We are slowly changing over from the old logo (left) to a new one (right).
You can see certain similarities – the blue/green which are prominent in our game boards and our pieces, the I and O with a slash between them.
The biggest visual change is the feel from round and fluid to square and blocky. There was an original sense of money coming down the Receivables track into the Green Cash circle, which was nice. But we have now redesigned the board, flipping the Income Statement and Balance Sheet (as well as changing the color of the Receivables).
But the biggest practical change is this: now when we introduce the game board we draw a rectangle on a flip chart or whiteboard, and make a vertical slash on it: “This on the left is the Income Statement, and this, centered on the Cash Circle, is the Balance Sheet.”
We have a series of little videos being produced for our facilitators, to show how many fundamental accounting lessons can be taught right on the board itself: key ratios, cost structure, leverage, the difference between managing for profit and managing for cash flow, and more.
The same conceptual structure is in the game board and in the Visual Finance app:
And at the end, as a reinforcement, we remind people that your Sales come down through the Costs and Expenses of the Income Statement, and what is left at the end is your Net Income. (And that line comes straight down the Income Statement side of the logo.)
And your Balance Sheet shows you the Outcome of all your activities, focused on your Cash.
The summation of the workshop is the logo itself. The logo may not mean much to someone who hasn’t played the game, but everyone who goes through an Income/Outcome workshop from now on will see the new logo and remember and reexperience the key insights they developed, the key learning that they took away.
The clarity of the representation that we developed in 1996 continues to give new benefits. It remains the cleanest, clearest, simplest illustration of financial statements that you can find in the world. And the thanks for that goes to Eliza, who insisted that the board we were going to create had to have everything on it that financial statements have on them, and nothing on it that isn’t a financial statement line item – and the items should be structured to reflect the structure of the statements as well.
The new logo is simply a new manifestation of that original drive. And it is very, very useful! Check the videos as they become available.