Clean Run Magazine - December 2007 - 47

geared toward future architects. Although the book was out of print for a while, it remains a classic and is now available in reprint. McKim’s book highlighted that while people tend to think that some of us are born with visual skill, there are exercises that you can do to train yourself to think visually. It takes practice. It takes time in the saddle. And the payoff is learning to make observations and good decisions quickly. Succinctly stated in the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell: “It’s a magical decision-making ability… It’s the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing.” While Blink doesn’t discuss how the process of making instant decisions is related to visual thinking, most of these snap decisions (making decisions on first impressions) are visual thinking. McKim’s book highlights the types of visual thinking and learning needed to improve visual thinking, learning how to make (or improve the process of making) snap judgments. Gladwell’s book discusses the impact of snap judgments and the background of how we create those judgments. Blink does a very good job of covering the downside of snap judgments and indicating when more thought might be needed before proceeding. For dog trainers, this especially applies to troubleshooting, or trying to fix a problem. Visual thinking is needed to spot whether there is a problem but more thought might be needed to identify the cause and possible remedy. To increase their ability to spot problems, visual thinkers can use technologies like video replay or video analysis software to further their agility training skills. Improving Visual Skills Thinking visually involves a number of visual-spatial operations. These include items like finding the pattern, matching patterns, pattern completion, categorizing, and filling-in. In working to improve these areas, we can improve our ability to think visually and our ability to make good snap judgments, or as mentioned in Blink, to thin-slice—to make decisions based on limited amounts of data. Some of the exercises and examples presented in this article are to help you to learn to enhance your training and handling skills and are based on McKim’s book. One of the easiest ways to start working on your visual skills is to work on finding patterns. This easily translates to agility, particularly for course analysis. Consider a serpentine. Now, do this exercise as quickly as possible—do not think about handling. In Figures 1 through 3 find the serpentine(s). Answers can be found at the end of the article. To continue to improve your skills, start identifying common patterns in agility. Good resources include: • “Power Paws Patterns” by Nancy Gyes (starting in CR June 2007) • “My Pattern Method of Course and Exercise Design” by Nancy Gyes (CR February 2006) • Course Analysis for Agility Handlers, Stuart Mah, Clean Run Productions Next you can sit down occasionally and look for patterns • In agility games books • In copies of courses/sequences from Clean Run • In your collection of course copies from trials • At shows; stand ringside and look for patterns on a course Now that you have these resources, quickly go through them searching for patterns. I’d personally circle the pattern. You can do it two ways: either look at the course flow as designed or ignore the assigned course flow and just look for the pattern to see if it exists somewhere. 1 4 7 1 6 5 3 8 2 2 7 8 2 3 9 5 6 1 4 10 3 6 13 1 14 1 7 8 5 12 9 1 1 10 2 11 4 3 1 December 07 | Clean Run 47

Clean Run Magazine - December 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run Magazine - December 2007