To Doodle Or Not To Doodle. That is the question!

Can doodling make you more productive in meetings?

You join me in the boardroom of a large blue-chip organisation, across the freshly polished table are two senior executives, we are about to enter the depths of early stage negotiations. Customary greeting have past, the usual tea, coffee, biscuits offered, now it is down to business. As I start to present you notice doodling by one of the two executive present. In your head curiosity ensues...Have we lost one of them! What is going on? What does this mean?

Visual Thinking

According to recent studies, doodling does not mean a person is daydreaming or disinterested in what you are talking about. Doodling can act as a method of furthering concentration for the task at hand. With doodling we are thinking in pictures.

Jesse Prinz, a philosophy professor at City University of New York Graduate Center who studies doodling in the context of research on art, finds the practice is optimally suited for oral learning. He says doodling keeps people in a state of “pure listening.” This comes as a positive for any of us who are not visual presenters and this might be a little disappointing for any of us who use visual cues.

Generate Ideas

Studies relating to the benefits of doodling argue that this repetitive movement expands our minds ability to generate new ideas. It means that while we are attempting to focus on one action, a speaker, we are drawn to discover new ideas because of the content being discussed by that speaker. This also indicates that as a speaker, or teacher, we may need to rethink our method of communication to enhance the overall experience and reduce the need for some to doodling.

Cognitive Benefits

While doodling can help us link one situation to another, it has also been shown to give a greater insight into our emotional health at the time of doodling. Discussing a certain topic can often lead many to feel uncomfortable and doodling acts as a release for these emotions in an artistic form. How many of you remember doodling on a school book? What was the reaction you got?

Sunni Brown co-author of GameStorming: A Playbook for Rule-breakers, Innovators and Changemakers said in a recent Ted Talk "Under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom or a boardroom or even the war room. On the contrary, doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high. Because doodling is so universally accessible and it is not intimidating as an art form, it can be leveraged as a portal through which we move people into higher levels of visual literacy. The doodle has never been the nemesis of intellectual thought. In reality, it is one of its greatest allies".

If the reaction we received from our early childhood was negative towards doodling, at school for example, then this could lead to our habits and attitude towards doodling today in the corporate world. Should this is true, then we must, unlearn the rules of school.

The other side of doodling

Let's go back into the boardroom, we reach the end of the meeting, you compliment the executive on their very creative doodle and they say "I am glad you like it, its the way I take notes". We look at each other at the same time with an expression of WOW on our faces.

In this article we have discussed many of the benefits of doodling for the doodler, but what if you are on the other side of doodling? This is for any of us that have been speaking or leading the conversation and discover that a person is doodling. Initially, we would tend to become irritated and assume they had lost focus but hopefully with the aid of this article we will have a different interpretation of doodling and doodlers.