Life and business can be messy and complicated.
This blog is about making sense of it with the help of drawings.
I’m Karthik Suresh, and in this blog I write about strategy, management, marketing and innovation, with a focus on model driven decision making using Visual Systems Thinking (VST). VST is the practice of using visual modelling techniques to explore situations of interest using handcrafted images and text, and computer generated graph models.
My main interest is in addressing “wicked” real-world problems using the methodology described here.
For more information check out my professional experience.
Managers are the audience for this blog. Managers in organisations deal with issues and matters that are of concern, and also make strategic choices and decisions about what to do and what not to do. Some of the concepts in this blog will help with individual or personal decision making, but the principal focus is on how to work better with others in groups to improve situations and outcomes.
All content on this blog reflect my personal views and should not be taken as representing the views of any employers, companies, universities or social enterprises that I am associated with.
About The Blog
I started this blog in December 2016 to work on my writing skills and in June 2017 set a target of writing a million words in ten years – figuring I needed to produce around that much to get to the point where I could write to a decent standard. It’s a work in progress. I try and write every day. And I hope you find it useful. After a couple of years of writing standalone blog posts, I am now working on book projects using the blog to work out a first draft. Some useful background posts are:
Blog posts – 500,000 words and counting
The methodology that underpins the work
Book Projects
I have a series of book projects that I work on a blog post at a time. Each set of posts is tagged with a category, and you’ll see them in reverse order in the listing. Eventually (hopefully) these will be polished up and published.
Introduction to my first book project: “Getting Started“ and posts that will eventually make their way into the book.
Introduction to my second book project: “Listen” and the posts that make up the draft.
Introduction to my third book project: “Community” and the posts for this draft.
I have stopped the third project part way through and decided the focus of 2021 is going to be a little different, perhaps around art. I’m well ahead of schedule on the words practice front – over 650,000 words in four years, so I’m going to dial back on the word production for a year and think about images instead. This is the first post in the new set, and I’ll come back to the book projects eventually.
Update: August 2021
I’ve started a PhD which will take around six years to complete and plan to use the blog as a place to gather and reflect on ideas that I come across in my reading and research in a “memo” format. The post explaining this thinking is here.
Handcrafted insight 