Jenkins idj article 2010 - final

This is a contribution from Information Design Journal 17:3
© 2009. John Benjamins Publishing Company
This electronic file may not be altered in any way.
The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of
offprints, for their personal use only.
Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students
and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet.
For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the
Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com).
Please contact rights@benjamins.nl or consult our website: www.benjamins.com
Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com
John Benjamins Publishing Company

Information Design Journal 17(3), 188–201
© 2009 John Benjamins Publishing Company
doi: 10.1075/idj.17.3.04jen
188
Julian Jenkins
From data and measures to meaningful decisions
Designing useful information for senior managers and boards
Keywords: decision-making, analytics, rhetoric, wicked
problems, meaning-making, information overload
Analytical approaches to organizational decision-
making, with their heavy reliance on data, measures
and increasingly sophisticated IT, work well for solving
tame problems, but not for the wicked problems which
increasingly confront organizational and government
decision-makers. An alternative approach, drawing on
the ancient tradition of rhetoric and focusing on the
way that meaning is constructed and communicated,
opens up new horizons for enabling decision-makers to
overcome the problem of information overload and make
good decisions. Applying this approach opens up new
opportunities for information design to play a crucial role
in organizational decision-making.
One of the factors that has not been addressed fully in
the wake of the global financial crisis is the extent to
which the poor decisions that led to some spectacular
corporate failures and to massive write-downs in
value were caused by information overload and
poor information design. Blaming the crisis on slack
regulation and greedy corporate cowboys may well mask
a much more fundamental problem, which will not
be solved by imposing more regulation and reining in
executive pay packets.
I gained a strong appreciation of the nature of the
information problem late in 2008, when I interviewed
a prominent medical practitioner and academic about
her role as a member of the Board Risk Committee for a
large Australian corporation, and, more specifically, about
the pack of papers she was accustomed to receiving a
week in advance of each Committee meeting. The most
recent set of papers consisted of no less than 400 printed
pages, with over 60 discrete documents and a wide
variety of formats – and my interviewee calculated that
she regularly spent up to nine hours reading all these
documents in preparation for the two-hour Committee
meeting.
When I asked her how confident she felt about her
understanding of the organization’s risk systems and
processes, however, she only rated it about 40–60%,
in spite of the strong personal interest she had taken
in risk over a number of years. Not surprisingly, she
was dissatisfied with her experience as a user of the
information, because her hours of effort in reading the
papers were not generating the desired rewards in terms
of clarity and insight. Clearly, a lack of intelligence was
not the issue; the problem lay with the scale and format
of the information, which was clogging up her cognitive
capacity and dumbing her down.
A question mark over how much the members of a
Board Risk Committee understand about the systems

All rights reserved
Julian Jenkins • From data and measures to meaningful decisions idj 17(3), 2009, 188-201
189
and processes they are responsible for overseeing
would be a cause for concern at any point, but it was
particularly worrying given the fact that the papers we
were discussing were dated October 2008, right at the
height of the near-meltdown of the global financial
system.Yet nowhere in the 400 pages of text was there
any obvious reference to the clear and present dangers
that were threatening the very existence of this particular
organization. If this scenario is indicative of the general
state of affairs in large organizations, then there is
something critically amiss in the state of organizational
information and decision-making.
The growing scope of management
information
You have to feel sorry for your average senior executive
or board member. Not so long ago, large corporations
were managed with little more than the financial
accounts as the only real source of data that a decision-
maker needed to worry about. Over the last twenty years
or so, though, there has been an increasing awareness of
the need to take a more holistic approach to measuring
the performance of the business. The introduction of
new buzzwords into the management lexicon, such as
“triple bottom line”,“balanced scorecards” and“corporate
social responsibility”, reflects an increased recognition of
the need to look beyond just profit and loss to consider a
much wider range of factors that indicate the health and
well-being of the company.
Not only has the range of topics on which data is
being collected significantly expanded, but the scope and
scale of many organizations have increased dramatically
as we have moved towards a globalized economy. Many
of today’s organizations are reporting across not just
multiple business units and locations, but multiple
geographies, cultures, markets and industries – hence the
ever-increasing volume of information and diversity of
document formats which are dramatically increasing the
cognitive workload for the organizational decision-maker.
On top of all this, every corporate scandal or
economic crisis seems to generate another layer of
external regulation, so that many of the meetings held
by boards and management teams are dominated
by compliance documentation.Whether or not this
additional regulation is desirable or necessary is a moot
point; the issue is that more and more trees are being
added to the forest of management information (almost
literally, given the amount of paper being consumed),
without any corresponding increase in the time or
cognitive capacity available to decision-makers to process
everything they are being asked and expected to read.
As America’s intelligence agencies discovered in
the wake of 9/11, the sheer volume of information that
has to be processed itself creates a risk that important
insights and patterns will be overlooked. In the wake of
the global financial crisis, we can probably say the same
about organizational decision-making – whether in the
context of government agencies or large corporations.
When business was booming and the economy was
looking strong, it was easy to overlook the gaps inFigure 1. The growing scope of corporate information.

