Charts and graphs are ubiquitous in business these days, appearing in client presentations, internal reports, and marketing materials. These data visualizations can be very powerful and persuasive given that they appeal to the roughly 40 percent of our brain involved in visual comprehension.

But good visualizations—ones that actually communicate what you want in a memorable way—are tricky to put together. And that creates some risk. “If you do it wrong, it’s a disaster. It can be complete spaghetti,” explains professor Steven Franconeri.

Today we’ll hear from Franconeri about how to avoid creating spaghetti.

How to Make Compelling Data Visualizations

Because Franconeri researches and teaches how to make good data visualizations, Insight turns to him often to catch up on best practices. If you missed his The Insightful Leader Live presentation or our podcast with him, for instance, you should check them out.

Below are a few key points that he stresses you should think about when creating your own visualizations.

Visualizations aren’t optional: It can be tempting to cram your presentation slides with all the important bullet points you want to convey. But Franconeri advises people to cut down on written information and use visuals instead. This is because our brains use the same systems to process speech and written language, so it’s impossible for your audience to listen to you and read your slides at the same time. But, he says, “you can look at pictures and listen at the same time at full blast.” To convince your audience of your point, “the visualization part is not optional.”

Avoid the curse of expertise: You know your data better than anyone. Which is great, but also a liability. You understand exactly the story you’re trying to tell with a visualization—but your audience may not interpret it the same way. So Franconeri suggests making a few different versions of a visualization and showing them to people. Ask them what they’re seeing, what patterns they notice, what conclusions they are drawing. Then adjust your visualizations based on that feedback. Presenters have “a curse of expertise,” Franconeri says. “They see what’s important in a graph, and they think the audience does too. They are typically wrong.”

Declutter and focus your visualizations: Two popular pieces of data-visualization advice state that you should declutter your charts and graphs by removing extraneous information, and you should focus your audience’s attention by highlighting the key info you want to convey. But do these techniques actually work? Yes … but only if you do them in tandem. That was the conclusion from recent research by Franconeri and colleagues. They found that combining decluttering and focus significantly increased comprehension. Compared with people who saw a decluttered-only graph, participants who were shown a graph that was both decluttered and focused were around 2.5 times more likely to capture the main conclusion and did a better job of redrawing the relevant trend.

What to Watch for in 2022

After 2020 and 2021, I’ve stopped trying to predict what the new year will bring. But I at least want to know what I should keep an eye on. So I asked several of our professors what business, economic or policy trends they’ll be watching closely in 2022. I’ll run their answers as I get them.

From Megan Kashner, clinical assistant professor and director of social impact: The global business community faces a range of pressures and public urgency from many fronts when it comes to climate change. How corporate leaders face and react to these forces and to the moment at hand will impact the pace and viability of climate-change mitigation overall. This deserves our attention beyond surface promises and claims and it’s what I’ll be watching as we step into the new year.

Moving from the buzz around COP26 and into the new year I’ll be focusing in on corporate responsibility, including net-zero commitments, science-based target-setting, and pledges towards a clean-energy transition. In particular, we all should be curious to see how business flows in aviation, transport, automotive and machinery, and even food reimagine themselves and their top-line decision-making in light of our changing climate and the urgent focus on mitigation.

Hand-in-hand with these commitments, I’ll be watching the emergence of the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation (ISSB) as it pulls together and codifies the quantification, transparency, and KPI-focus necessary to support the transitions I mentioned above. For the first time, we see true convergence towards generally accepted standards and reporting practices when it comes to corporate sustainability practices and outcomes. This could be a game-changer in addressing concerns about greenwashing, obfuscation, and overblown claims of corporate impact and progress against true and public climate and impact commitments.

The Insightful Leader is taking the next two weeks off. Happy New Year to you all, and we’ll see you in 2022!

—Emily Stone, senior editor
Kellogg Insight