I once learned that Alfred Hitchcock used to sketch on storyboards to pre-visualize the shots of his movies. What if I could apply cartooning and storyboarding techniques for my Zen-style presentations? With acceptable results, I thought, I could use those sketches as first-class citizens and incorporate them in my slides. Can you imagine the possibilities? No more frenetic searches for decent stock images, guaranteed originality and unlimited possibilities for further improvement.
This is one of the super crazy “what if” scenarios that I played in my head for quite some time but never had the courage to try – until recently.
Ladies and gents, I’m proud to unveil the making-of The Rise of the Lean Machine, a presentation that I just premiered at the excellent Lean & Kanban 2010 conference in Antwerp.

As many of you know, I’ve been obsessed about visual storytelling for many years. I developed a pretty good process to structure a story-driven presentation, borrowing techniques from screenwriting and creative nonfiction. As my Crafting Outstanding Presentations illustrates, Story, above everything else, is the main device that I use to render dry information memorable.
With all that focus on the power of Story, however, I never anticipated I could take my script further and create the kind of artwork you saw above, particularly at the crazy fast pace I had to deliver it. Heck, even my mum was as surprised as I was.

It all started a couple of years ago when I decided to pick up a new hobby: drawing cartoons. Inspired and guided by Robin Hall’s excellent “The Cartoonist Workbook”, I soon learned how to turn my scribbles into something believable. I even bought myself a beautiful (and expensive) Wacom Cintiq 12WX to draw and color directly on screen. I can safely say that I could easily match the artwork that you see in typical cartoon strips in newspapers. You need tons of wit to succeed in that business, but that wasn’t my goal. Creating cartoons was relaxing, fun and… easy! So easy, in fact, that I’m almost certain that anyone can do it. All you need is that book, practice and simple observation.

But it wasn’t until I picked “Visualizing Ideas” and “The Storyboard Design Course” that I began to think that I could eventually apply those techniques for my presentations. I was daydreaming, however. Personal and professional events – some with catastrophic consequences – forced me to re-assess my priorities. My beloved cintiq quickly started to collect dust.

Fast forward to recent times.
I committed to present the Rise of the Lean Machine at the conference in Belgium because I had a genuinely good story to tell – a story that deserved to be told right. But all I had were vivid episodes which I captured by instinctively filling my whiteboard with post-its covered with scribbles rather than words. Could I translate them into comic art? It was a nice thought, but could I finish on time for the conference? Time was tight, so I run a quick feasibility experiment.

Embarrassingly, it took me almost 2 days to complete the first drawing. Using a photo as loose reference, I sketched “It was a dark night in Dublin” on my tablet and painstakingly colored it. At school I did quite a bit of technical drawings, so I have no problem designing inanimate objects in perspective. But this time I wanted to add strong cinematic drama: bend the horizon, exaggerate the perspective, curve the buildings, choose a dark palette, hint at details with few color strokes. It was a completely new style for me altogether.
I published that first picture on my flickr account for my own inspiration. I remember telling my wife, Irene: “I love it, but there is no way I can do 70 slides like that, there is just not enough time”. “Can you do only the key frames?,” she replied. “I don’t know. On the narrative side, I still need to work out the essential plot of the story”.

I didn’t know what to do and I was really worried. I posed a worthy challenge, but I was simply running out of time. My rational brain knew I couldn’t do it, my heart was telling I had to. You could cut the tension with a knife.

Our baby Matteo was born last year. We never had a break since. It might appear irrational, but despite the time bomb I was sitting on, we decided to put family first and go on a last-minute holiday break. Three weeks before the conference, I still had to tighten the structure of the story – something I knew I could do in a sunny Spanish island. As for the pictures, I just gave up on the whole idea of drawing them.

Well… I almost gave up.
Surrounded by Mediterranean pine trees facing a beautiful sandy beach, I started sketching images on a plain notepad. I sketched for 2-3 hours a day using a simple pencil, a sharpener and an eraser. Damn, I needed a ruler too! At the end of the week, I had quite a bit of work done – enough to let me believe that, perhaps, I could actually pull it off.

On my return at home I scanned each image and imported it on a 1600x1200px canvas in ArtRage Studio Pro. Then, using my tablet, I traced all the edges with a (virtual) ink pen. I don’t have a defined technique for coloring, but I generally color-block shapes first and then add light and shadows. I just pick one or more sources of light and give depth to shapes by coloring over the existing texture.