All rights reserved
190
the capability of decision-makers to fully process and
understand the reams of data and information being
presented to them. Now we are all too aware of just how
many risks are created when you are buried so deep in
the data and detail that you no longer have a clear view
of the whole picture.
Recognizing the problem of information overload is
easy; knowing how to respond is much more difficult.
There is no human equivalent to Moore’s law, which
describes the long-term trend that computer storage
capacity doubles every two years. In effect, this means
that there are no real constraints on the volume of
information that can be generated and stored, but there
are very definite constraints on human processing
capability.
We should not just blame the computer revolution
for the position we now find ourselves in, however.
Computers are simply a technology that enables
the phenomenon of information overload to occur.
Underpinning this whole problem is a much deeper
issue, a fundamental paradigm for how we have chosen
to manage organizations using information. In order
to find new ways to solve the problem of information
overload, we need to understand the underlying
paradigm, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and
consider whether there are alternative frameworks of
thinking that could open up some new approaches. In
the process, we may well discover some important new
horizons and opportunities for information design to
play a crucial role in creating value for organizational
decision-makers.
The prevailing information paradigm
The origins of the current paradigm for managing large
organizations are rooted very firmly in the early stages of
the modern industrial age. One of the early champions
of the approach that we now take for granted as the
way to manage an organization was Sylvanus Thayer,
the Superintendent of the US military academy at West
Point from 1817 to 1833. Inspired by a trip to the École
Polytechnique in Paris, he applied a rigorous engineering
mindset to running the academy based on relentless
numerical measurement of student performance and
regular reporting (daily, weekly and monthly) by those
filling his newly invented role of line manager – with the
result that he could manage the academy without having
to leave his office. These methods were inculcated into a
generation of graduates, who were to play a major role in
guiding the Union side to success in the American Civil
War, thanks to their superior logistical skill in manag-
ing supply lines and co-coordinating troop movements
(Hoskin, Macve & Stone, 2006, pp. 168–179).
More intriguingly, several graduates of West Point
also made their mark in the burgeoning world of
the industrial corporation. Daniel Tyler (Springfield
Armory), George W.Whistler (Western Railroad) and
Herman Haupt (Pennsylvania Railroad) all became
leading pioneers of modern“managerialism” and major
contributors to the success of the organizations they
worked for.With no formal business training to draw on,
it was their experience of Thayer’s organizational culture
at West Point that informed their approach to manage-
ment – an approach that became embedded as the
prevailing paradigm in the modern business enterprise
(Hoskin et al., 2006, pp. 170–171).
Now there is no doubt that the methods pioneered
by Thayer and taken by his students out into the wider
world have played an important role in the rise and
success of the modern organization. The analytical
methods and engineering mindsets which they employed
have enjoyed substantial success in creating some of
the most important elements of modern industrial
production, such as efficient supply chains and produc-
tion lines, rigorous examination and testing of product
quality, technological innovation and financial controls.

