Visualize Data to Make Decisions

We like to talk about being data-driven in our thinking. But when teams have to make decisions, especially difficult ones, it's easy to get buried in so much data that we can't possibly make sense of it. This is usually because the data hasn't been processed in a way to help us make decisions. This is almost entirely a design problem.

One problem I see over and over again is that we tend to collect way too much information, too many reports, and too many sources of data to make any sense of it. Instead what we need to do it to think about what we need to see before we go looking for ways to see the situation in that way. We need to become much more back-to-front in our thought process.

This is what leads to the idea that visual thinking and visual intelligence is ultimately a design problem. What we should be doing is designing visual solutions before we build them. We have to "imagine the end" before we begin to build anything.