Napkin Technique One:I Saw You Draw

In my first post in this series, I described what it meant to “get a napkin”: that is, to receive a prescriptive outline of a solution (in graphic form or any other) that kills the opportunity for others to contribute meaningfully.

While the term is fun and seems to describe something that literally everyone I’ve spoken to about it has experienced, it’s perhaps most important to think about what to do when you get one. I have some ideas about that too: empathize first, and then, try one of these seven techniques, which I’ll describe over the next several posts:

1. “I Saw You Draw”
2. Three Things
3. Concept Map
4. Guerrilla SWOT Analysis
5. Why-How Ladder
6. Heuristic Ideation
7. Business Model Canvas

Remember that the goal of empathizing and employing any of these techniques is to back out from the prototype, which the napkin represents, into some more ideation. (Empathizing may help keep you from losing your marbles, too.)

Empathizing on the 4th order so you can ideate on the 1st and 2nd order.

I Saw You Draw

This first technique riffs off the “I heard you say…” reflective listening technique described in countless psychiatric textbooks and counseling blogs. The idea is to play back what you hear from someone else, which accomplishes several things:

• it acknowledges their ideas, and the work that went into it.
• it forces you to listen very actively and carefully
• misunderstandings are cleared up immediately
• it makes both parties responsible for accurate communication

It also has the advantage of having a neat kinesthetic trick that Hugh Dubberly taught me: “I (point to your eye) heard (point to your ear) you (point to you) say (point to your mouth).”

This is the simplest technique, and we’ll build from here. Simply apply this verbal technique to a written or graphic one. Ask your napkin holder to describe the sketch and then repeat back to them what you heard. Say, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to draw this as you describe it, to make sure I understand.”

The original napkin

This reflecting tactic shines a light on the requester’s thinking process and may prompt them to reconsider their assumptions, again opening them to new approaches. At the least, you’ll understand where they are coming from better, and that may give you an opportunity to contribute more in the next step.

The “I Saw You Draw” version, complete with coffee stains.

There are two key things about this approach:

1. It’s not additive. You’re not really drawing anything they didn’t already draw — you’re just playing it back to make sure you understand. If possible, keep to the same medium (a white board, plain paper, or in this case, a napkin) and use the same tool.
2. It’s conversational. If you do this properly, you’ll re-draw the napkin while the requester is watching, and talk and ask questions while you do it: “So I see that at the top you have this picture of a car — that’s a pretty big photo, right?” You’ll certainly get a lot more from the conversation than you would have gotten out of just the napkin. And you may get a feel for where they’re open to new approaches or ideas.

I know this works for spoken and graphic napkins. I believe it can work for written napkins too, if you read and then ask, “To make sure I understand, can I summarize this back to you?”

I’d love to hear from others if they’ve used this technique with any other kind of napkin, or any napkins at all, and how it worked for you. Next week I’ll cover another quick-and-dirty technique: Three Things.

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Audrey Crane