All rights reserved
191
Total Quality Management, Process Engineering and Six
Sigma are all modern management approaches rooted
firmly in this tradition.
However, much has changed in the business and
wider cultural landscape since Thayer laid the founda-
tions of modern management in the early nineteenth
century, culminating with some paradigm-shifting
developments towards the end of the twentieth century.
The dominant metaphor at the center of the economy
and society is no longer the machine, but the web. The
manufacturing economy which fuelled the Industrial
Revolution has given way to a knowledge- and service-
based economy as the engine of future growth, and
the key driver of business success is no longer efficient
production lines, but the quality, simplicity and emotion-
al resonance of the customer experience. Moreover, we
have come to recognize that hierarchical organizations
based on command and control are out of step with an
interconnected world, where real power rests in inter-
personal influence far more than in formal authority
structures.Why else would politicians have embraced
Twitter so enthusiastically?
If the world has changed so much, then shouldn’t we
be asking ourselves whether our information paradigms
and decision-making practices need just as radical an
overhaul to cope with the new realities and increased
complexities of the twenty-first-century environment?
The problem is not with analytical methods per se;
they still have much value to contribute to the world. The
key issue is whether they are the right methods to apply
to the sorts of questions that organizational and govern-
ment decision-makers are increasingly confronted with.
To understand that point, we need to recognize that not
all problem spaces are the same, and that we need more
than one problem-solving methodology in our toolkit to
work effectively in the world.
Two types of problems and two intellectual
toolkits
Long before the advent of the Internet, this issue was
understood and addressed by none other than the
ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who recognized
that there are two types of problem in the world: those
where“things cannot be other than they are”, and those
where“things can be other than they are” (Golsby-Smith,
2001, pp. 195–202). Situations where things cannot be
other than they are include much of the natural world,
where order is fixed by laws of physics, chemistry and
biology; and also the linear world of machines, which
are governed by processes of cause and effect. In both
of these situations, the scientific method and analysis
(which Aristotle was also instrumental in founding) can
be applied admirably as a basis for knowledge. Objective
measurement of a fixed reality (such as the distance
between the earth and the sun at a given point in time,
or the past performance of a Formula 1 racer) can be
made with considerable confidence and used to predict
future reality (in the former case) or modify future
performance (in the latter case).
However,Aristotle was wise enough to realize
that the use of objective data processed via rational
intelligence was not an adequate basis of knowledge for
all the problems in the world. He recognized that there
was a whole different class of problems that required
an entirely different epistemological approach – one
where“things can be other than they are”. These types of
problems are much more fluid in nature, not governed by
natural laws or objective facts, but by open possibilities
and multiple options. In short, this is the realm of human
decision-making.
A much more modern articulation of a similar
epistemological insight is found in Horst Rittel’s
distinction between tame and wicked problems (1973,
pp. 155–169). Tame problems are those that can be

