes, or other sketchnotes and visual book notes!

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This video doesn’t cover everything – there’s a gap in the middle when we started painting. I have to figure out how to reliably do time lapses with my phone or computer. =) This was fun, though!

Nathan Monk and Jennifer Marron reached out to me with this cool idea – in addition to sketchnoting Lean Startup Day at MarsDD on Dec 3, why not sketchnote the banner as well? I told them I’d never worked on anything that big, but they were up for the experiment and I was too. They rounded up canvas and paint, booked the boardroom, and away we went.

I started by drafting possible layouts using pencil and paper. They suggested some ideas to feature on the banner, and I added quick sketchnotes: an unfinished robot for the minimum viable product, arrows for “pivot or persevere”, and so on. I copied key elements of the first draft onto a second draft, and that was good to go.

Based on the proportions of the paper, we cut the canvas to roughly 68” by 120”. Coming from years of sketchnoting on a laptop screen (and doing the occasional blackboard/easel pad), it was certainly quite a new experience! It was so tall that I had to stand on a chair to reach parts of it. Glad to see that the proportion lessons I’d taken in art class paid off, though – I found it easy to work with the large space.

We started by taping the canvas to the wall and chalking outlines. I used my measuring tape to find the center and scribe a circle around it (hooray for high school geometry!). Then I lightly chalked the outlines of the MaRS logo and the sketchnoted quotes while Nathan and Jennifer chalked in the partner logos.

After chalking the layout, we stepped back to see what it looked like. It looked great! Then the duct tape gave way (canvas is heavy!), and we unanimously decided to move it to the boardroom table for the actual painting. If it collapsed that way while painting, we’d suddenly have an abstract art piece on our hands! We spread plastic wrap all over the boardroom table and the floor, set out the paints, and got going.

While Jennifer focused on the partner logos, I painted the MaRS logo, the Lean Startup Day arrows around it, and the sketchnote-style concepts surrounding the logo. We completed the banner in around 4 hours – about 1.5 hours to design and chalk it, and 2.5 hours to fill everything in with paint and touch up with white to cover up mistakes. The materials cost less than $200 – maybe $150? – and that was with way more paint than we needed, since none of us had any idea what to work at that size. I couldn’t get a good picture of it, but once it’s up on Dec 3, I’ll be sure to.

That was fun!

Lessons learned:

• It’s okay to not get things exactly right, so don’t worry about not having a projector or other tools.
• Chalk lightly and with a light colour so that it’s easy to brush off mistakes!
• Have lots of small brushes on hand for detail work.
• A little paint goes a long way.
• So does a sewing tape measure.
• White (or something close to your background colour) makes a great cover-up.