Presto Sketching

A book to help you think and communicate better with drawing

visual metaphor

Draw more creatively with FLARE

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If you want to find ways to draw topics more creatively, or you feel like you’re in a bit of a rut drawing things the same way all the time, then the FLARE prompts are for you.

How do you draw a person? Or a building? Or a tree? There are lots of ways to draw real-world objects, and we can use curiosity, observation and practice to draw these in satisfying ways.

A group of simple drawings depicting common objects like a lightbulb and cloud

Some simple images of simple real-world objects

But how do you draw more complex and abstract concepts, like ‘innovation’, ‘strategy’, or ‘diversity’? It’s much harder, isn’t it?

A couple of years ago, Axelle Vanquaillie (a masterful visual practitioner, facilitator and leadership coach, and owner of the company Visual Harvesting) and I were discussing how to help people in our training workshops with this common challenge: how do you illustrate abstract concepts in more creative ways? We realised that many of us anchor on to one idea, and find it hard to go beyond that. My design background has always taught me that it’s always better to use divergent thinking, and that the way to have one great idea is to have 100 so-so ideas first. 

With that in mind, we pooled our knowledge, sketched a lot, and swapped stories of various training sessions we had run and examples we’d come up against. And that’s how FLARE was born.

We’ve since used FLARE with a variety of different groups in training sessions, with a variety of levels of confidence in drawing, and it has always helped everyone be more creative and get more satisfying results from their drawing. And now it’s your turn to learn!

A photo of a participant in one of our training sessions reflecting on the experience of using FLARE to illustrate a tricky concept

A participant in one of our training sessions reflecting on the experience of using FLARE to illustrate a tricky concept

What is FLARE?

FLARE is a set of prompts you can use to help you move beyond the way you’re used to thinking about a topic you want to draw, and think about it in new ways. What you get is a much greater range of ideas that you can then refine and combine into one final image.

A drawing of the process of coming up with ideas without FLARE and with FLARE

The FLARE process gets you more initial ideas from which to create your final visual

FLARE stands for:

  • Feel – What does it feel like? What emotions does this trigger?
  • Look – What does it look like? What are the real-world objects at play?
  • Another word – What’s another word (or words) to describe this?
  • Result – What is the result of this? What is the end-game of this topic or scenario? Is there a benefit realised? Or a negative impact that might happen?
  • Experience – What is the experience of this? Is it something where there are several steps involved? Or several devices, places, people or roles involved?
A drawing of the word FLARE with text expanding on what each letter stands for

How to use FLARE

It’s really important to understand that when you use FLARE, you don’t try to come up with The Perfect Image first. What we’re doing here is generating lots of different ideas first, to help us explore the topic in better ways, and then we go back and refine and combine our best ideas.

1. Write your topic in the middle of a big page

Start with a topic – especially a complex or abstract topic – you have in mind to draw. It’s best if it doesn’t include any clichés or existing visual metaphors. If it does, try to restate it in a clearer way. Then, write it down in the middle of a big blank page.

Now, write the letters of FLARE around it. We’re going to make a mindmap. You can also do this as a grid if you like; the main thing is to give yourself plenty of space to write first, and then draw your ideas.

In this example, I’m going to go with “Teams struggle to understand each other”…

A drawing of a prompt in the middle, surrounded by the letters FLARE around the outside

2. Ask yourself the first FLARE prompt and draw your ideas

The first FLARE prompt is F: “What does it feel like?” Too often, concepts are – well – too conceptual, and it’s easy to forget that whatever the concept is, it probably affects people in ways that might actually be relevant to capture. Jot down some words that describe how your topic feels.

A drawing with a prompt in the middle surrounded by the letters FLARE

3. Jot down ideas for the other four prompts

Repeat step 2, and write down any ideas you come up with for the other four prompts. Allow each prompt to help you think about the topic in new ways, from new perspectives. You should have a set of descriptions around your original topic.

A drawing with a prompt in the middle surrounded by the letters FLARE

Don’t worry if you can’t think of several things for each of the five prompts. Some prompts won’t suit the topic as well as others. If you get stuck, just move on.

