Good Charts by Scott Berinato

Author:Scott Berinato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2016-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

MAKING A CASE

For managers, it’s often not enough to make a chart that’s simply accurate. You’re trying to reveal truths dormant in the data; to make a case; compete for attention, resources, and money; make a pitch to clients; recruit new customers; sway an opinion or help to form one. You don’t just want people to believe the chart is true—you want it to lead to action, suggest a way forward.

Persuasion science defines three strategies we use to influence behavior or thinking: economic (carrots and sticks), social (everybody else is doing it), and environmental (relaxing music at the dentist). Visualization falls for the most part into the third category. Steve J. Martin, a heavyweight in the field and a coauthor of several books on influence and persuasion, provides a legion of examples from his and others’ research of how environmental persuasion strategies work.1 For example, a professor doubled the number of people who were willing to participate in a survey by attaching a handwritten note to the request.2 Hotels increased the reuse of towels by 25% when they changed the wording of placards next to the towels.3 People serve themselves less food when the color of a plate contrasts with the color of the food.4

The mechanisms by which information visualizations persuade us are similarly subtle and equally powerful. “Whilst we’d like to think that our decisions are the result of effortful cognition, the reality is somewhat different,” Martin writes. “Much of our behaviour is driven by unconscious cues present in our environment.”

We’re veering away from the data scientists now. It’s often their job to show all the data—to be as objective as possible and present everything that’s available for analysis. This makes sense for them and for us when we’re doing exploratory visualization. It’s for fact-finding, hypothesis-testing, and analysis. This chapter focuses on those times when visual communication needs to sway an audience and effect change.

Even if we don’t think much about it, we recognize the distinction between conveying information and persuading, and we allow for both types of communication. A play-by-play announcer calls the action, describing mostly what’s actually happening on the field; a color commentator influences our sense of the game’s narrative. A house for sale can be accurately described as “2,400 square feet with 4 bedrooms and 2 baths on 1.2 acres” or, to make you want it more, as “a huge, open-concept Colonial with a brand-new modern kitchen, on a secluded, wooded lot with spectacular views.” What you may call a used car, the person hoping you’ll buy it calls pre-owned. Newspapers publish both reported stories and op-eds about the same topic. Compare these sentences:

Reported story Op-ed

The budget again seeks to retire the popular A-10 “Warthog” close air support aircraft for savings of $382 million, a move sure to anger Congress, which rejected a similar proposal last year.5 I appreciate the budget pressures that the Pentagon faces these days. But those arguments have serious flaws—and if we retire the A-10 before a replacement is developed, American troops will die.

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