Thinking with paper
One of the things I’m proudest of when I return to a project later is to see the client using post-its in their meetings. Why is this small change in habit so important?
Modern work is broken. We live in the information age — we’re mostly knowledge workers, but our methods of playing with knowledge suck. How many times have you sat in meetings and talked about vague ideas that remain abstractions? The end result is people with a different understanding of something with the same name. You say tomato, I say tomato.
Why is it so broken? I sort of blame computers. At least when we worked on paper things were at least partly externalised. But as we have moved to screens, we’ve gotten further away from sharing things with each other when we are physically present — think of that person sitting in the corner tapping away at keys. I’ve heard someone even blame that most influential of philosophers, Descartes: “I think therefore I am” preferences an inward kind of mind work, not the kind where you get your hands dirty.
Perhaps it’s partly our education system. Think of the layout of a classroom: the implicit message being: “You sit and listen, I tell you what to think.” Let’s stop beating the play element out of our kids while we’re at it. My English literature lessons would have been so much more interesting had we mapped the subtext or characters using post-its.
When we do culture-change work at Clearleft, I’ve constantly had to tell CEOs that modern work environments just aren’t built for the kinds of work that digital workers really need. Get away from the screen. Stop having meetings that are talking-only. Make something. Sketch something.
Hands aren’t a separate thing that we shouldn’t use when thinking… they’re an integral part of it.
