If you have lots of complex or detailed information to get your head around or convey to others – why not consider a Sketchnote?

Rachel Burnham writes: Many of us need to digest and make sense of detailed and complex information such as regulations, health & safety requirements, project plans and organisational policies as part of our work.   And having got our own head around this material, need to go on to convey this to others in a meaningful way.

Sketchnoting the key points from this kind of material can help you to get to grips with it.   Creating a Sketchnote is a dynamic process that can help you to step back from the detail and identify the big picture – the main story, if you like. Sketchnoting can help you to identify the most important aspects of the information for your needs and map out how these aspects are connected – arrows, proximity and size are often used to indicate relationships within a Sketchnote.   Sketchnotes are versatile and can make use of a variety of different types of graphics – flowcharts, simple illustrations, diagrams (such as Venn Diagrams or Input/Output Diagrams), cartoons, plus words and even combinations of these.  By playing with different ways of representing the key elements you can discover what best represents this information.  Working visually and on paper is often easier – in a way the paper becomes an extension of your brain.   By Sketchnoting you can set out your own understanding of complex information in a one page format. 

Going through this process in an iterative way can help you to identify your own gaps in understanding and enable you to focus your efforts to get further clarity. 

By making visible your understanding, you can also use this to test out with other colleagues and stakeholders, how your understanding compares to theirs, making it much easier to develop a shared and more rounded understanding of the information and insights from it.

Once you and other stakeholders are happy that your Sketchnote represents a helpful summary of the information, you can use this as a basis for communicating with others.   You could use the Sketchnote as a summary or introduction to the more detailed original information.   A Sketchnote could be used as a talking point within a presentation or learning programme or could be used as a curated resource conveying the key information, with access to the detailed material for those who require it.  

Sketchnotes are often experienced as a more engaging and accessible way into a topic.  And for complex or detailed information they can be computational more efficient because they summarise the material in a single page and so allow people to access the main points more easily.

If you would like to learn to Sketchnote why not book a place at my online ‘Thinking Differently:Introduction to Sketchnoting’ workshop? 

 

Rachel Burnham

3 February 2023

I help individuals and organisations to use visuals to think, learn and work more effectively, particularly though using Sketchnoting and drawing