Timeline: A Sequence of Decisions
A very interesting timeline visualization is included with “Semiology of Graphics”, the fundamental book by Jacques Bertin. In case you haven’t had a chance to check it out, I highly recommend doing so. This book would be an indispensable read for anyone who wants to dig deep in data and information visualization.
The timeline I’m talking about shows how the actual and potential decisions and events were unfolding during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. This series of moves, as in a chess party, is believed to have brought USA and USSR to the closest point of nuclear conflict with the strongest probability for massive mutual destruction. The crisis was eventually resolved, and the visualization — which is also available in the book’s preview online on page 18 — covers the whole story.
This mixed events-decisions timeline got me thinking. No doubt, the Cuban crisis does deserve to be visualized that way, with its hidden and/or possible threats and agreements. But I don’t recall ever seeing any similar mix of both events and decisions on a timeline anywhere else, neither in a presentation, nor in a case study of a project success or failure. There’s a bunch of visual techniques for decision-making, but it looks like there’s no common visual technique to facilitate a retrospective analysis of decisions bundled with actions.
For example, with some work management apps, we can use a release timeline to reverse-track the points of “Done” for features, and we will embrace the whole picture in one look. But what would we do at a release or a project retrospective, if we look at a timeline and see that our initial estimate for releasing a feature is very different from the actual release time? An events-only timeline wouldn’t provide clues to stakeholders as to which decisions resulted in the late release. Hence, they’d have a lesser chance to improve them. Someone would look at the past release timeline 6 months later and think to themselves: “Hmm, I can’t remember what happened, why were we actually that late with releasing this thing?” That’s where visualizing a sequence of decisions+events over time might come in handy. Besides, it’s worth to note that we are somehow more interested in “the reasons for failure” when at a retrospective, but this wording and thinking would hardly serve us right. We might want to formulate the above question in another way. Which sequence of decisions resulted in the delay?
“Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes our focus away from becoming truly exceptional” — source
Well, it could be that taking such a grand look at a delayed project release is an overkill. Okay. Let’s then move a level up and see how visualizing decisions+outcomes would help with a more serious stuff, such as analyzing a failure/success of a business, or a start-up. This compilation puts together 287 Start-Up Failure Post-Mortems. Ironically, the web page offers me a context ad which says: “get data and trends on start-up failure”. I’d say the prevalence of data- and trends-based thinking is something that most of the failed start-ups have in common. With everyone having access to statistics and trends, it’s quite logical for the failures to be grouped by certain criteria. A successful start-up must have something more up their sleeve than data and trends, and namely: spot-on decisions made in their particular context, free from the “do-it-like-everyone-does” mindset.
What I’m getting at is this: if start-ups and established businesses had a visualization technique similar to the one used for the Cuban crisis, they would be able to take a deeper insightful look into the nuts and bolts of things. I presume that people who read the stories of failed or successful start-ups want to learn from these stories, so having them visualized as a timeline with actual/potential decisions looks like a good idea.
My hope is that one day someone comes up with a timeline as a tool that visualizes not only events, but actual/potential decisions and their linkage with the events as well. Such a timeline would be immensely helpful not so much for decision-making — there are zillions of visual techniques for that — but rather for a retrospective analysis of success/failure of a business, or a product release, or a PR campaign, or shooting a blockbuster, or staging a play. The practical applications are diverse, and such a visualization would facilitate the insightfully pragmatic thinking focused on success, rather than on failure.
Related:
Decision-Making and Rusty Tin Man
The Manifesto for Big Picture Pragmatism
Visualization: Why The Fusion of Art and Tech Matters
Further reading:
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
This story was updated and re-written from one of my earlier articles.
