If you haven’t come across Rich Notes before, they look like the image above.
I make rich notes in my work nearly every day, to document and facilitate meetings with prospects, clients and colleagues – especially if we’re trying to work through something complex and multi-faceted.
They are notes taken by hand mostly using digital tools such as paint software and a graphics tablet.
- The content includes text and images.
- The structure is non-linear and non-hierarchical.
- They are made using rich structural elements such as branches, processes, and lists.
- They follow conversations, capturing what people say – or their narratives.
What makes rich notes different from tools like mind maps is their rhizomatic structure – a term from botany.
A tree is not rhizomatic. It has a structure that starts with a trunk, divides into branches, and keeps splitting until you get to the leaves.
Think of it like a top down approach that imposes structure where it grows.
A rhizome grows horizontally, with stems and roots growing off various nodes.
Rhizomes can interconnect at different points. If a piece breaks off, it can grow on its own.
It spreads out, growing around obstacles.
In the social sciences Deleuze and Guattari first used the rhizome as a metaphor to argue that the non-hierarchical, non-linear structure of a rhizome provided a richer way to understand social phenomena such as philosophy, linguistics, science and politics.
They talked about a rhizome establishing connections between signs, power organisations and circumstances.
In any situation you have multiplicities or dimensions and they talked about the need to flatten everything on the same sheet – lived events, histories, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.
This again resonates with taking rich notes on a single infinite flat sheet.
Taking rich notes helps you get an understanding of a situation in all its detail, but what happens next?
That’s for another video.
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This post is a script that I worked on for a recent talk. If you want to listen to the presentation I recorded, see the video below.
Handcrafted insight 