Welcome To Shrinkonia. : About.

A year ago I bought the book “Visual Meetings” (doodling for team productivity) and a Moleskine notebook (of course) on my way back from Washington to Amsterdam. At the stopover in New York I drew this:

And this:

It changed my work. Really.

Before I just had a stack of Moleskine notebooks (what else) full of seemingly unrelated notes. Words. Lots of words.

I knew there was a pattern. Somewhere.

But connecting the dots got just more difficult. Making more notes made things worse. Not better.

So. I started doodling. Making awful simplistic drawings. And I am sharing these drawings. Not to show off my skills. It is more to show you it’s ok if you can only doodle and not create picture perfect images.

This is what I found.

If you make a lot of drawings, a common visual language emerges. You use several symbols over and over again. The use of identical symbols reveal a hidden link.

After the individual images I crafted a “story”. On the topic I find most difficult. Identity. Ok. I also used text and quotes.

I created many pages to explain to myself the things I had written over the last years.

This helped me immensely in explaining this stuff. To you and to myself. Mainly that last part.

It changed my approach to almost every thing that feels complex and appears difficult.

As always. You don’t have to try this. Really.

But before you decide, I hope you have a look at this short (5mins) TED talk by Sunni Brown, author of “Gamestorming”. Doodlers, unite!