If it is a chart it must be good!

I’ve happily spent my morning refining a PowerPoint presentation for an executive at my client’s company. I am attempting to boil down nine months worth of work into 10 slides that show we’ve added value and reduced risk, oh and it has to contain pretty pictures. This is easy where we have data. I can make pie charts all day long that show wonderful things. But it got me thinking, if we’re consolidating nine months worth of work into ten slides for one mildly successful company, what to the leaders of the world’s largest countries get at the year end, or what kind of reports do they get after major incidents?

Is there some analyst somewhere turning Somali refugees into a scatter chart? Or is there someone in Darfur making bubble charts showing the movement of the various ethnic groups affected by the war? If it’s a bubble chart and pretty it can’t really mean people are dying can it?

Once I moved down this track of thinking I was wondering if there’s any convenient positioning of data going on as well as marginalizing human suffering into pretty pictures for our worlds executives. Looking at the statistics for Hurricane Katrina if you simply present that 1836 people died and 705 are still missing then it looks bad… but if you present it as the successful evacuation of 99.44% of the population is that a way to show that it wasn’t a complete cock-up? (Honestly, if you go by the numbers on Wikipedia of the population in June of 2006 of Orleans Parish and subtract the missing or dead, the percentage is the same as the purity of Ivory Soap… creepy.)

I’d like to see the bullet points on that slide

· Successful evacuation of 99.44% of Orleans Parish population
· National Guard response within agreed upon SLA (service level agreement)
· Slight logistical difficulties within downtown core for 72 hours following primary event
· Potential negative media coverage mitigated by Presidential flyover and FEMA response (actual impact continues to be assessed.)
· Recovery and Response activities underway