Dave Gray, CEO and Chairman of the consulting and design firm XPLANE, is nothing if not prolific. Oil painter, avid blogger, author, teacher, entrepreneur, he seems immersed in it all. Dave Gray took the time to talk with rhetology.com about his beginnings, his creative process and where he turns for inspiration.

When did your interest in art begin?

I was always an artist. So I’ve been drawing my whole life. It’s probably one of those things that goes back forever.

When did you know that design would be something that you’d pursue professionally?

Probably when I was in high school. I remember looking at the traffic signs and roads signs and those kinds of things and thinking that somebody did that for a living, I wonder what that job is like, I want that job. I’d like to do that for a living.  You know the children crossing the street and the railroad signs and all these things that helped people find their way around.

I always thought they were so simple and so iconic and beautiful and functional. I guess that was the first time I thought that this must be a job; this must be something I could do.

From art school where did you go?

I went to work in a fish market.  I was waiting tables, I was doing the kinds of things you do when you get out of art school.

Then I got into the newspaper business and got a job as a newspaper artist. That was doing things like maps, charts, and illustrations sometimes. From there, I decided to start a company. I learned how to do infographics, which are basically visual explanations of things how things work, etc.

Then, in the early 90s, even then, even before Google really was the thing, it was obvious that the newspaper business was in decline. I had a glass ceiling as far as where you can get as an infographics guy and I really couldn’t find a job that would capitalize on all my skills. So I had to start a company in order to make a job that I thought I would enjoy. And luckily it was successful.

When you were working for the newspapers, were you writing as well as doing infographics?

It’s a good question and not an easy one to answer. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There is a difference also between writing and reporting.  Reporting is not simply writing but going out collecting facts and finding the information and figuring out whether there’s a story there and what the story might be.  There are a lot of things involved in that.

With the way the newspaper business was structured, it was a gray area that had not been figured out. I worked at several different newspapers. Some newspapers would have a strict rule that journalists would write the story and then write the copy for the information graphic and they would be responsible for collecting the facts. Other newspapers might have someone who is responsible for collecting the facts and then organizing information and running interference between the art department and the news department

The art department in newspapers is very similar to the art department in a lot of companies. It often is viewed as a service department for example, ‘we made this, now make it pretty.’ I always kind of bristled at that because you miss a lot of opportunities when you do it that way. There is an opportunity to start with a visual and sometimes when you start with a visual, you have a lot more opportunities and possibilities than if you start with the assumption that something is going to be put together using words or using words and a photograph. Photographers would be sent out on location obviously to take pictures of stuff, and even then the photographers were still considered part of the service department.

So I did do a lot of writing but by forcing the issue not because it was set up that way. I had to break down some barriers and build a lot of relationships. I guess those relationship building skills sure came in handy when I started building the company.

I felt that even though I didn’t major in journalism, I felt that a lot of times I could write as well as those guys. Also it was frustrating sometimes because the reporter would have their six PM deadline and try to get their copy out and I wouldn’t even get my information until 7 o’clock when that information was available all day long. If I just was able to go get it I would and often I’d say, “Well, ok, I’m going to go call people and talk to them. “

You touched on something that I think is interesting and I think is still true now, which is that when we think about conveying or obtaining information we think that first it would be in text and then we use visual aides to help round out the knowledge but we don’t think about using the visual first.

People have been talking about visual thinking since before xplane was around and I like that term and we call ourselves the visual thinking company and we are the first company, that I know of, that has built its company around that. The reason I prefer visual thinking as opposed to visual communication is that I think that visualization and visual thinking is very closely linked with discovery, invention, and exploration of ideas. Actually, if you look at the history of great thinkers and people who are involved in discoveries, often they describe their thinking process visually and they even invent new visual forms in order to be able to talk about what they are thinking about. When (Leonardo) da vinci did a little sketch in his notebook of a helicopter he didn’t have 90 percent of the words that you would need to describe a helicopter didn’t even exist yet. The terms actually come after the invention not before the invention.

When you are exploring things that really new, it is usually the case that there is not a word for it yet. The language that is needed to describe those ideas has not been developed. So you have to find ways to explore it. It is especially true in business; we find all the time that by exploring things visually we generate all kinds of new insights that would not happen if you were simply talking across a table.

Can you tell me a little bit about what Xplane does for its customers?

Anywhere that a company has things that are complex or potentially confusing that need to be explored or communicated are potential areas where xplane can help. We do a lot of work related to business strategy, execution of business strategy, and how to get all the gears in the company together to achieve a certain goal.

Usually the people who are thinking about the strategy are a very different group of people than the people who execute the strategy and they are thinking about different things. When you are actually coming up with the strategy, you are thinking in very abstract terms, such as markets and you are looking at a lot of data and numbers.

When it comes time to execute the strategy, people have a whole different set of things they have to do and are often going to be asked to do something radically different or to do the same thing radically differently than they did before. In those cases, people need to understand not only what they need to do differently but also why.  The way you might explain something to a senior team is often very different than the way you want to explain it to someone working in a call center. There are a lot of holes between the way someone thinks about a strategy and a lot of potential misunderstanding and confusion between the top of the pyramid and those who are executing it out at the edges of the pyramid. What happens is that the percentage of strategies that fail is more than 50 percent. Much higher than you would imagine. I and a lot of people believe that this has not to necessarily with the strategy itself, but how well it is thought through and how well it is communicated.

