Whitespace

What’s the first thing you do mentally when viewing a table of data?

Most of us instinctively and immediately search for the primary meaning within the data – a trend, an exceptionally unique data point, differences in subsets of the data, etc.

This is natural and good. We’re searching for insight, to understand what the designer of the table intended us to see. But too often we stop there, quickly moving on to the next serving of information provided. In doing so, we allow the boundaries of the analysis – and thus the insight we might gain – to be defined and limited by others (the author of the table, in my example).

If great, independent thinking is our goal, we need to assess not only the data provided, but also that which isn’t. Why did the author include these seven specific variables? Are they the best seven? If we were to add three others, what would they be? And how might they change our conclusion?

Processing the data provided to us is easy and convenient. It’s also potentially limiting, and worse yet, promotes mental laziness. Considering what’s missing is a vital component to great thinking.

Look at the following table from the Wall Street Journal accompanying a story about GroupOn the day of its recent IPO. Are these the measurements and points of comparison you would have included?

This entry was posted in Presentations. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>