All rights reserved
192
addressed in a relatively linear way to achieve a specific,
quantifiable objective. Consider, for example, travel to
the moon. For centuries, such a notion was in the realm
of fancy, or mystery. But careful application of analytical
methods (involving both gathering of objective data
and rational deduction of the laws of physics, such
as gravity and aerodynamics), combined with the
technological know-how to build a reliable machine fit
for the intended purpose, enabled mankind to find a
solution to the problem and achieve what had seemed
an impossible goal.
Flying to the moon is the sort of problem that the
scientific method is well equipped to solve. The nature
of the problem may be incredibly complicated and
technically difficult, but with sufficient perseverance,
number-crunching and brainpower, it is possible to
develop a“correct” answer – correct in the sense that
it is viable and will deliver the intended outcome. The
progression of science and in particular of technology is
a process of taking problems that seem intractable and
making them achievable – of moving from mystery to
repeatable algorithms (Martin, 2004, pp. 7–10).
However, wicked problems are of a different order
altogether. They are fluid and highly contextual, with very
little in the way of fixed laws or measurable parameters
that can be reliably used to solve the problem.Wicked
problems are multilayered and not readily reducible
to clear notions of cause and effect; the nature of the
problem itself is a matter of subjective perception or
interpretation.Wicked problems exist within complex
systems with multiple interdependencies, so that it is
almost impossible to predict in advance what the exact
result will be of any intervention. There are no“correct”
answers, only actions with better or worse consequences.
And once you have taken a step in a particular direction,
the starting conditions have changed, so that you can
never grapple with the same problem in exactly the same
formulation twice.
Wicked problems are seldom answered. Twenty years
ago, Francis Fukuyama boldly proclaimed the“end of
history” (Fukuyama, 1993), by which he meant that the
perennial wicked problem of which form of government
and economy worked best was finally on the verge of
being tamed. That was in the halcyon days after the
Cold War, before the Bush administration sullied the
reputation of Western liberalism and the global financial
crisis brought capitalism to its knees. In other words, just
when you think you have a wicked problem contained,
new dimensions of wickedness emerge – the complexity
can never be turned into an algorithm.
Most of the problems that confront us in human
society are wicked problems – issues such as how to
respond to climate change, how to create a lasting
peace in Afghanistan, how to stimulate an economy
in recession, how to bring up teenagers. Equally, many
of the strategic issues in today’s globalized business
environment are wicked problems – whether it is
establishing an enduring brand identity, re-engaging
a disillusioned workforce, fostering productive
collaborative relationships with governments and major
clients, creating a culture of innovation or identifying
the most compelling strategic pathway through a global
economic crisis. To believe that we can solve these
problems using the thinking tools, information styles and
decision-making processes of the old management order
is a recipe for disaster.
If nothing else, the global financial crisis has done
us a big favor in two key respects – it has highlighted
all too powerfully the wickedness and non-linear
interconnectedness of the modern business environment,
and has exposed the limitations of information and
quantitative analysis to save us from our own folly. Now
more than ever we need to find new ways of thinking
and decision-making.
It’s not as if we have to come up with an entirely
new intellectual toolkit. Long before the rise of data and

All rights reserved
193
computers as the dominant tools for decision-making,
whole civilizations were built on a different set of
thinking processes, based not in objective measurement
of current realities, but in argument and persuasion
about future possibilities. Not only did Aristotle
recognize that there are two types of problem in the
world, but he also bequeathed us two problem-solving
methodologies. It is an indication of the overwhelming
predominance of the scientific world view in Western
culture that the term“rhetoric” has been reduced to a
pejorative, often associated with the adjective“empty”,
rather than being celebrated, in the terms of Aristotle
and two thousand years of scholarly tradition that
followed him, as a fundamental and creative thinking art.
The weakness of organizational decision-making in
today’s world can be attributed in part to the substantial
neglect of the study of rhetoric – that is, study of the
ways in which arguments can and should be constructed,
study of the skills of asking penetrating questions, study
of the social processes and interactions that shape the
way decisions are made. Using rhetoric as our toolkit
opens up a whole range of subjective, interpersonal
and value-laden factors that are deliberately (though
somewhat disingenuously) discarded from the analytical
toolkit.
Moving to a rhetorical approach to
information and decision-making
The traditional response of many organizations and
agencies when confronted with an information problem
is to invest large sums of money in building bigger and
better IT systems, since improving our technology is our
preferred answer to most of the problems we confront
in the modern world. But in many respects, the ever-
increasing power and storage capacity of computers, and
the proliferation of information channels spawned in
the digital era, form a major contributor to the problem
of information overload. Expanding the range of data to
be collected, working hard to improve data accuracy and
align measures across organizations, and, increasingly,
building data warehouses in which to house all this
information, while valid activities in themselves, are not
going to solve the fundamental problems of information
overload.
So, what if we shifted our paradigm and applied a
rhetorical approach to the issues around information
and decision-making in the modern organization? How
would it change things?
Figure 2. Two types of thinking toolkit. Figure 3. An analytical approach to decision-making.

