Listen: Visual Thinking with Yuri Malishenko

Yuri Malishenko runs a podcast called Visual Thinking — so naturally, I was delighted to join him as a guest. He's a practitioner himself, and it showed. This was a conversation between people who already speak the same language.

We covered a lot of ground. Here are a few highlights: 

On how The Idea Shapers came to be:

I was in Auckland at 4am, wide awake from a vivid dream that I was laying out a book. I could feel how successful it was. I lay there thinking: I guess I'm writing a book.

That afternoon, I went through a few rounds of the same argument with myself: I want to write the book about visual thinking for everyone, but I really should write the book on graphic facilitation. I want to write the book for everyone, but I really should...

Okay. I'll write the graphic facilitation book first.

The Graphic Facilitator's Guide was the book I had to get out of the way. The Idea Shapers is the book I was put on the planet to write.

On listening:

There is a massive amount of cues in speech that help you see how close an idea is, how far away an idea is, whether it's the opposite idea. When somebody says "to build on that" versus "I want to completely switch gears" — those are all spatial cues that tell you exactly how the next point fits with the previous one. Tune into those transitions.

On comparing yourself to others:

Don't compare your insides to somebody else's outsides.

And the flip side: don't compare somebody else's finished product to your own personal process. You look at someone's portfolio and you have no idea how that image was created. It's probably the tiniest sliver of the work they actually do. Every day of the week, I'm going to recommend focusing on process over product — because that's how we get really good stuff done.

We also got into index cards, the pattern language of architecture as the model behind The Idea Shapers, drawing influences (La Linea and the Muppets), and what "snazzy" means and why it's hard to translate.