4. Draw lots of different ideas based on what you wrote

Now we get drawing! Go back over everything you wrote, and do some quick sketches to capture what you wrote. Remember, this isn’t about trying to draw the One Perfect Image now, or even to draw the entire topic or concept in one go; this is still just brainstorming.

A drawing with a prompt in the middle surrounded by the letters FLARE

As I sketched various ideas based on what I’d written for this example, I made sure not to self-edit as I went. The more rough sketches, the better.

5. Refine and combine

Now comes my favourite part! This is where you channel your inner editor, look over all your various sketches from across the prompts, and choose the ones you think are most relevant, most compelling, and/or most insightful. There might be one that just nails it on its own, but typically there are a few. 

A drawing with a prompt in the middle surrounded by the letters FLARE

As I went back over what I’d written and sketched in this example, the bridge idea really resonated with me, as well as showing several different languages. The going-around-in-circles also appealed to me.

Now, draw something that unites those several good ideas into one single cohesive picture.

Two different drawings illustrating the prompt

As you can see here, I landed on two different ideas. The first idea to illustrate the topic of “Teams struggle to understand each other” uses speech balloons and thought balloons… No surprises there, but positioning them on a roundabout double arrow added some more meaning. As I thought about my second idea with the bridges, it occurred to me that it could look interesting if either ‘side’ basically built their own different bridge, and even though both bridges are complete, they never meet in the middle. This speaks to the inward-looking nature that some teams have when they struggle to communicate with one another.

Which one do you prefer? What do you think you would draw for this topic?

Some tips to help

Here are a few other things to consider about the FLARE method

  • Trust the process! Too often we’re hard-wired to try to draw just one image that works the first time. Embrace the fact that it’s better to create and explore many options first, and then you’ll have more to choose from. And who knows, you might have some a-Ha moments about the concept itself you’re trying to draw along the way, as well as how to draw it.
  • Not all prompts have to be present in the final image. Try not to force an image that includes something that speaks to every prompt. It’s totally fine if your final image ends up just being about how your topic feels. It’s also fine if you land on an image that combines feel with look and result.
  • Feel free to skip step 3 if you like, and jump straight to drawing your answers to each prompt. I put this step in to help you if you’re more comfortable with writing as well as drawing.
  • Not all prompts will make sense all the time and that’s okay. They’re just prompts; if you’re stuck on a prompt because it doesn’t seem to work for your topic or context, just move on.

Taking FLARE further

I encourage you to give FLARE a go the next time you need to illustrate a tricky topic, or if you want to try illustrating a familiar topic in a more creative way. The FLARE prompts help you think deeper about the topic, and maybe help you to clarify your point of view, too.

With that in mind, there are other ways you can use the FLARE prompts.

  • Group drawing – FLARE is fun in pairs! Two heads are better than one, as they say, and if you try these prompts with someone else, you’ll both benefit from each other’s different experiences and points of view.
  • Facilitation questions – If you run any meetings at work, you probably know that great facilitation is often about asking great questions, to help your group have a better conversation. The FLARE prompts might give you ideas about how to enrich your next conversation, by helping everyone think about their topic in different ways.
  • Problem solving – As Charles Kettering is said to have said, “A problem well stated is half solved”. So often, a great solution lies in the way a problem is articulated in the first place. Using the FLARE prompts can help you and your team approach any problem or challenge from a different point of view, to perhaps reveal a hidden solution.

Feel free to drop me a line and let me know if this helps your drawing. 🙂

For more creative sketching, try SNAILS

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Looking to change up how you draw the same thing all the time? Or to boost the variety and style of what you draw? I got you: try this easy and effective SNAILS method.

If I got a dollar for every light bulb that I drew in my work, I’d be… well, I wouldn’t be rich, but let’s just say that the beers would be on me next time!

The point is: if you do any kind of sketching regularly, you might find yourself drawing the same old things in the same old ways, and you might be after some fresh ways to increase the visual variety of what you’re sketching. Whether it’s sketching for yourself (e.g. sketchnoting, urban sketching) or sketching for others (e.g. scribing, storyboarding, graphic recording, graphic facilitation), it can be easy to feel in a bit of a rut when it comes to what you draw and how you draw.