All rights reserved
194
For a start, we would stop treating senior manag-
ers and boards like human supercomputers, expected
to process larger and larger volumes of information in
smaller and smaller timeframes, and embrace a much
more basic and profound view of human beings as being
meaning-makers. The dominant refrain right through my
interview with the member of the Board Risk Commit-
tee, in response to the masses of information she was
being asked to process, was“but what does it mean?” Her
problem was not with understanding any of the individ-
ual parts or specific topics that she encountered, but in
being able to bring them together into a coherent whole,
and to discern their relative significance and meaning.
If we make“meaning-making” our focus, we can
envisage a very different decision-making pathway, with
a number of new elements to consider in the process.
A conceptual framework
Meaning-making begins with a conceptual framework,
a gestalt of the system or set of processes that you are
administering. Most system or process diagrams tend to
be rather confusing, engineering-inspired flow charts,
but that is not what we mean here. Rather, people need a
high-level mental map which enables us to locate infor-
mation and recognize where it fits. This is particularly
important in today’s business world, where the systems
and processes being managed are not tangible produc-
tion processes easily viewed from an office above the
factory floor, but are intangible and non-spatial. It
became abundantly clear during the global financial
crisis that many organizational and governmental
decision-makers had no clear picture of the systems and
processes that they were operating within.
Strategic knowledge
With a mental map in place, we are now ready to receive
specific information about current issues and perfor-
mance, but not the volumes of data and reports that are
typically the current inputs to organizational decision-
making.We need to take a leaf out of Elliott Jaques’
book, and recognize that most of the material presented
to senior managers and boards is at the wrong level of
work (Jaques, 1998). Much of the information that fills
management reporting is operational data, suitable for
middle managers who are responsible for monitoring
and improving the performance of the organization’s key
operating systems and processes. In a large organization,
this data is collated together, and then passed upwards
to senior management teams and boards, with very little
value added. The result is that the organizational deci-
sion-makers get detailed data across multiple operating
units, and are expected to make sense of it, in spite of
the fact that they are quite removed from the operating
contexts out of which the data has been generated, and
so have limited capability to understand the circum-
stances that have given rise to the data, or to quickly
assess its significance within that context.
The automation of reporting systems often perpetu-
ates this problem, as IT systems are good at collating
and aggregating information, but cannot synthesize data
to recognize strategic themes or explain the stories and
contexts that sit behind the trends and anomalies in the
Figure 4. A rhetorical approach to decision-making.

