When the Vision is clear, strategy is easy!

Not long ago, the ability to create smart data visualizations, or data viz, was a nice-to-have skill. For the most part, it benefited design- and data-minded managers who made a deliberate decision to invest in acquiring it. That’s changed. Now visual communication is a must-have skill for all managers, because more and more often, it’s the only way to make sense of the work they do.

Data is the primary force behind this shift. Decision making increasingly relies on data, which comes at us with such overwhelming velocity, and in such volume, that we can’t comprehend it without some layer of abstraction, such as a visual one.

Without visualization, detecting the inefficiencies hidden in the patterns and anomalies of that data would be an impossible slog. But even information that’s not statistical demands visual expression. Complex systems — business process workflows, for example, or the way customers move through a store — are hard to understand, much less fix, if you can’t first see them.

Thanks to the internet and a growing number of affordable tools, translating information into visuals is now easy (and cheap) for everyone, regardless of data skills or design skills. This is largely a positive development.

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