FUZZY PAY-OFF

Is drawing moribund?

I thought of this question as I read a totally unrelated article about business practices. This article made a comparison between the Google of today and the General Motors of yesterday.  As it discussed general business trends, various terms and phrases were tossed around. For example, the article mentioned terms that I had never heard of before, including “loose-tight organizations,” “flattening hierarchy,” “M-form structure,” etc.

What struck me was that the business sector continues to maintain a fascination for combinations of new business terms.  This is all in the effort to improve their game.

What are the parallels to sketching? Plenty. Businesses are constantly trying to improve. They are continually working to adapt to a competitive marketplace, adjust their product to be more responsive to the needs of the people who pay them, etc.

Yet where is the innovation and evolution of our understanding of drawing? As we all basically draw in some form or another for a living, wouldn’t you think that there would be a similar passion for adaptive and evolving understandings of drawing?

Let’s use these same business terms as examples. I have no idea what a “loose-tight” organization is, but there are multiple books on the subject, so somebody must think they do. So how about loose-tight sketching? What might that mean? This might be a whole new way of giving an impetus to drawing. Or what would “flattening the hierarchy” do to our drawings and how we solve problems?

To push this a bit further, I did some search to see what other business terms might apply.

Fuzzy Pay-Off was a term that hit me. It turns out that this is a real business method, in which three or four options are overlapped to derive what they call the pay off, or what we call the solution. That sounds at times a lot like what we do. And the great thing about this Wikipedia entry is that it states that the Fuzzy Pay-Off method, because of its intuitive nature, is a transparent practice. Yes, look it up; the word transparency is listed as an advantage.

So even the business world is seeing the advantages of overlapping meanings, intuitive understandings, and transparency.  Which means that those of us in the drawing world need to pick up our games.