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Graphicacy: The Third Skill
From pre-kindergarten we build literacy skills taking us from ABCs to parsing nuances of sincerity and innuendo from words. Along the way we learn spelling, grammar, syntax, and how to build sentences, paragraphs, and essays. These skills are all assessed for clear input and output communication throughout school and in college entrance examinations.
Our numeracy skills are built on a system of numeric symbols (0 to 9) and operations that follow rules. By junior high school, we are productively combining numeracy and literacy as we tackle 'word problems,' and again we are tested.
The third major domain of thought and expression is 'graphicacy.' Appropriate skills build upon a foundation of graphic symbols and a system with rules and syntax, assuring clear graphic input and output communication, just as literacy and numeracy represent similar linguistic and quantitative skills.
The development of graphicacy skills is seen by visionary management as a core corporate competency. Employees have never formally learned these skills, nor have they been tested to assure they meet a standard for input and output communication, yet they are constantly called upon to create and understand graphic images. The organizations that are building this core competency will attain a clear competitive advantage in their marketplace. They will develop a common language of clear internal graphic communication, enabling them to understand and communicate the reality in their data better than their competition.
Graphicacy in Action
In corporate boardrooms today, one commonly sees two and three dimensions of data presented simultaneously; more rarely we see four or more dimensions - a major enhancement for understanding the reality in data. While graphicacy skills greatly improve the presentation of two and three data dimensions, they are critical for four or more.
A beautiful illustrative example of this is found in the Statistical Atlas of the United States published by the U.S. Census Office in 1903 (Fig. 1). Color printing was very expensive more than 100 years ago, so when successive pages show different color images of the same data, we can imagine the battles that were fought over which graphic format to use. These formats, easily produced by software available to anyone in business today, illustrate principles of graphicacy while highlighting major differences in what can be discerned.
Figure 1: Statistical Atlas of the United States, U.S. Census Office 1903, Plate 57
The pie charts in Fig. 1 visually support the headline "Foreign born at each census, with the proportion of each leading nationality: 1850 to 1900." The four dimensions are: time (1850-1900) as a name label; nationality at birth as a color key; percent of the foreign born population as an angle; and total number of the foreign born population as an area (or is it a diameter?). Can you track how any segment is gaining or losing share, in raw numbers or in proportion, and at what rate?
Figure 2: Statistical Atlas of the United States, U.S. Census Office 1903, Plate 58
The bar charts in Fig. 2 use the same four dimensions to visually support two different headlines. The first, "Total foreign born at each census, with the number of each leading nationality: 1850 to 1900," uses three dimensions: time (1850-1900) on an interval scale; nationality at birth as a color key; and total number of the foreign born population as a linear length of the bar. Now, can you track how any segment is gaining or losing share in raw numbers, and at what rate?
The second headline in Fig. 2 is "Proportion which each of the leading nationalities bears to the total foreign born at each census: 1850 to 1900." Three dimensions are still shown, but here the percent of foreign born has replaced the number. Now, can you track how any segment is gaining or losing share - as a proportion of the whole -and at what rate?
Relevance of Graphicacy Today
Every organization has dimensions such as products, services, or geographic regions that are measured on some scale over time. Just as in this pair of images, invariably an effort is made to understand these measures of performance both as raw numbers and as a contribution to the whole of the organization.
In the first line segment (light blue) in Fig. 2 (German born), it is clear that the raw numbers have been dramatically increasing in the four decades since 1850, with a slight drop-off in 1900, yet, as a percent of the whole, this segment has been barely holding its own.
In the second line segment (salmon) in Fig. 2 (Irish born), the raw numbers have been relatively constant over the four decades since 1850, with a slight drop-off in 1900. Yet as a percent of the whole, this segment has been dramatically decreasing.
The above two observations on the interaction of numbers and proportions are practically impossible to make from Fig. 1. Those with graphicacy skills know that proportional pie charts, while eye-catching, offer little effective communication, and avoid using them in the conference room.
While one would never expect to develop years of literacy skills through a single magazine column, the same is true for graphicacy skills; here though are some highlights:
- Visualizing a time dimension on an interval scale (Fig. 2) allows a higher bandwidth of communication than having this dimension only as a name label (Fig. 1).
- Visualizing ratio dimensions on linear scales (Fig. 2) is much easier and more precise than using angles.
- Attempting to visualize a ratio dimension by using area or diameter (size of pies in Fig. 1) always obscures clear communication.
Few of us can recite all the rules of grammar we learned on our path to literacy, yet we use good grammer to communicate effectively in the boardroom. The same high level of operational performance will be true of our graphics when organizations make graphicacy a required skill for management decision-making.
Howard A. Spielman, M.B.A., Ph.D., President of Management Semiotics International Inc., can be reached at HASpielman@ManagementSemiotics.com.
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