Simplicity, Complexity, and Delicacy of a Dashboard Management

Let me start with an image of a traffic light. Green, orange, and red. Simple, complex, yet delicate tool. 

Among many indicators to assess whether someone is a truly expert or not, I believe two dashboard-questions can tell much more than others:

1. What do you put in your dashboard on what you manage?

2. How do you decide the color of the items, if shown in traffic light?   

If you are a simple driver like me, we naturally think what need to be in a dashboard of a car : speed, gas, odometer, etc. We are so much accustomed to see almost same items in a dashboard. Then how about an extremely complicated machine, something like a time-machine? How would you know if a rare scientist who claims he/she is a truly reliable inventor of such machine actually is a trust-worthy expert? I will ask the two questions above mentioned. What items do you put in the dashboard on the time-machine? How do you know if each item is green, orange, or red? If the person answers these questions clearly, I believe it reflects the person knows clearly how the overall functions are inter-related, and what levers actually drive each function.

Therefore I will put this “dashboard development and management capability” as a top criteria in deciding whether the person is qualified for the subject matter. If someone knows “what” need to be in the dashboard (namely critical KPIs), and knows “how” the mechanism of status decision (coloring of green, orange, and red) can be done, the next step can be expanded into “where” such information can be acquired.

 Alexander the Great, a king of the Kingdom of Macedon over 2,300 years ago, was known for a master of war. He was always in the front line of a battle, thus many think he simply was a great warrior. The fact is, he fought in the front line yet made amazingly strategic and agile decision quickly in such dynamic battle field. I believe it was because Alexander the Great had very effective dashboards of his own, in knowing the status of his army along with that of his opponents, to make a highly agile and relevant decision immediately. He was a courageous soldier himself, but I believe he fought in the very front of battles because it was the best place to collect information for his “battle dashboard”. General Douglas MacArthur also was famous in that he always went to the very front of battle grounds to make the right decision. No wonder it is highly encouraged for CEOs not to sit on nice-view offices but to be in daily business place and meet customers directly.

A decision on what to put in a dashboard for certain subject matter and on how to decide a color of an item in a dashboard requires highly skillful steps to understand entire mechanism on cause-and-effect and priorities. Even if you don’t get a satisfactory dashboard after multiple iterations, I believe such efforts of an individual and an organization will eventually make the person or organization stronger. The process will require an expertise of choosing relevant information, processing it in proper steps, and then communicating in a straightforward manner. If a CEO knows what five traffic lights show his/her company’s status and have confidence that the colors of those items are trustworthy, he/she can make an effective decisions quicker than anyone else, like we all know whether we are speeding or whether we are running out of gas, simply looking at a dashboard of our cars.     

Although such dashboard topic sounds like only for management areas, actually the approach can be extended even further to philosophical question: How is your life dashboard? What traffic lights do you pay attention and what are the colors? Are you paying attention only to your work and do you believe all those are in a green color? What about your health? Family? Are you certain the colors you put are actually representing the reality?

Knowing the importance of dashboard management in almost all aspects of my life, I tend to look at the simple traffic lights in the street in a different look while I drive.

Simple, complex, and delicate aspect of three colors. Yet we should pay attention to those before it gets too late.