All rights reserved
195
data. It is a great irony that organizations keep spending
large sums of capital on bigger and better computer-
ized reporting systems or dashboards, but do not really
invest in realizing the value of an expensive resource
that they are already paying for – the intelligence and
practical experience of their middle managers. Rather
than just passing unprocessed data up the line to their
superiors, middle managers should be playing a vital role
as alchemists of knowledge – taking the base operational
data and transforming it into nuggets of strategic insight,
by drawing on their deep experiential knowledge of the
operational context to highlight where the most signifi-
cant strategic issues lie.
Judgment
Once they have clear knowledge of the context and the
issues, then decision-makers need to make wise judg-
ments.Well-designed data can certainly play an impor-
tant role in providing knowledge about the current
state of a problem, or in forecasting the likely numerical
consequences of a particular course of action, but choos-
ing the most appropriate and meaningful action for a
particular organization or society in a unique context
faced with very specific and complex issues in a wicked
problem space is another thing altogether. Too many
organizational decision-makers think they can make
decisions based on neat and tidy mathematical models,
while ignoring the real-world, human impacts of their
decision-making.
Analytical models try to downplay the role of human
judgment on the basis that it is too subjective, but in
actual fact, we humans have a far greater capacity to
weigh up multiple factors, both quantitative and quali-
tative, and make a decision that is appropriate to the
context and the organization. To do this, we need to draw
on three important elements that are typically excluded
from the analytic paradigm:
– a well-defined vision and set of values which can
inform intelligent decision-making – and which are
actually much rarer than the proliferation of mission
statements in most organizations would suggest
– human experience – both the professional experience
of the organizational decision-makers in the rele-
vant fields of business or policy, and their personal
experience and insights into the nature of the human
condition
– human empathy – a quality which is seldom recog-
nized as important at senior management and board
level, but which is the critical wellspring for wisdom
and innovation in a wicked problem space.
One recent example in Australia highlights the impor-
tance of these elements. The management and board of
James Hardie Industries spent some years grappling with
the wicked problem of how to deal with the consequenc-
es of their involvement in the production of housing
materials made with asbestos from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Most of their deliberations seem to have focused on
analyzing the economic costs to the business and finding
legal ways to avoid any financial obligations, rather than
engaging with the human and social dimensions of the
problem. The failure of the decision-makers to base their
corporate response on a noble vision, clear values and
human empathy destroyed a previously highly regarded
brand, and has led to legal proceedings against the
directors of the company (Judge slams deception, 2009).
Clearly, it was not a lack of data or analytical capability,
but rather a lack of judgment, that led to the collapse in
reputation of the company and its board.
Process
A fourth key element on a rhetorical decision-making
pathway is the process that is used to make decisions,
involving both cognitive and social aspects.Anyone who
has participated in decision-making processes, whether

All rights reserved
196
in organizations or in any human context, will know just
how important a role the process itself can play in shap-
ing the decision that is made.
We generally assume that information is just there to
support a process, and underestimate how influential a
role information has in actually shaping the process.We
can make people smart or dumb, and either facilitate or
inhibit efficient and effective decision-making, depend-
ing on the type of information we provide and the way
it is structured. Poorly designed information that is not
fit for purpose will make people passive or render them
powerless to act, whereas well-designed information
will engage people in the thinking process and help lead
them towards the decision that needs to be made.Worse
still, the wrong sort of information or the wrong infor-
mation format will create confusion and communication
breakdowns, which can make the social processes far
more complicated and fraught with tension than they
need to be.
As one board member pointed out to me, if all you
provide to the board by way of information is a detailed
set of financial statements, then you are likely to end up
with a frustrating process of line-by-line interrogation
of the accuracy of specific numbers, rather than a more
meaningful conversation about the strategic direction
and performance of the organization.
Communication
With a clear conceptual framework, useful strategic
knowledge, human-centered values and insights for
making judgments, and a constructive thinking process,
we have a much better chance of producing a good
decision. But the meaning-making pathway doesn’t stop
there. The decisions that senior managers and boards
make need to be communicated to a whole range of
stakeholders – including clients, investors, analysts,
regulators, the media and the general public – in a way
that promotes shared meaning, a coherent story and
focused action. The power and promise of a good deci-
sion can be utterly squandered if it is not communicated
in a meaningful way.A rhetorical approach will focus
not only on the decision-makers themselves, but on all
the other audiences who will be affected by, and either
mobilized or demoralized by, the way in which decisions
are communicated.
New horizons for information design
What does all this mean for information design? Under
the current paradigm for knowledge and decision-
making in organizations, the perceived value of informa-
tion design has been largely limited to making objective
data more accessible, to a focus on“the visual display of
quantitative information” (Tufte, 1990). Much valuable
work has been done within this realm, from pioneers
such as Otto Neurath and Edward Tufte, through to the
high-tech and online tools now being developed.
However, by broadening the scope of our thinking
and embracing new models of knowledge and decision-
making based in rhetoric, we open up some important
new opportunities for information design. In many
respects, design is the modern incarnation of rhetoric;
both disciplines focus attention on the experience of
the user as their starting point, and seek to create new
modes of interaction and deeper levels of connection
with the user.
Exploring the new opportunities for information
design created by taking a rhetorical approach to using
information is the ongoing focus of the work we do
at 2nd Road. Our intent is to use these tools and ways
of thinking about the world to liberate organizational
decision-makers from the tyranny of information
overload, to lift the level of strategic thinking and
organizational intelligence, to design more efficient and
satisfying decision-making processes, and to create more