Frankly, my technique is instinctive and I’m only at the beginning of this journey.
As I always do when I’m under pressure, I set up a personal Kanban board with a simple TO DO, DOING(1), DONE workflow and 48 minutes timeboxes (12 minutes break) to work non-stop all day long. I honestly didn’t think I was going to finish on time, so I reduced the scope as I went along. I kept thinking about the conference, saying to myself “it’s only an hour, it’s only an hour”. I tweaked the story and slides until the last minute. There are a few slides with bullet points that I would like to rework, some images I would like to include, some sentences that I would like to clean up, some concepts I would like to further highlight (e.g. the role of Lean Enterprise Architecture). But hey, I had to constantly remind myself that there is a difference between being a perfectionist and an achiever.

The presentation has been an instant success. I received a lot of praise for the content, the story and the artwork. I paid a huge price too, however. Beside the sleepless nights during those frenetic 2 weeks, I had to decline working on a sizable business opportunity with an unmovable first deadline. That, my friends, hurt.

Was all this worth it? I don’t know.
But time, for sure, will tell.
Tick… Tock… Tick… Tock…

As promised, I put my slides on Slideshare. If you haven’t had a chance to attend, at least you could get a fair idea of what the session was all about. Let me know what you think! Don’t be fooled however, the slides are just a tiny part of the whole story.

In my exploration of how to design a better presentation, I used key books such as Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points. I loved the ideas and approach of the first, the Hollywood-style methodology of the latter.
In my quest, I also came across Made to Stick, an eye-opener book which gives amazing examples of how simple, unexpected, concrete, credible and emotional stories can make ideas memorable.

So, what is this new presentation style about? While PowerPoint has been fundamentally the same for almost 20 years, our use of it is beginning to change. Slides are finally becoming more visual and essential, with a renewed appreciation of how people learn. I am particularly interested in the focus on stories and movie structures to make our messages more compelling.

It’s a fascinating idea isn’t it? In fact, I want to develop it further. Content matters more than ever. Pretty pictures that don’t carry a compelling story are just (annoying) pretty pictures.

In preparation for my next presentation, I just received 7 books on screen writing and more are on the way (speed-reading is handy, isn’t it?). No, I won’t be the next Stephen Spielberg and I don’t see myself walking down a red-carpet event any time soon. But I want to learn as much as I can from that industry to be better at mine. My challenge will be to present a potentially dense technical topic in a dramatic and captivating fashion. Who said it is going to be easy? It will be my pet project for my next few months, 48 minutes at a time.

Based on my direct experience, I offered some concrete suggestions of how to revert seemingly impossible (but common) situations in IT projects using a combination of agility, effective communication and deliberate creativity. All of these are skills that I’m firmly convinced we can learn and improve upon, and I was committed to do my best to push the boundaries and bring the message across.

What can I say? The feedback has been absolutely tremendous, both on the core message and delivery style. I knew I had prepared something good, but boy, the response went far beyond my best expectations. I will follow Tom Raftery‘s excellent advice and publish my slides on slideshare in a few weeks, right after my next presentation.

I will indeed repeat my session here in Ireland at the DDD Community Event in Galway on Saturday May 3rd. If you happen to be around, you may consider coming over and join the action; there are plenty of interesting sessions, the event is totally free and you can register here.

At the Swedish event, there were lots of speakers from ThoughtWorks, including my good friend Dan North who, a few hours before my turn, helped me refining a couple of messages I wanted to convey on Behaviour-Driven Development.

I’ve also been really privileged to meet ThoughtWorks’ founder and chairman, Roy Singham, at dinner. His fervour, values and clarity of intent are simply remarkable and totally explain why ThoughtWorks is such a unique and respected consultancy company all around the world. He confirmed that he is seriously considering opening an office in Sweden within this year, an opportunity that the best talents in Sweden should not miss!

There would be so much more to say about the event and the stories behind the new and old friends I met, but unfortunately I just exhausted my small quota of writing energy! Let me conclude by saying that the event has been a great success and was extremely well organized by Cornerstone. I’m really, really delighted that InnerWorkings has such a good partnership with Cornerstone in Sweden. Well done guys!

Ultimately, the way we see the world affects the way we logically reason about it.

Imagine a team of developers and a customer discussing what to do, using agile stories as their starting point. I use the term “customer” to describe the role of the domain expert who prioritizes stories and can clarify what problems a new system is supposed to resolve. Ideally, the customer knows precisely what to program and the team knows exactly how. More realistically, however, requirements evolve both as the team better appreciates the nuances of the business domain and the customer realizes the possibilities and constraints.

But what would happen if both the customer and the development team had a truly open mind and a willingness to be wrong? What solutions would they come up with if they all had a creative attitude and used a language designed to help them restructure their thoughts? I’m suggesting a catalog of practical refactorings and patterns that would add some rigor to anyone’s thinking process!

