Using Data Visualizations To Build Alignment

Artfully expressed data can enhance team alignment by connecting people to a project’s objectives and progress. While marketing often focuses on external visuals, beautifully designed internal artifacts can add significant value. Data visualizations can convey key project milestones, performance metrics, and team contributions, fostering a sense of unity and purpose. Here’s a guide on applying design thinking and service design principles to align your teams around project achievements, goals, and collaborative efforts.

APPLYING DESIGN THINKING TO DATA VISUALIZATION

The design thinking process begins with understanding the user.

Empathize: Start by understanding your team’s data needs and pain points. What are the key insights or gaps they’re struggling to understand?

Define: Clearly define the goals of your data visualization. What story are you trying to tell, and who is your audience?

Ideate: Collaborate with a cross-functional team to brainstorm creative ways to present the data. Use divergent thinking to explore a variety of visual formats.

Prototype: Create multiple drafts of your visualizations. Try different formats and test them with a small group of stakeholders to see what resonates.

Test & Iterate: Gather feedback from your team and refine your visualization based on their insights. The process is non-linear, so be open to revisiting earlier stages.

ASSEMBLE YOUR DATA VISUALIZATION TEAM

Design thinking is inherently collaborative. You need a cross-functional team to work through the data, design, and storytelling processes. Assemble key players like a graphic designer, a project director, and potentially a video producer for animations. Importantly, include a data analyst to provide insights that will inform the story. In this phase, you are leveraging the "Ideate" phase of design thinking—bringing diverse minds together to generate ideas on how to convey data most effectively.

THINK ABOUT THE STORY

In design thinking, storytelling is central. When creating data visualizations, think of it as building a narrative. In my previous career as the owner of an experiential travel company, I designed graphs for our Annual Meeting that told stories about our performance. Looking at the graphs, I’d think about the infinite narrative possibilities, remembering that a compelling narrative often includes a conflict. I would decide on the sequence of this narrative, and also consider that what is included can be just as powerful as what is excluded.

The stories presented from those data visualizations would elicit different responses for employees, like surprise, disappointment, belonging or pride for having contributed to the success of the company.

Just like in service design, a well-crafted narrative engages the audience and prompts emotional responses such as pride, surprise, or motivation. As part of the "Prototype" phase, visualize the impact of different stories and experiment with what to include or exclude to create the most compelling narrative.

Here is an animated example of a data visualization that builds a story. And while it isn't explicitly stated, "you" the viewer naturally see yourself in it to reflect on your place in the world. <iframe src="https://www.dhirubhai.net/embed/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7016683164437741568" height="676" width="504" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" title="Embedded post"></iframe>

The main takeaway here: the process of uncovering the narrative is rarely linear. Sometimes it may start with a dataset, and other times you may begin with a topic and explore from there. If you’d like to go deep into design methods for data visualizations, information designer and artist Giorgia Lupi generously elucidates her process of “Multi-layered Storytelling Through Info-spatial Compositions.”?

CHOOSE YOUR TOOLS

In the design thinking framework, choosing the right tools is key to realizing your vision. I used Google Charts for the simple data visualizations I described above. But if you need interactive, animated presentations, tools like Tableau or Chartist can help you create engaging visuals. Always consider the level of complexity needed to fit your audience’s needs and how it aligns with the story you’re trying to tell. Tableau also has a simple guide to building a data-driven culture.??

HOW TO SHARE YOUR DATA VISUALIZATIONS TO BUILD ALIGNMENT

1. Craft a Narrative

In design thinking, storytelling is crucial for building empathy and alignment. Show a timeline with key quantitative data organized chronologically, telling the story of a project, product, or company’s journey. Parameters might include sales metrics, geographic expansion, or team growth. By overlaying different datasets, you can reveal deeper connections that explain a company’s evolution. This example below illustrates a multi-dimensional story of innovation through dynamic visualizations:

2. Understanding Company Structure Through Discovery and Mapping

In service design, jumping straight to solutions can lead to missed opportunities or superficial fixes. Instead, we first employ discovery research to fully understand the problem. This process aligns with the Empathize and Define phases of design thinking, where a comprehensive understanding of the system is essential before moving forward with ideation.

Zooming out for a broad perspective and zooming in for granular detail is a key balance throughout the design process. One powerful way to visualize and explore company structure is through tools like ecosystem maps and stakeholder maps.

• Ecosystem Maps: These maps provide a holistic view of interconnected systems, showing relationships between various entities such as departments, external partners, and customers. They allow for the identification of gaps, redundancies, and opportunities for innovation. This zoomed-out perspective is critical for seeing the larger picture of how different components interact within the organization.
• Stakeholder Maps: Stakeholder maps zoom in on the people involved in or affected by a service. By mapping stakeholders, we can better understand their needs, roles, and influences. This ensures alignment across teams and helps foster a collaborative approach to solving complex challenges. These maps often reveal power structures and unspoken dynamics that can affect decision-making and problem-solving.

For larger organizations, illustrating the structure with a birds-eye view of different departments, products, or subsidiaries can bring clarity. A great historical example is this 1957 infographic from Disney, which shows how company divisions were structured and how they interacted with one another, offering valuable insights into corporate dynamics.

3. Employee Survey Results

In design thinking, gaining deep insights from users (in this case, employees) is critical for creating meaningful change. Graphs and data visualizations from engagement or satisfaction surveys can reveal valuable patterns. For example, word clouds can be used to visualize frequently chosen descriptive words, making abstract feedback more tangible and easier to interpret. These visualizations align with the Empathize phase, where uncovering key themes helps you better understand employee needs.

When conducting surveys to build alignment, it’s important to have a clear delivery and feedback strategy in place. Analyzing survey results can highlight areas for improvement, which should be paired with actionable changes based on feedback. This iterative process, aligned with the Test and Iterate phases of design thinking, ensures continuous enhancement of the employee experience.

4. Data Visualization Events

Have teams create data visualizations as a community building activity with a hackathon or lunch and learn event. Make it fun and possibly competitive, and use the event to build a data-driven culture.

INSPIRATION FOR YOUR PROJECT

Enjoying the data visualization process can enhance viewer engagement. Here’s some inspo, perhaps to support ideation.

Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names - Demonstrates word relationships and categorizations.

Crazy Market Bubbles - Exemplifies a chronological narrative expressed with macro and micro perspectives.

Culture 500 Project - Charts dimensions of organizational culture based on employee reviews.

Infographic of Infographics - Gives great inspiration for various graphics and data organization.

DISTRIBUTE AND ITERATE

Using design thinking's iterative approach, share your visualizations with teams via Slack, email, or as part of a presentation. Gather feedback, gauge engagement, and adjust based on insights. Consider delivering physical copies to remote workers as a tangible reminder of their role in the broader story. This fosters alignment across all team members and ensures the visualization remains impactful over time.