I got to this point fairly often a while back, so I started working on various ways I could spice up what I was drawing, to keep it more interesting and more meaningful. I’ve refined these various ways into an easy-to-remember method: SNAILS! I had the joy and honour of sharing this SNAILS technique as part of a workshop on using visual metaphor to explore and solve problems at the EuViz conference in Denmark, 2018.

SNAILS – An easy-to-remember set of sketching prompts

No, I’m not saying you draw snails on everything (although, hey, that might be your style). SNAILS stands for 6 creative prompts, or aspects you can think about changing whenever you draw something, to add more creativity and meaning.

SNAILS stands for:

  • Shape
  • Number
  • Angle
  • Identity
  • Line
  • Size

The SNAILS approach is a great way to take something you’ve already drawn and try a little bit of ‘visual first aid’ to help it visually ‘work’ a bit better. It’s also a good way to think more creatively about the topic, object, or concept you’re sketching. Let’s take a look at each of the 6 ways…

Shape

Changing the shape of an object can change its meaning, especially if it’s a visual metaphor for something. In the light bulb examples below, the shape of the glass changes to mimic other objects (e.g. a deflated balloon), to show what type of idea it represents.

Number

Sometimes adding more of the same object can add some nuance to what you’re showing, like one fish amongst a whole school of fish that looks different, or one bright idea amongst lots of ‘dim’ ones. A dozen fresh free-range ideas, anyone? 😉

Angle

Changing the angle – or your point of view – can enrich the meaning of the thing you’re drawing. It can give it more character (e.g. showing it viewed from slightly below looking up), or indicate that something is not quite right (showing an object upside down or backward), or movement (slanted to look like it’s moving fast).

Identity

If you’ve been following Presto Sketching for a while, you’ll probably know by now that I like putting faces on anything and everything. By putting a face on an inanimate object, you give that object an identity and an opinion. What type of face you give it obviously shows what personality or point of view it has, no matter how subtle or obvious the face is.

Line

This prompt is straight from art school. The nature of the line we draw says so much about what it is we’re drawing. Thin trembly lines indicate fragility or brittleness. Thick flowy lines indicate confidence. But you can take this further in so many different creative ways. Here are a few examples:

Size

Lastly, by playing with the size of what we draw, we can show how important it is in relation to what’s around it. For this to work, you usually need something else in the picture to give the particular object scale, for comparison.

Share your sketches!

I hope this SNAILS method has given you some ideas about adding some more variety to what you draw. Try it today, whether it’s on a whiteboard in a meeting, or in your sketchbook, or as part of live scribing. And as always, I’m keen to see how you use these methods in your own sketching, so feel free to share it on the socials and tag it with #prestosketching, or tag @prestosketching on or Instagram.

3 ways to visualise psychological safety for better team performance

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Think about you and your team at work for a minute. How supportive would you say it is for everyone to speak their mind, try new things, and learn from mistakes? Is it a pretty open, encouraging team, or is it rife with politics? Do you feel like you can be yourself there?

This is what psychological safety is all about: having a culture where you and your team can bring your whole selves to work, speak your mind with respect for each other, trust each other, be curious, be assured that it’s okay to try new things, and not be penalised speaking out, or for taking small risks. Psychological safety is essential if an organisation wants to have a culture where inventing and implementing breakthrough ideas can thrive.

Using sketching to promote and embed psychological safety

That sounds like a pretty good culture to work in, doesn’t it? So how can you promote and embed that sort of culture? By using more sketching and visualising in your team, of course! Here are 3 ideas to get you going.

1. Draw project ‘horror movie’ posters

I’m a big fan of awesome movie posters, as well as pre-mortem activities, where a team can discuss what they think could go wrong in a project at the beginning of the project, and then discuss what they can do to avoid those things. This is a great way for everyone to be more real with each other, air those anxieties, and be more connected by realising that everyone probably feels the same anxieties.