The great creativity masters can teach us very relevant lessons in this context. Edward De Bono’s “Serious Creativity” book, for example, contains lots of insights and sets the foundation of the first thinking pattern I’m going to introduce:

Extract Concept

Motivation

Extract Concept is one of the most regular techniques I use to deliberately increase my ability to generate alternatives. In fact, it is so basic that, at first glance, it might even seem too obvious. But don’t be fooled. Its mechanism taps into our human talents of abstract thinking, and it is a good step towards sharpening our creativity skills in a disciplined way.

Perhaps the most important benefit is that it forces me to look for alternatives even when I’m fairly confident that the first idea I have is good enough: I’d ask questions such as “this is a way of doing what?” and “how else can this be achieved?” This attitude is particularly important as I know that if I blindly trust my first instincts I may miss tremendous opportunities.

Alternatives must have a reference point: I’d ask “alternatives with reference to what?” A new concept becomes a fresh reference point that can somewhat change my perspective and lead to further ideas.

Mechanics

1. Define the objective. It might be general or specific, but make sure that you are very clear about what you are focusing on!
2. Identify one or more ideas relevant to such objective.
3. For each of those ideas, extract a broader concept by asking: “this is a way of doing what?“
4. See how each concept can trigger further alternatives by asking: “how else can this be achieved?“
5. If applicable, find further alternatives by extracting an even broader concept (a direction) from one or more existing concepts.

Example

• I start defining the problem: “Provide useful help on our website”.
• I quickly identify as many relevant ideas as I can. In this case is pretty easy to get a good few of those, but let’s pick 2 of them for simplicity sake:
  • Add “?” icon beside potentially confusing fields to open a popup dialog
  • Provide Email address

• For each of those ideas, I extract one or more concepts:
  • Using the “?” icon, is a way of answering questions on the same page they arise
  • An email could be seen as a form of human interaction when visitors can’t find the help they need.

• Using each concept, I can now identify more alternatives:
  • The concept “Answer questions on the same page they arise” leads me to the following ideas:
    • Use the “?” icon to inline-expand helpful hints
    • Add permanent “why?” sections beside each form section
    • Add (light-grey) instructive text directly inside each field (that disappears when the visitor clicks on a field)
    • Add help search section within page
    • Add inline validation (to show error messages within the form before the visitor has the opportunity to click the button that submits the form data
    • …
  • The concept “human interaction” helps me finding further alternatives:
    • Phone us (visitor calls us)
    • We phone you (visitor gives us his/her number, we call)
    • Forums (let visitors help themselves)
    • Chat
    • …

My talk is titled “Passionate Teams and Cooperative Customers: Agile tales of creative customer communication“. I have the abstract here for your convenience:

“In this session, Claudio presents stories of effective collaboration, thinking tools and valuable insights that can transform “incompetent” customers and “arrogant” teams into unstoppable forces.

We are getting so used to complexity that we no longer notice it. To bring simplicity to our software however, we need to communicate effectively with our customers, distill their knowledge and bake it into our domain models. Yet, we focus so much on improving our technical skills that we often offer elaborate solutions to the wrong problems, unprepared to deal with a world where perception is far more important than logic.”

If you happen to be at the conference, make sure you attend my session! I bet you won’t be disappointed .

The list of stars that will join me at the event is, quite frankly, a tad intimidating (see here).

I always wonder about what drives people to speak in public. Is it the genuine spirit of contribution? Perhaps the publicity and recognition that inevitably goes with it? Is it maybe the excitement of being on stage? It’s probably a combination of all of that and more; my biggest reason, however, is to confront my greatest fears: speaking in public is like Freddie Krueger, a pure nightmare becoming real. In fact, it is the preparation and the waiting for the moment of truth that drives me nuts. All my insecurities emerge all of the sudden, my entire body reacts, and I become absurdly anxious. Then again, once on stage, everything changes completely: I’m on a mission, I’m (over)prepared, I just can’t fail.

So, there you go. It is never easy and probably it will never be. I still haven’t won my fears at all, but the past rewarded me with really good memories (like when, a million years ago, I addressed a group of scientists at CERN for a whole week, for example), and the future will surely hold even better ones.

By the way, have you ever considered speaking in public? There is a good chance that your own community would love you to volunteer on a topic you feel passionate about. If you live in Ireland like I do, this is definitely the case. It takes a lot of commitment, but perhaps this year you could try. Just don’t let your fears eat you. People want you to succeed, don’t you know?

You see, those tests may well find out that I’m an idiot, or at least, that I’m not that sharp.
No thanks, in this case I’d rather be a smart coward and influence my destiny in complete ignorance. After all, I can still be “imperfect” and yet make a difference in this world.

