How I fell in love with Sketchnotes
In college I found that adding doodles to my notes, made them more interesting. My love affair with Sketchnotes began formally much later.
Confronting scale
In 2009, I joined Wipro ($10bn in 2021, 200,000 employees) as its first Chief Learning Officer (CLO for short). It gave me chance to create my own job description. I spoke to several people whose counsel I rely upon. The Chief Learning Officer is meant to "bring the outside in" to the organisation in three ways.
How will business evolve over the next 12-18 months.
What skills will be necessary to win
Find creative solutions to get people to build the skills & use in business
What made it difficult was to do this for 150,000 employees (in 2009) across several countries. Since Wipro worked with clients in multiple businesses, each employee would have to become their own CLO.
The Monday Mailer was born
I used to take notes in school and college and doodle liberally in the last few pages. Then I came across the work of Mike Rohde and Dave Gray. Illustrating the notes with visuals made it easier to recall the idea. Every Monday I would send a 100 word mailer to all employees accompanied by a sketch from my notebook. (The sketches from 4 of the mailers are given below).
The idea was simple: Build a community of curious people.
This is a three stage process (i) Seeking information from diverse fields and individuals (ii) Making sense of the information (Sketchnotes is my method) and (iii) Sharing them (in my case it was through LinkedIn and Twitter.
Don't miss this podcast where Harold Jarche and futurist Ross Dawson discuss how to make sense of information <Listen here> <Read the transcript>
Sharing it on LinkedIn
Sketchnotes is a wonderful way to make sense of what I read. That could mean summarising a book or a TED Talk or an article. When I left Wipro I started posting my Sketchnotes on LinkedIn and Twitter. My followers grew on LinkedIn from 3000 to 800,000. When Pinterest caught my fancy, I started a board around Sketchnotes <see the Pinterest board>
These are Sketchnotes and illustrations that you may recognise from my newsletter/ articles and presentations. Some of them are from my book Dreamers and Unicorns.
Use my Sketchnotes - they are free for you
Then I started illustrating my articles and blogposts with my sketchnotes. These were quick sketches done on my notebook and cleaned up in Photoshop. My website abhijitbhaduri.com started getting more traffic. The links to these were posted on twitter.
Then to my absolute delight the Venture Capital firm a16z shared one of the Sketchnotes with their 549,000 followers.
Prof Matt Abrahams the Graduate School of Business at Stanford shared another. Professor Bill Fischer, the Professor of Innovation at IMD Lausanne turned one of my sketchnotes into a poster and put it up outside his office. I share these sketchnotes as part of the Creative Commons license. Anyone can use it as part of their presentation or research or writing.
I use sketchnotes to illustrate my books Digital Tsunami. The review in Forbes drew attention to the sketchnotes.
Time to go digital
While I still love to sketch and take notes in my notebook (that is comfort food for me!), I though I am going to challenge myself to go digital. I have used Adobe Sketch which now has become Adobe Fresco. Adobe Fresco is my absolute favourite when it comes to calligraphy. For the Sketchnotes I use Adobe Photoshop on an iPad Pro. The Sketchnotes are saved in the Creative Cloud so I can access it from my phone, Mac or the iPad Pro. That is super convenient.
I still draw my entire keynote as a sketchnote in my notebook at times. Then I color it and scan it and store it as a PDF to give away to participants of the workshops or conferences. "Where do ideas come from?" was a talk I did for students at XLRI. That sketchnote is in the collage below.
I have run workshops for clients on using Sketchnotes to make their messages stick. You can use stick figures to draw your Sketchnotes. It is not about drawing skills. It is about synthesising and simplifying ideas. It is all about making it possible to recall an idea when you need to. Try it, you will love it.
How many Sketchnotes can you count in this post? Leave your answer in the comments below.
If you like this , leave a comment for me to let me know. It means so much to hear it from you.
