Part 3 (2/2)
When we enter any ”data landscape” (a spreadsheet, table, chart, diagram, etc.), our eyes go through the same looking process as when we entered the bowling alley.
The point here is to ill.u.s.trate that even though this chart and the bowling alley have nothing in common, our eyes still look at them the same way. We have exactly the same number of incoming visual signals, the same kind of electrical impulses to a.n.a.lyze and collate, and the same pathways along which to pa.s.s those impulses. From our eyes' perspective, we've even got the same set of problems to solve-orientation, position, identification, and direction.
How to Look Better: Four Rules to Live By To develop good looking skills-and build a good foundation for visual thinking-there are four basic rules to apply every time we look at something new: Collect everything we can to look at-the more the better (at least at first).
Have a place where we can lay out everything and really look at it all, side by side.
Always define a basic coordinate system to give us clear orientation and position.
Find ways to cut ruthlessly from everything our eyes bring in-we need to practice visual triage.
THE FOUR CARDINAL RULES FOR BETTER LOOKING.
Looking is collecting, just like any other kind of collecting. Once we've started, we're immediately faced with one of two problems-either having too much to collect or not enough. The first situation we've already seen in chapter 2: When Daphne needed to make a decision about her publis.h.i.+ng company's brand, she collected all kinds of data about the industry, so much, in fact, that she couldn't quickly make sense of the results.
These days, Daphne's problem is shared by everyone, everywhere, in every business context: Information overload is today's standard operating condition, and we're just going to have to learn to deal with it. Given that reality, active looking serves as a useful approach for figuring out what's important and making sense of it. After all, our eyes have too much information coming in all the time, and yet we can still see very well. There's a lesson there.
Too Much to Look At When Daphne e-mailed all her survey materials to our team, it was as if we were suddenly teleported into the middle of the bowling alley, bypa.s.sing the front door and finding ourselves plopped down in the middle of a lane, with data sailing past us right and left. Without knowing where we'd come in-or even what we were supposed to be looking for-we didn't know where to look first.
But our vision system is flexible and resilient, and it really wants to figure things out. So we put our active looking process to work. First order of business? Figure out which way is up. We needed to find a coordinate system to get us pointed upright, so we define d a model that mapped who/what (compet.i.tors) versus how much (revenue).
Next up: position. We looked for measures that showed where Daphne's company sat in the s.p.a.ce defined by our coordinate system. Next: identification. We looked through the data to locate where other companies were located within the same s.p.a.ce. Eventually, the picture that became Daphne's chart emerged. Information overload is here to stay, but active looking gives us a way to get through the worst of it.
Choosing a who/what versus a how much coordinate system gave us a context in which to look at other detailed data, such as where and when.
Not Enough to Look At A year after completing Daphne's publis.h.i.+ng brand strategy picture, I was contacted by Ken, the communications director at a well-known scientific research center, with what appeared to be a problem similar to Daphne's, namely how to position his inst.i.tution's ”name brand” for maximum financial impact. The scientific inst.i.tution that Ken worked for also needed to raise awareness among potential investors-not because it was going to list on the stock exchange, but because changes in the federal funding landscape prompted it to look into possible alternative sources of scientific funding outside of the federal government.
But it quickly became clear that Ken's challenge was actually the precise opposite of Daphne's: She had too much to look at; he did not have enough. It came down to the ways the two organizations looked at themselves. Daphne's company saw itself as a moneymaking business, and any opportunity to make more money was at least worth a look. Ken's inst.i.tution saw itself as a guardian of scientific truth, and was uncomfortable with potential conflicts of interest from business sources of funding-so uncomfortable that our entire study had to take place under the cover of darkness. If word got out internally that we were even looking at funding options, scientific mutiny was feared.
We were again thrown into the bowling alley, but this time with most of the lights switched off. We had the inst.i.tution's insights and reports on federal funding, but that lit up only so much. If the inst.i.tution was going to look outside for money, it was going to need to look outside for ideas. As with Daphne's challenge, we had to define our coordinates first. Again, we started with the 6 W's as a way to frame the problem: Who: Who were roughly similar organizations-science based, academic and research oriented, focused on the natural world-and in need of large sums of nongovernmental money?
How much: How much money did these organizations need, and how much did they get?
Where: Where does their money come from? Where are they located in the overall landscape of scientific and natural sciences funding?
When: How often do they get their money? Weekly? Annually? All the time?
With these framing criteria in place, we went out and looked for the right whos. We found numerous organizations worth including-museums, environmental organizations... everything from Conservation International to the Sierra Club to the Monterey Bay Aquarium-they all fit in the frame: science, natural world, needs money. So we took names, and between the laws of public disclosure and the miracle of the Internet, we were quickly able to find much of what we were looking for: size of organization, financial status, source of funds, etc.
With nothing to start with other than a simple problem statement-”What are nongovernmental ways we can get funding?”-we used active looking to collect the pieces necessary to build a visual model of the natural sciences funding landscape. It looked roughly like this: Visual model of the natural sciences funding landscape.