Edward de Bono, one of the leading business creativity experts, likes to describe intelligence as the horsepower of a car, our potential. The skill of thinking is then the skill of the driver. A poor driver on a powerful car can still be outperformed by a skilled driver on a humble car.
We may not all have the same IQ, but we can certainly learn to become skilled thinkers.
If I could only remember where I left my car keys

The irony is that highly intelligent people may fall in what Edward calls the intelligence trap: for example, they may be unwilling to take risks for fear of not being right all the time. Or they may be so good at supporting and “sell” their own point of view that they may never find a need for seeking potentially better alternatives. Ouch!
As the French philosopher Alain (Émile Chartier) once said:

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one you have.

I recently found some evidence that IQ and creativity are different in the most unlikely of all places: the Big Brother House (BB8 UK).
Uh? Big Brother? Well, I confess. I usually don’t watch these programs, but this year I’m hooked. The best part is shown on Sunday evening, when a group of psychologists display the result of their weekly experiments on the contestants.

A few weeks ago, Big Brother called each housemate in the diary room and presented them with a simple task. Within one minute, they had to identify things you can and can’t do with a paper clip.
Each of the housemates came up with a bunch of ideas; it was certainly interesting to observe how the constraints of the environment and their condition greatly influenced the answers they gave.

But when 20-years old Brian entered the room, something unexpected happened.

Poorly educated, gullible, goofy and – by his own admission – not one of the brightest people around, Brian quickly identified a rather impressive number of ideas and easily outperformed all his housemates.

As the experts indicated, within the given time constraints, he gave proof of excellent:

• Fluency: the number of meaningful ideas generated
• Flexibility: the number of different categories of relevant responses
• Originality: the statistical rarity of the responses
• Elaboration: the amount of detail in the responses

In conclusion:

• Don’t envy others for their intelligence, because you can be (at least) as creative and as they are.
• Explore the world with a fresh perspective and you’ll soon see things others can’t see.

Along the way, you’ll pick up some serious thinking tools to help boosting your potential.
Like a blacksmith, I’m hand forging those tools for you.
The first one is almost ready, and I’ll hand it to you in my next post!

A few years ago, I suggested to each member of my team to choose a nick name, an inspiring name that would break away from what has been chosen for them by their parents.
I didn’t have a particular reason; it was just for fun.

A co-worker (who later changed his mind and chose to be called Lone Ranger) initially opposed to the idea and argued that “you can’t wake up one day and decide to call yourself, say, Alexander the Great”.
Why not? – I replied.
I thanked him for the really great suggestion, as he had just found my new name!

Alexander was such a formidable icon.
He was an invincible fury who conquered most of the world known to the ancient Greeks.

But there is a different reason why I still use that name to this day.
It is a powerful reminder that you should never be afraid to question the rules and revisit your assumptions, particularly when others say “it can’t be done”.

Many will be surprised to know that my mum is an accomplished and multi-talented artist. She is a French-Italian poet, interpreter, writer, editor. In the past, she has been a painter, a radio DJ, a dancer, an aerobic instructor, and many other things I can’t even remember.

Even if we discount the tiny possibility that my attitude towards creativity may have been genetically determined, my character has been powerfully influenced since early childhood.
In my family, we have always valued originality and worked extremely hard to develop our talents.

Although it might sound widely pretentious to state it here, I know I can be (and I have been) extremely creative.
Unlike my mum, however, I’m not an artist.
I’m a software developer, after all; I’m more technically inclined and definitely a bit rusty on poetry

I hopefully inherited her capability of creating ideas that can bring success in any field and personal life.
The problem with such attitude, however, is that you can only accept it for what it is – it’s not easy to develop a gift, is it?

The truth is that creativity can be learned and developed indeed, and it has nothing to do with intelligence.
Perhaps you knew this already, but I was surprised to make this discovery very recently and by pure coincidence.

Luckily, my motorbike broke.
On my new bus commute to work, I started speed reading creativity books voraciously.
I learned theories and ideas form Edward de Bono, Michael Michalko, Roger von Oech and many others.

I shared some of these findings with my team in our latest muffin morning, and will share them with you here, in my next few posts.
I will present some behaviors, mental models and tools that I found useful to organize thoughts and generate tons of ideas.

My dream is to evolve as a better thinker, to be original, maybe even revolutionary.
And I would love to share and help others to evolve too: my family, friends, coworkers, and, yes, perhaps even you.
I know, it’s just a dream, so please don’t judge me.
We are all allowed dreaming after all, although most of us have long forgotten how to.