All rights reserved
197
coherent stories and arguments around the decisions that
are made.
For example, we use our visual design skills to create
simple conceptual models for intangible systems, such
as a business planning and reporting cycle, which help
to orient people and give them a coherent picture of
the whole. Creating a shared mental map and shared
language around the management systems and processes
they are implementing, or about the wider environment
in which they are operating, is a vital element in enabling
a group of decision-makers to build a common platform
of understanding as the basis for their discussion.
We also use our design skills to lift the level of
information provided as inputs to decision-making
processes to a more strategic level.We have developed a
user-based approach to organizational reporting, which
involves structuring the new reports around the key
strategic questions that senior managers and boards need
answered, rather than around specific measures and
KPIs (key performance indicators), and using a layered
approach to information to create a simple cognitive
pathway. Not only does this style of reporting significant-
ly reduce the workload and improve the comprehension
of the readers of the reports, but it also creates the
opportunity to build the capability of middle managers
to add value to their reporting by placing more emphasis
on their contextual knowledge, strategic insights, and
judgments as to where the most significant issues lie
(Jenkins, 2008, pp. 68–77).
One of the most compelling ways in which we have
brought a rhetorical toolkit to the decision-making
process arises in the context of building human empathy.
One of the most powerful ways of shaping the thinking
of organizational decision-makers is to bring the voice
of key stakeholders into the boardroom – whether it be
customers, employees or investors. Using our skills as
qualitative researchers, we conduct interviews with rele-
vant stakeholders and then create an immersion experi-
ence for organizational decision-makers, in which they
are directly confronted with the faces, experiences and
emotional responses of the people affected by their deci-
sions and by their organization’s processes and culture.
There is nothing quite so powerful as seeing top execu-
tives immersed in the human realities of the decisions
they have made, the negative impacts of the systems they
have created, or the opportunities to connect at a more
meaningful level through their communications with key
stakeholders.
Figure 5. A simple conceptual map of an end-
to-end management process.

All rights reserved
199
The immersion workshop is a good example of a situ-
ation where we design not only the information inputs,
but also the social process. There is a huge difference
not only in the user experience, but also in the quality
of engagement and outcomes, between a process based
on“death by PowerPoint”, where the audience is passive
and their brains are worn down by an overload of data,
and one based on a conversation, where the audience is
actively participating throughout and where the informa-
tion can be interacted with. 2nd Road has pioneered the
use of the Strategic Conversation™ as a rhetorical process
for organizational decision-making, and has created a
purpose-built facility in Sydney which enables groups of
decision-makers to interact with information in creative
ways, including moveable furniture and walls, and wrap-
around floor-to-ceiling whiteboards.
Finally, we also put a lot of effort into the communi-
cation and implementation of organizational decisions,
to ensure that there is a coherent and meaningful story
built around the strategic decisions that have been made,
and to enable a wider group of stakeholders to embrace
and engage with the implications of the decisions. In one
landmark project, we worked with a new business unit
that had been created out of a corporate merger, and
used our information design skills to help create a visual
picture of the future state of the merged entity based
on the metaphor of a city. Not only did this metaphor
become an important communication tool that created
a high level of ownership and engagement, but it actu-
ally enabled staff from two very different organizational
cultures to quickly locate themselves and build a shared
language and understanding around their new reality.
As a result of this process, this particular business unit
made much more rapid and successful progress towards
integration than other areas of the merged organization.
Figure 7. A user experience immersion workshop. Figure 8. Decision-makers interacting with information as
part of a conversation-based process.

