Picture This

I'm conscious that I don't put up many pictures here. It is partially a desire to keep the site clean, clear, and lightning-fast. But it is also partially because it simply takes much longer to draw an original idea than to write an original idea. The exception is if you are a professional artist whose work has intrinsic value because of what it is rather than what it represents. I am not a professional artist.

But I always draw original pictures in my consulting work. It requires a particular skill that I have noted before. The skill to take a seemingly endless spiel of marketing requirements, spouted in broadly sequential yet apparently random fashion, then transfom that into a diagram. It is a skill that is essential for anyone who needs to translate business objectives into real deliverables, in fact for any technology or process improvement.

If you work in office environments, you'll recognise the sort of people who can't help but draw boxes and arrows after every few minutes of conversation. The sort of people who visualise bits and bytes flowing across disks and wires.

So I know a picture can be worth a thousand words. But I try to keep to a hundred.