At the beginning of a project as part of a kick-off meeting, ask everyone to imagine (in silence) the project as a horror movie or disaster movie, where everything they think could go wrong HAS gone wrong. Then, give everyone a sheet of paper and a pencil or marker, and ask them to each draw a promo poster for that movie, showing what has gone wrong.

The drawing doesn’t have to be good at all; just enough to get their idea across. And like all visualisations, just getting those vague thoughts out of people’s heads and out in the open can be really clarifying. You can put everyone at ease by showing them a rough drawing you’ve done yourself, earlier.

Once everyone has finished (after 5 or so minutes), get everyone to stick them up on the wall, and let everyone tell each other about what they’ve drawn. Then, discuss as a team how to avoid those things going wrong. It’s fun, it’s really revealing, and it bonds the team a bit closer together.

2. Do a ‘Circle of expectations’ sketch

Another good activity to do during a project kick-off, or whenever someone new starts on the team, is to do a ‘Circle of expectations’ sketch. Draw a big circle on a whiteboard, and write ‘IN’ in it. Outside the circle on one side, write ‘OUT’.

Set the scene by saying that everyone has a part to play in the culture of the team, and this is the opportunity to state what behaviour expectations we all have. It’s a good idea to demonstrate what you’d like everyone else to do, so go ahead and write something like ‘WE DO THE TASKS WE SAY WE’LL DO’ inside the circle.

Ask everyone to grab a whiteboard marker and write what behaviour they think everyone should have in the team inside the circle. And then ask everyone to write what they don’t want outside the circle.

Discuss as a group how to make sure that everyone does what is inside the circle, and avoid what’s outside the circle. This is a great way to foster honesty, and having each others’ backs.

3. Draw a superhero drawing of yourself

This is a fun and very insightful 15-minute ice-breaker activity to do with your team. Ask everyone to draw a simple outline of a superhero on a sheet of paper (you can use something like the image below as a template if you want).

  • Ask everyone to imagine themselves as a superhero, and then write or draw their own SUPER POWERS around the outline. It’s totally fine to be a bit silly with this; it gives people a chance to get past any awkwardness about drawing and sharing this sort of stuff.
  • Then, ask people to write or draw what they really value inside the outline; this is the POWER SOURCE of you as a superhero. You might want to drop hints by including things like authenticity, honesty… things that reveal what really motivates you.
  • Thirdly, ask everyone to write or draw their KRYPTONITE, the things that make you anxious, annoyed…the things that sap your mojo.

As with all of these activities, get everyone to talk through what they’ve drawn, and discuss as a group how you can support each other to stay connected to your power sources, use your super powers to help each other, and avoid the kryptonites.

Your turn

The only way these activities will bring better psychological safety to your team is for you to actually do them. Maybe try them alone first to get the hang of them, and then do them with your team. I’ve used these over and over again, I’ve seen them bring great benefit to teams, and I guarantee you that they will improve your team’s psychological safety too.

So if you do try any of these activities with your team, let me know, send me a photo… it’d be great to hear how they’ve worked for you!

Use the Product Box sketch to improve any product or service

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Picture yourself strolling down the aisle of your local supermarket, looking at the various products on the shelves. What catches your eye? What is it about the boxes, packaging and labels that gets that product into your trolley?

Not many of us get to design those boxes and packaging, but imagine if you got to do exactly that for your business, product or service?

Or imagine if you got to design a box for you?

That’s exactly what this Product Box sketch trick is all about. It’s a way to help you think about whatever it is that you’re selling, from a fresh point of view. You use the visual ‘language’ of boxed product design (like a box of cereal) as a way to express your product’s value to customers. And it goes a bit like this:

Decide on what it is that you want to sell. As an example, I’m going to use ‘Project Manager’ (I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about how she’s trying to help her team understand how a project manager can help them).

1. Start the box

Sketch a nice big rectangle. This is going to be the front of your boxed product.

2. Sketch the front of the box

Now it’s time to start getting creative! Write the name of the ‘product’ at the top of the box in nice big letters (in my case it\’s ‘Project Manager’), and sketch whatever your product is. Make sure you leave some area blank for the next step. Note how I\’m keeping my sketching really simple:

3. Add the benefits

Next, think about the benefits of your product. What’s your product going to do for your customers? Why should they care? Write those benefits on the front of the box, too (up to 3 benefits is fine). Try not to agonise over the benefits (or your sketching) too much. Progress is better than perfection at this point!

