A chart is an argument and can be cross-examined
💎CORE ARGUMENT
A chart looks like a window. It is a piece of advocacy. Somebody chose what to count, where the axis starts, which months to include, what to leave out and what colour the good news is. None of that is dishonest in itself. All of it is choice, and a choice can be questioned in a way that a fact cannot. Treating a chart as testimony is what lets me cross-examine it.
Five questions do most of the work, and they fit in the time it takes someone to say as you can see:
- What is the axis? Where it starts, what the unit is, whether the scale is doing the persuading.
- What is missing? The months before the window, the segment that was filtered out, the customers who left.
- Compared with what? A rising line means nothing without the line it should be read against.
- Who made it, and what do they need it to say?
- What would change it? If no possible data could make this chart look bad, it is decoration.
I keep the list because of a chart that won a meeting this spring. It was true, and it persuaded for reasons that had little to do with being true: where the axis began and what had been left off. Nobody asked. I noticed on the tram home that I had not asked either.
Dashboards are the difficult case, because nobody presents them and so nobody feels addressed. They make their argument politely, every morning, to people who have stopped reading it as one.
The limit: cross-examination is cheap, and it can become a way of never accepting any evidence. The questions are for understanding the chart, not for winning against it.
🧱BUILT FROM
🌍WHY IT MATTERS
I ask at least one of the five out loud in any review where a chart carries the decision, starting with my own slides the evening before.
☑️NEXT STEPS
- Run the five questions over my own slides the evening before a review
- Ask one of the five out loud in the next roadmap review
- Turn the dashboards hook into a draft or delete it
A short old book on truncated axes, convenient averages and the comparison that was left out.
The honest answer to the axis question is often a range: 💎 An interval is more honest than a point. The third question is the whole of 💎 Evidence persuades when it compares.
Every chart encodes decisions about scale, scope, comparison and emphasis. Those decisions shape the conclusion as much as the data do, and they are invisible unless asked about. Asking returns the chart to the status of a claim with an author.
Most charts are made in a hurry by honest people. Treating every colleague's slide as hostile testimony is tiring, and it teaches a team to stop showing data at all.
An issue, the five questions as a routine, and a hook for a piece on dashboards that is still only a hook.