In my recent article
on Adding Meaning and Value to Information, I summarized the processes,
'end-products' and tools that we use to understand, to derive meaning
from information. A lot of the end-products and tools mentioned in that
article are visualizations, organizations of information into tableaux.
Such visualizations, like the extraordinary one above from Lawrence
Livermore National Lab that effectively captures forty pages of data on
a single page, not only add meaning and help us understand, they are
useful for capturing and holding our attention (long enough to
understand) in the first place.
Here's a very subjective chart
showing 25 methods of attracting attention to written material, how
successful, on average, these methods are at grabbing ("eyeballs") and
holding ("stickiness") our attention, and how much, on average, these
methods actually add to reader comprehension:
This
chart is a (mediocre) example of the consultant's classic '2x2' chart
-- showing the correlation (or lack thereof) between two variables.
What it shows is that what gets our attention is not necessarily what
is most meaningful to us, or useful to us in our comprehension or
learning. In business there is a great passion for benchmarks, for
example ("an efficient business should turn over its receivables at
least x times per year; Wal-Mart manages a standard-setting y
times") and their publication therefore often attracts a lot of
attention. But benchmarks are meaningless without context, and from
personal experience I've learned not to put much stake in them. At the
other extreme, single frame presentations (massive art-gallery-style
graphics that explain an entire concept sequentially around the walls
of a room), ecolanguage, and other animated visualizations can convey a
vast amount of information and meaning, but their complexity is
initially intimidating and off-putting to many people. Likewise, one
can learn a great deal from wikis, which aggregate the collective
wisdom of many participants, but they are (generally) visually ugly,
not the kind of thing that grabs your attention.
So what is it
about the media and techniques at the right end of the chart above that
grabs our attention, even when they may not have much to say? They say
brevity is the soul of wit, and what characterizes the
attention-getters most, I think, is their conciseness.
Even the energy chart at the top of this post, while it takes some
effort to absorb, is concise compared to the mind-numbing and
un-navigable forty pages of tables it effectively replaces. We are attracted to information that is simple, memorable and easy to absorb. That makes us suckers, alas, for oversimplifications, a weakness that politicians and corporate marketers exploit well, and which the mainstream media pander to.
We are likewise attracted to information that engages us interactively in its interpretation and use.
When we see tables of survey results we compare where we stand versus
the respondents in the survey. We print out the checklists so we can
check off each box later. We take self-quizzes and participate in
(well-designed and interesting) polls and surveys, even the most inane
ones -- it's fun, and it's
almost as if we can't help ourselves. We bookmark top 10 lists and
memorize and forward on to others clever, pithy quotes, because they're
memorable and make us sound witty and profound by association.
Crafting
visualizations and other reorganizations and syntheses of information
in such a way that they are both attractive and meaningful takes a rare
talent, and it is more an art than a science. The energy chart at the
top of this article, or the famous Charles Menard graphic depicting Napoleon's losses
on his march to Russia, are works of extraordinary thought, skill and
imagination. There is no course that teaches you how to invent such
brilliant, compelling and meaningful representations of mounds of tedious data. There should be, however. These are true masterpieces.
Sometimes
a representation of information can be compelling because it resonates
with the worldviews, the ways of perceiving and understanding, of
others. The following systems thinking graphic of mine, showing the
vicious cycle of depression, has popped up all over the Internet since
I posted it a couple of years ago:
Senge's systems thinking diagrams are one of the most powerful means of showing
causality, correlation and information relationships. We are innately
programmed to study, and to want to understand, causal relationships --
that is how we and all creatures 'solve' problems. So any technique that
allows us to capture and convey, simply and intuitively, such relationships is
bound to be powerful and appealing. We all need to learn, and schools
need to teach, systems thinking, mindmapping and other easily-learnable
visualization techniques, and to encourage and employ those rare
imaginative, creative, artistic people who have the knack for
visualizing more complicated information and relationships.
But just
as we are prone to oversimplifying complex information, we need to take
care not to try to apply systems thinking, mindmapping and other
techniques where they are not appropriate. Among the features of
complex systems are the impossibility of knowing all the variables, the
absence of simple causal relationships, and the inability of predicting
outcomes in such systems. A systems thinking diagram of any social or
ecological system (e.g. one that purported to show 'the
solutions' to global poverty) would necessarily be incomplete and
misleading, a dangerous oversimplification that would inevitably lead
to ineffective or even dysfunctional decisions and actions.
Unfortunately, while our intuition and subconscious (if we listen to
them and trust them) are pretty good tools for dealing with complex
system problems and challenges, I know of no visualization or similar
tool that is helpful in such situations. The closest thing I know of
to a shareable, social tool that helps us address complex situations is
narrative, the detailed, context-rich stories that indigenous peoples
(and the rest of us, if we're wise, and if we have the discipline to
listen) tell each other. Open Space and other methodologies for
grappling with 'wicked' problems depend significantly
on story-telling as a means of knowledge transfer, learning, and hence
personal decision-making in such situations.
If you know of other tools, techniques and methodologies that work well in complex systems, please let me know. (That's another way of getting people's attention: asking questions and asking for help -- again because it engages us to interact.)
Why are the tools and techniques in the top
half of the attention/meaning chart above so effective at adding
meaning and understanding to information? I think this is relatively
easy to explain: show me don't tell
me. We understand better when we're shown what something means, or how
to do something, rather than just told. All of these
high-meaning-adding tools demonstrate rather than simply relating meaning, which ties directly into the cognitive learning processes we have used since we first appeared on the planet.
What
other tools exist, and what else can we do, as writers with important
information to convey, to catch readers' attention (honestly, not
deceptively), and to demonstrate its meaning to them without oversimplifying?
If you had a friend who's idea of interesting information was what Brad
Pitt's baby had for breakfast today, or the stuff in the local crime
blotter, how would you go about getting their attention on global
warming, or disease pandemic preparation, or the End of Oil, or ending
global poverty, and then conveying these terribly complex challenges
and some of the approaches that might address them, in a way that would
have meaning to them?
If we can answer that question, it could change everything.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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