4. Add the ‘ingredients’

Now, let’s get 3D: draw a bit of a parallelogram on one side of your ‘box’. This is the side of the box where your ‘ingredients’ go. This can be the main features of your product; the sort of things that customers want to check that your product includes, when they’re comparing your product with others. Go ahead and write whatever those ‘ingredients’ are.

5. ‘Open here’

Finish off the box by drawing the top (like you can see below). Add in something about how customers start using your product. Do they just open the box and away they go? Or do you want to add the price?

6. Refine your design

As you sketch this ‘product box’, you may well have more ideas about how to make it better. You might also get into the metaphor of the product box a bit more too, and you might want to riff off product-y things like ‘batteries not included’, or ‘assembly instructions’, and so on. Go ahead and do another sketch, and work in your refinements. Here’s mine:

And there you have it! It’s amazing how often we forget to think about our business, our product, our service — whatever it is — from a customer’s point of view, and the product box is a great metaphor for getting us thinking differently. Here are some ways you can use this Product Box sketch as an activity:

  • Help you and your team get a shared understanding about what your product/service is now
  • Help you and your team think in a fresh way about what it could become
  • Galvanize your team, and get them thinking about their internal value to your organization in a new way
  • Help you think about yourself. What value do you want to be in the world? Why should people ‘buy’ you?
  • Sharpen up your resume: what are the benefits to your new employer if they were to give you the job?

So, give the Product Box sketch a go, first by yourself and then with your team. As always, let me know if you try it out, and how it went.

Sketch the resource Tank for better team efficiency

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I’m sure you know the feeling of being absolutely overwhelmed. You’ve got so many things going on in your head, and then one extra simple thing comes along, and you’re just flummoxed. Stressed. Jammed. Stuck.

Welcome to cognitive overload.

Not fun, is it? But hey, aren’t you glad there’s a sketch you can try, to visualise all those things, and then work out how to make sense of it all? I know, right?

The Resource Tank visual framework

I’d like to introduce you to my friend the Resource Tank sketch, and it basically looks like this:

You draw a tank, with a wavy line to show that it’s full of liquid, and then some straws coming out of it, going to various things that are drawing on that resource. The resource itself – the liquid in the tank – can be different things, like fuel, or time, or attention, or patience, or money.

When we run into a problem, or have to make a decision, it draws from our ‘cognitive fuel tank’. A few things or a few decisions are okay, but when there are more and more, it can drain us dry. Visualising it on paper (or on a whiteboard) like this is a great way to bring all those unseen things out of the fog of your mind and into the light, and then think about what we can do about them. But wait, there’s more:

By putting levels in your ‘tank’, and straws that go to different depths, you can also explore how different things can drain more of the resource, whether we want them to or not. This is a really neat visual metaphor that you can adapt and use in a variety of ways, e.g.:

My ‘attention map’ – what are the things that matter the most to you? There should always be ‘fuel’ for those things, which is why they get the deepest straw. There are things that matter a lot less, so we should only let them have a shallow straw.

Budget and expenses comparison – what would it look like if you compared what your budget expenditure should be, to what it actually is? Are there types of expenses that are crowding out other types, draining resources away from the things that matter?

Team resources and expenditure comparison – What would the fuel tank look like if it were your team? Say you manage a support team; are you leaving enough fuel in the tank for your premium clients? Or is energy being sapped by lots of seemingly urgent and important tasks?

These are just a few examples of how you can use the Resource Tank visual framework, and I’m sure that if you applied it to your own situation, you could probably think of (and sketch!) some more. Whatever happens, we all want to move away from this situation (below)!

So have a go, and have a think about how deep all of those straws are sinking into your valuable energy and attention, and then have a think about what changes you could make to set those straws at more – ahem – fuel-efficient levels!