All rights reserved
200
The importance of information designers as
meaning-shapers
Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, has recently
declared that“the ability to take data – to be able to
understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to
visualize it, to communicate it – that’s going to be a
hugely important skill in the next decades” (Manyika &
Varian, 2009, para. 13).While he was making an argu-
ment for the“sexiness” of statisticians in the twenty-
first-century knowledge economy, he also stated quite
clearly that the analytical skills of statisticians needed to
be combined with the communication and visualization
skills that information designers can bring to the table.
If senior managers and boards are going to be able
to make the sort of decisions we need them to in today’s
complex world, we need to move beyond just improving
the quality of the data to improving the quality of the
decision-making experience. Drawing on the ancient
Figure 9. A visual representation of the newly
integrated“city”.
thinking tools of rhetoric, information designers are
ideally placed to play a critical role as meaning-shapers,
who design not just the information, but the thinking
process and the user experience. By taking up the mantle
handed down to us by Aristotle and numerous succeed-
ing generations of rhetoricians, we have the opportunity
to exert influence at a much deeper level, and to ensure
that the needs of the user, not just for information, but
for coherence and empowerment, are being met.
In a world increasingly confronted with wicked
problems, information design provides the opportunity
to create a pathway to the simplicity on the other side of
complexity.While we may not be able to promise that we
can avert a future global financial crisis, we can none-
theless enable leaders in both the corporate and wider
social and political worlds to make wiser, more human-
centered, more meaningful decisions about our future.

All rights reserved
201
References
Fukuyama, Francis (1993). The end of history and the last man.
London: Penguin.
Golsby-Smith, Tony (2001). Pursuing the art of strategic conversa-
tion: an investigation into the role of the liberal arts of rheto-
ric and poetry in the business world. Unpublished doctoral
dissertation, University of Western Sydney.
Hoskin, Keith, Macve, Richard, & Stone, John (2006). Accounting
and strategy: towards understanding the historical genesis
of modern business and military strategy. In A. Bhimani
(Ed.), Contemporary issues in management accounting (pp.
167–197). London: OUP.
Jaques, Elliott (1998). Requisite organisation: A total system for
effective managerial organization and managerial leadership
for the twenty-first century. 2nd revd edn. Arlington,VA: Cason
Hall.
Jenkins, Julian (2008). Information design for strategic thinking:
Health of the system reports. Design Issues, 24:1, 68–77.
Judge slams deception by Hardie Board (2009, April 24). Austra-
lian Financial Review, p. 1.
Manyika, James (Interviewer) & Varian, Hal (Interviewee) (2009,
January). Hal Varian on how the web challenges managers.
McKinsey Quarterly. Retrieved August 1, 2009 from http://
www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web
_challenges_managers_2286
Martin, Roger (2004). The Design of Business. Rotman Manage-
ment, Winter edn, 7–10.
Rittel, Horst (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning.
Policy Sciences, 4, 155–169.
Tufte, Edward (1990). The visual display of quantitative informa-
tion. 2nd edn. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
About the author
Julian Jenkins is a senior consultant and
thought leader for information design at 2nd
Road, a Sydney-based management consul-
tancy specializing in using design thinking
and the principles of rhetoric to transform
management processes in large organizations.
Much of his work focuses on designing infor-
mation to support the work of senior leadership teams, in areas
such as planning and reporting.
Contact:
2nd Road
Zenith Centre, Tower B, Level 9
821 Pacific Highway
Chatswood
NSW 2067
Australia
julian.jenkins@secondroad.com.au

Jenkins idj article 2010 - final

Recomendados

Recomendados

Más contenido relacionado

La actualidad más candente

La actualidad más candente (9)

Destacado

Destacado (20)

Similar a Jenkins idj article 2010 - final

Similar a Jenkins idj article 2010 - final (20)

Último

Último (20)

Jenkins idj article 2010 - final