Have you ever spent the majority of a meeting trying to figure out what’s on the slides? Ever have an audience start drawing conclusions or overfocusing on parts of your slide that aren’t relevant to your point? Both of these scenarios occur because we tend to just show the data. People are missing the good ideas that are further down the agenda and that inevitably get pushed to the next quarter’s meeting because decision-makers spent too long trying to dig through numbers.
There are other unintended consequences to just showing data. It can cause confusion, which often leads to inaction. Data confusion and lack of action occur every day in corporations all over the globe.
Poor Visualizations Make for Bad Business
Here’s an example: A few years back, a major car company was sued for its failure to act on a known safety issue. It had a problem with an ignition switch that caused car engines to turn off even while the cars were being driven if the keys jingled in a certain way. A dead engine also meant no power steering or airbag deployment. As one would expect, people died as a result.
The company knew about this issue for a long time before it was forced to take action. An investigation into what the automaker knew and when detailed how people inside the company discussed the matter in meetings early on. When you look at the actual meeting presentations, you can see that the slides themselves are dry, technical and nearly indecipherable.