With that framework in place, it was now a matter of plotting in the numbers we'd collected, and we were on our way toward looking at the viability of all kinds of funding options. Once again, active looking provided the guidance we needed, even in darkness.
Having collected everything, we now have to lay it all out where we can really look at it. This is such an obvious rule that it often gets ignored, and yet it is the single best way to effectively look at a broad range of inputs-take everything we've collected and lay it out side by side, where our eyes can scan it all in a few pa.s.ses.
The Garage Sale Principle: How Do We Even Know What We've Got?
Let's call this the garage sale principle: Regardless of how well organized all the stuff in our garage may be, laying everything out on tables in the light of day yields a completely new perspective on it all. The same is true of data: When it is packed away in individual files and records, it's impossible to look at the big picture-but getting everything out in the open makes otherwise invisible connections visible.
A couple years ago, I was working with a computer manufacturer in Silicon Valley. In order to keep up with global changes in software sales, the CEO of this company made the gutsy decision to turn his sales process upside down. No longer would customers buy a shrink-wrapped package of software CDs and then receive complimentary upgrades and technical support. In the new world that the CEO envisioned, the software itself would be given away for free, and customers would pay for the upgrades and support-kind of like going from a ”buy a book a month” club to joining an expensive private library: The same books are available; we just pay for them differently.
The garage sale principle: Everything looks different when we can see it all at once.
This was a huge change. It meant that everything had to be revised, from the way software was written to the support process. In order to avoid company-wide panic among the tens of thousands of employees, the decision was made that the first word should go out through a series of low-key, ”impromptu” meetings-hundreds of them.
What a disaster. From the moment that the designated speaker first mentioned the change, he was overwhelmed. Salespeople demanded, ”What about commissions?” Engineers demanded, ”How will we release the binaries?” Everybody demanded, ”Are we insane?!”
All the speaker could say was, ”Let me finish. I promise we'll get to that! For now I just want us to look at the big picture!”
The problem was that there was no picture at all. It was as if he had said that everything in the garage was going to be rearranged, but n.o.body could look in the garage-all they could look at was their own little stack of boxes. It's too bad, because the message to deliver was simple and almost entirely visual-here's what we do now, here's what it will look like in the future, here are the parts that will be the most difficult to change-and could easily have been introduced with no more than two or three pictures.
But no pictures were ever made. These meetings went on for weeks, with the same result every time: shock followed by confusion followed by anxiety. In the end, momentum finally built up enough to where people either got on board or left the company. Today the company is well along the path to implementing the change, fine-tuning the new process, and waiting to see how the market reacts. But when I think about the time and money that was wasted in those meetings and the angst they generated, all I can think is how much could have been saved by simply laying out the big issues side by side on the table and letting everybody just take a look.
WHERE CAN WE PUT EVERYTHING SO THAT WE CAN LOOK AT IT?.
From a practical perspective, laying everything out where we can look at it means we need plenty of s.p.a.ce, so it's important to be prepared to spread things out and let the room get messy. Cover every table, chair, wall, and flat s.p.a.ce: It's amazing the connections that our eyes will find when given free reign to look everywhere.
When I was still working for the company that sent me to London, my team had to present a design to a client. The day before the presentation, I asked everyone to print out a copy of everything they had created, from notebook sketches to typeface tests to final designs, and pile them all in a stack in the conference room. When I came in early the next morning to set up the room, the table overflowed. When Susi, the receptionist, arrived thirty minutes later, the conference room looked like a war zone, with papers spread from end to end.
Susi freaked. Our boss Roger was notorious for neatness-especially in the conference room. Here I was, ankle-deep in paper and, even worse, taping things to the walls. When she saw that, Susi really went buggy. The only thing I could do was ask for her help.
It was a great day. When our clients arrived, a surprising thing happened. We couldn't start the meeting. As people moved into the room, they immediately gravitated toward the walls; fingers pointed, arms waved, designers and clients who had never spoken before spontaneously conversed-and great ideas emerged as people really looked at everything for the first time.
At some point during the presentation, I noticed that Roger was in the room. He smiled, and after the meeting he insisted that the work remain on the walls for several days, to let other people coming and going in the office take a look. In the end, the final design emerged not from a formal review, but from the perceptive comments of an accountant who couldn't stop looking at two of the drawings.
But big open s.p.a.ces aren't always needed to lay everything out. Many times the data we need to look at is just that: numbers, plain and simple. That's where spreadsheets come in. Although some Black Pen people may be convinced that numbers buried in rows and columns can never be ”visual,” spreadsheets are excellent tools for spreading out lots of data on a single sheet, where it can all be looked at and compared in one go.
Remember that instant 3-D model of the bowling alley that we created in our minds the moment we walked in? We were able to build it so quickly because our eyes could immediately discern the room's underlying coordinate system: which way was up, left, right, front, back. Since we live in a three-dimensional world, our eyes are really good at recognizing these coordinates, otherwise known as length, height, and depth. As an example, imagine holding a small box.
A box has three dimensions: length, height, and depth.
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