Boxes, Arrows, Toast, and BOXARR

Here's a TED talk about how to make toast:[ted id=2179]Well, it's not really about making toast. It's about the kind of diagrams people naturally draw when someone asks them to draw "how you make toast".Unsurprisingly, most people draw diagrams that are made of boxes and arrows. This isn't surprising to engineers, who have been sitting with cups of coffee drawing boxes-and-arrows diagrams on napkins from time immemorial. But Tom Wujec, the speaker in this talk, goes on to make the key observation: when people collaborate to draw boxes-and-arrows diagrams, effective innovation happens.In industry, I've seen this work. Get a group of subject matter experts in a room with PostIt notes, a white wall, and a problem that needs a process, and you get something amazing, whether that process is a new battleship design or the script for a new animated movie.But I would say that, because I'm one of the creators of BOXARR, the software takes boxes-and-arrows from sticky notes on a wall to the big data age. Through a combination of live, networked collaboration in workshops (or from distant desktops), and powerful import from disparate data sources, BOXARR has been routinely creating massive (100,000 nodes or more) boxes-and-arrows diagrams for organizations like Rolls-Royce, Boeing, Airbus, and the U.S. Navy for years. We can manage diagrams at this scale through powerful visualization, grouping, filtering, and focusing capabilities.Collaborative boxes-and-arrows, accumulating all the benefits discussed in the Wujec's talk, at real-world-engineering scale, automatically stored in a database: no need to take pictures of a wall of PostIts then transfer it to PowerPoint.But BOXARR does more than that: what you get is not the dead picture you'd have in PowerPoint or Visio: it's a real boxes-and-arrows model. And BOXARR provides customizable analysis tools to turn these models into schedules, process plans, optimizations, earned-value calculators, supply chain designs, with what-if analysis, and much more.So there, my blog post turned into a BOXARR ad. But I'm really proud of what BOXARR does. And it's great to see others, like Mr. Wujec, talking about the power of what we started with in BOXARR years ago.Simple boxes-and-arrows, powered by people.