Everyone knows Southwest’s (Airline) strategy. It is not hard to understand. That is one of the reasons it is so successful. It’s not particularly brilliant but everyone in the company understands it. That actually makes a big difference. When the people are designing the website, they know who the customer is and they know what that customer cares about. When the flight attendants are walking through the cabin they know that, too. If you fly American Airlines, you’ll notice a big difference because nobody at American Airlines knows what the strategy is. Pretty much any other airline beside Southwest. That is why you’ll notice that if you fly South by Southwest, the people who work there are happy and cheerful when they are waiting on you and taking care of you but the people at the other airlines are listless and despondent and hopeless. That’s because their airlines aren’t making money and they know it. Their companies don’t have a strategy or if they do they don’t understand what it is.

Will you discuss some of the pros and cons of using PowerPoint to communicate visually?

The biggest problem that PowerPoint has is that Microsoft doesn’t understand it. They don’t understand its strength and weakness. So whenever they build templates, when they put together tutorials and helpful things, they are really working against themselves. I’m a big fan of PowerPoint and a lot of people hate it. Of all the tools for creativity and thinking and communication on the Internet and that have been designed for our computers PowerPoint, I believe is one of the closest to a whiteboard or pen and paper.  The reason for that is that when you open a PowerPoint slide, you kind of have a blank slate. PowerPoint doesn’t assume that you …

When you open up Photoshop, for example, it assumes that you are going to be working with photos or images. Microsoft work assumes that you are going to be writing as your primary activity. A spreadsheet assumes that your going to be working with numbers. A web browser assumes you’re going to be clicking and reading. Name a software and it’s got some assumptions already that your going to be doing this, that, or the other thing, which is fine.

PowerPoint is very forgiving. It basically says, “Hey I’m a blank page.” You can pick up a pen, if you have a tablet PC, and draw right into a blank PowerPoint slide. You put video in there, you can put words in there, you can do nearly anything that you can imagine. Of course, that is also a weakness of PowerPoint. If you can do anything that you can imagine, people can imagine all kinds of terrible, horrible, ugly things with PowerPoint.

Anything is possible, which is good and bad. One of the things that’s important is that you know how you are going to use PowerPoint. I’ve actually written a book in PowerPoint, but I know it’s a book. I’d never take my book and get up in front of a crowd of people and start to present it to them. Because you don’t read a book – a book is a very intimate and personal thing that you do by yourself – and a presentation that you are giving to a 100 people is a completely different type of scenario.

You might ask, why would someone write a book in PowerPoint. Well I wanted to write a visual book on visual thinking. One of the things that was wonderful about PowerPoint was that it didn’t force me to down certain paths and have certain assumptions.

Speaking of books, I read this about your book, “Marks and Meaning has created a new medium – the unfinished book.” What’s it like to have a book in process?

Well, I guess it is just like having anything that is still in process. It still has the potential to be anything you can imagine and it has the potential to not ever be finished. So there are pros and cons to that, I guess. Imagine if you had a project with no deadline. What would happen?

That wouldn’t be good for me. I really need deadlines.

(laughs) I’m not sure it’s good for me. It’s an experiment. We’ll see. Basically what I did there was rather than publishing a book, I realized that I’m never going to be done with this book because I don’t have any deadlines.

I’m just going to publish the notes for the book; it’s been pretty interesting, a bunch of people have bought it. They are interested enough in the topic that they want to explore it with me. There is an email discussion group where we are talking about all these ideas, what can happen with them, it’s a lot of fun.

You have said that creativity is about play, where do you play? Where do you turn for inspiration?

I turn to the Internet. The internet has made it possible for the first time in history for people to reach out and find those people who are like minded or kindred spirits no matter where they are in the world, assuming they can get on the internet, they can find each other. And they way that they find each other is not by doing a search for a person like you would in a phone book, but you do it by putting the things that you are passionate about on the internet. So they find you when they search and you find them when you search. What you’re going to find is that people are putting things online that they care about. It’s like taking the things you are passionate about and giving it an address. For me the Internet has become the place that I find those communities.

There’ve always been artist communities but even in the heyday, the biggest and most famous artist community was in Paris somewhere in 1880 and 1920, there was a lot of great stuff happening there. And there are local artist communities.  But with the Internet you are always going to be able to find people who are kind of like you. In St. Louis where I live, I can connect with other people about art, but you if you go deeper within that, they care about art in a totally different way than I do. They have completely different people that they think are interesting than I think are interesting. But when you get onto the Internet, you can find that small group of people who share that interest so specifically that it feels like they are long lost relatives.

It sounds like for you, you find inspiration not only from the art and visual stimulation, but also from the connections you that you make with people. It sounds equally important to you.

I never would have thought that until the Internet but I discovered that it is true. It’s something I found out about myself. But I only knew it because I actually found that community where I thought I would never find it.

Then on top of that I find that almost any city that I visit there are going to be a least a couple of people that I would never had met otherwise. I’m a big Internet fan. I’m certain that my company would never have been able to survive without the Internet.