How well does your team make decisions? The Decision Tree can help

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A good friend of mine once said that a team is running well when it’s moving at the speed of trust (which is a classic Stephen Covey line). I’ve always found that trust at work has so much to do with how a boss delegates work, and empowers team members to make decisions themselves. Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter is a huge help in this area.

Easy to say, but hard to do, right? If you’re a manager, how do you free up your team to make decisions without you getting in the way? Or how do you try to change the behaviour of a micro-managing boss so that they will trust you more?

Draw a Decision Tree

One way I’ve found that really helps is (surprise surprise) using drawing and visualisation. More specifically: drawing a Decision Tree*. The Decision Tree is from Susan Scott’s book Fierce Conversations, and looks a bit like this:

Go ahead and sketch a tree yourself**. Think of your project, your team, or your company as a tree that grows and bears fruit. For this tree to thrive, countless decisions are made every day, week, month and year. But there are different levels of decisions:

  • Leaf decisions – Make the decision and act on it. You don’t need to report the action you took. There’s no real risk here.
  • Branch decisions – Make the decision, act on it, and then report the action you took (daily, weekly or monthly). There might be some risk, but it can be mitigated.
  • Trunk decisions – Make the decision, but report on the decision to check before you take action. There could potentially be high risk of harm to the project, team or company.
  • Root decisions – Make the decision with input from other people. There could be great risk of harm to the project, team or company if these decisions are poorly made and/or implemented.

Example: if you yank a leaf off a tree, the tree isn’t going to die. In the same way, a ‘leaf decision’ poorly made won’t really impact the company. But if a wrong action is taken at the root level, it could really damage the tree.

How to use the Decision Tree

The Decision Tree has tons of uses:

A way to figure out autonomy – To help you and your team think about and clarify what ‘autonomy’ means in their context (this was HUGELY helpful for me in a previous job!), so that everyone knows exactly where they have authority to make decisions and take action.

A way to chart professional development – To help articulate clear paths for professional development. The more senior an employee gets, the more their decision-making power moves from leaf to branch to trunk level.

A way to free up senior management – To help senior management release control appropriately, and develop grassroots leadership within the organisation. This frees up senior management to focus on the more strategic decision-making, while providing more learning and development opportunity to employees at various levels.

A way to help a team work better together – To help a team and/or management articulate where team dynamics and leadership feel wrong (micro-management, anyone?), and where changes can be made in how decisions are made and acted on.

A way to coach junior managers – Junior managers are typically on a journey of relinquishing control and empowering people around them (I’ve been there). The Decision Tree is a great way to coach a junior manager on how to delegate more to others.

Here’s an example way to use the Decision Tree in your team

Do you manage people? Are you a project manager, change manager, or product manager? Here’s a step-by-step way you might want to try using the Decision Tree in your team:

Draw the Decision Tree on a whiteboard, and use the Root / Trunk / Branch / Leaf structure to explain the four different types of decisions to your team.

Get everyone to list the various decisions that need to be made in the team. My favourite way to do this is to capture them on sticky notes, one decision per note (you’ll see why in a second). Ask each team member to read out what they wrote, and ensure that everyone understands each one. Here are some examples:

  • Leave request approvals
  • Quarterly ad-spend changes
  • Commits and pull requests (for the developers amongst us!)
  • Stationery orders

Map the decisions on the Decision Tree. Everyone can then place their sticky notes on whichever level they think each decision belongs. You can always combine any duplicates as you go.

Discuss the map of decisions on the Tree. Are all the decisions placed where everyone expects? The interesting insightful parts of this discussion should be about any decisions where people don’t agree on the level at which they should be. Why do different people expect specific decisions to be at different levels? how can they come to a common understanding about the appropriate level? This can be particularly insightful for a team manager.

Finally, discuss what specific actions can be taken, to change the situation to be more favourable.

As always, I’m keen to hear if and how you use this visual framework, or any other techniques included in this blog.

* I should say that this Decision Tree visual framework is different to the boxes-and-arrows decision tree drawings you might have seen before, which are still great for analysing decisions and outcomes.

** I probably went a bit overboard on mine (above); a simple bunch of lines is completely fine!