If you ask any four year old, and I know this for a fact since I once taught preschool, if you ask any four year old if they can draw, sing or dance, they will look at you as if you had lost your mind. OF COURSE they can draw / sing / dance!! Who can’t?! It takes considerable institutional effort and several more years of education, art appreciation and art criticism to teach us that we were evidently wrong about this.
Storytime. Me. Third grade. My teacher is Miss Mullen, in her 50thand last year of teaching. She had taught my father before me. Whenever she called on “Chet” to answer a question in class I provided that answer. My classmates wondered why I would answer to someone else’s name, an imaginary person no less, but I preferred not to incur her wrath since I knew she was referring to me. Her favorite punishment was making us stand in the coat closet, in amongst the coats such that all anyone who might be looking would see of us would be from the knees down. Amy McCullough practically lived in there. Once when I got sent into the coats, Amy sneaked around from the girl’s coats to stand next to me in the boy’s coats, but we both got caught, resulting in letters home to our parents. No matter – Amy liked me! (no kissing at that age, but we stood there silently holding hands, faces partially obscured from each other by the hanging coats surrounding us, two abandoned souls who had found each other in the midst of life’s cruel indifference).
Anyhow, one Monday morning Miss Mullen set us the task of drawing some goldenrod that she’d picked from the schoolyard and placed in a vase upon her desk. A still life, if you will. If you didn’t draw it well enough you had to stay in during after-lunch recess and try again. There were about five of us stuck in the classroom that Monday afternoon. There were still two of us Tuesday afternoon, but by Wednesday I was the only one remaining, the only one who could not properly draw a common weed. I ended up staying in for recess all week.
The system at our house for my brother and I was that you got a clean shirt for school every day, but wore the same pair of pants all week. We each also had two pair of good pants for school, and my mother would spend the off-week mending the rips and tears we’d put into last week’s pair. Coming home on this particular Friday my mother noticed that my pants were not torn again in the knees, were not in fact even dirty in the slightest, and asked me what that was all about, so I told her. Well, my mother, who NEVER interfered in school matters (she was a teacher herself at a different school), marched in there Monday morning and demanded that Miss Mullen put an end to this little game. But the damage was already done. I hadn’t learned how to draw, but I had learned something else – I had learned that I could not draw, and it became something I KNEW for the remainder of public school.
In a related story that I’ll have to save for another time, I eventually did learn to draw, finally laying to rest the ghost of Miss Mullen. It was a short, swift and amazing journey lasting only as long as a six-week college summer session, but it taught me much more than just that I could draw (and probably could have all along), but that I could, with the proper instruction, learn to do anything.
Which brings me to the point of this week’s post – visualization and business intelligence. One definition of BI is that business intelligence = data + context, with the context typically adding the most value when it is visual in nature. Telling someone that the answer to their question lies in column G, row 37 is NOT context. If you think that BOLD, italic, doubleunderline is the ultimate in visual effects, you need to get out more. Visual context is a map, a graph, a trend line, a plot, a histogram, a dashboard, a scorecard, a traffic light, a dial, a flag, an arrow, a bubble chart, diagrams, pictures, colors, shapes, shadows, depth, texture, movement, velocity, acceleration. Visual relationships.
There is more brain matter cortex devoted to visual signal processing than to the other four senses combined. We are first and foremost visual creatures – speech was an evolutionary afterthought. The guild symbols of the pawnbroker, the cobbler, the fish monger and the mercer were instantly recognizable to an illiterate, medieval population. These past hundred years of neon signs and giant billboards have made us forget how to really “see” our environment rather than merely “read” it, but the innate visual capability is there. Visual literacy is probably the most overlooked and undervalued of our treasured “communication” skills, as visual context can be so much more “information dense” than the auditory and literary modes. In this age of Pixar animation and Wii and massively multiplayer online games (MMOG), business needs to take the hint and get with the program. Spreadsheets embedded in PPT’s, even with dynamic, real-time updates, just aren’t going to cut it anymore.
Now I’ll be the first to admit, drawing 101 aside, I am as PowerPoint challenged as the next finance guy, but that doesn’t mean we all can’t start taking the first steps. Here are a few examples of what’s at stake:
- Hans Rosling’s TED Talk on global health and economic trends
- Aaron Koblin’s “Flight Patterns”
- The work of Edward Tufte – “Beautiful Evidence”
- Geoff McGhee’s “Journalism in the Age of Data”
- “Fantasy Baseball – Picking the All-Stars”, from JMP
What do all of these have in common? They tell stories. They don’t just present DATA, they TELL STORIES. A beginning, a middle, and an end. They communicate.
I probably should give myself more visual credit than I do, for years ago, when I was presenting a product or market investment analysis to the board for review and approval, I quickly realized that I could best communicate the key financial data to the non-financial members through graphs, and got quite good at using brute force methods to incorporate multiple axes, scales and data types onto one, single slide that visually told the story, the projected life history, of the project under consideration.
Today, we have both much more data available, much more data to deal with and to analyze, much more information to communicate, but also, much better tools with which to do it. But as I said above, the data is only half of the picture - CONTEXT is what pulls it all together and tells the story. The logical place for finance to start is Office Analytics, which uses and connects the data and the analytics with the Microsoft Office products you are already familiar with (Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook) to produce consistent views of data, automate reporting and add analytical insights while keeping the business users within their comfort zone. The next place to take business intelligence is dynamic business visualization, which enables business users to interactively explore ideas and information and investigate patterns and relationships through visual queries. Most importantly, it allows you to tell your story in a way that static charts and spreadsheets can’t begin to match.
When you were four years old, this visual way of thinking and communicating was intuitive and easy. As for the future of education, I think we are most definitely going to need to make communication skills, in all their varied media - visual, musical, kinesthetic - an imperative along with the 3R’s. As for the present, we the living need to unlearn the limitations we’ve acquired over a lifetime of Miss Mullen-like encounters and start telling our stories visually. With tools like Office Analtyics and Business Visualization we don’t need to become graphic designers ourselves, nor even take Drawing 101 (although if you do, trust me, you’ll be pleasantly and spectacularly surprised at the results). Not only can you now, with the help of technology, draw that dog, you can make it sit, jump, roll-over and speak as well. WOOF!
By Leo Sadovy, from: http://blogs.sas.com/content/valuealley/2012/03/14/can-you-draw-this-dog/