Most dashboards are reports with better colors.
Charts describe. A decision needs a question, an answer, evidence and a name.
The layout is cleaner and the numbers arrive faster, but the screen does the job the monthly PDF used to do. When the meeting ends, everyone leaves holding the same decision they walked in with.
A chart is a description. It arranges the past so you can look at it. A decision is a choice between options, made by a named person, at the point where the answer changes. Reporting work builds the description and hopes the choice falls out of it.
An MIT Sloan Management Review article on decision-driven data analytics, by Bart de Langhe and Stefano Puntoni, states the symptom plainly: “Companies have more data than ever, but many executives say their data analytics initiatives do not provide actionable insights and produce disappointing results overall.” The authors name the pattern behind it. Analytics that starts from the data already at hand often leads decision makers to focus on the wrong question. Their correction: “Instead of finding a purpose for data, find data for a purpose.”
Instead of finding a purpose for data, find data for a purpose.
What a screen owes you
We build every screen around four parts, and we write all four in words before anyone opens a design tool.
- Question. One business question in plain words, at the top of the screen, not implied by a chart title.
- Answer. Yes, no, or not yet. The screen commits to one.
- Evidence. The few numbers that settle it, with nothing else competing for the space.
- Action. What to do next, and the name of the person who does it.
Leave one out and the screen drifts back into reporting. Drop the question and the numbers float. Drop the answer and you have a chart again. Drop the evidence and nobody believes the answer. Drop the name and nothing happens after the meeting.
An answer can be contradicted by the next set of numbers, and the person named next to the action has to live with it. That is uncomfortable, and it is the reason most screens quietly stop short of it.
A test that takes a minute
Read the top line of one of your screens out loud. If it describes last month, the screen is a report. If it is an answer, with evidence under it and a name attached to the next move, it is a decision screen. Count how many of each you have.
This is step 04, Accelerate. We build the platform around your decisions, not around charts, because a screen that cannot be read as an answer will be read as a report.