Part II

Visual Evidence: From Charts to Decisions

Charts that answer, not decorate

This part is about visual argument: turning a clean dataset into a chart that answers a named business question without quietly overclaiming. Chapter 3 builds the grammar — chart choice is question framing, so the comparison gets named before the tool opens, the baseline is where that choice becomes visible, and a filterable atlas of twenty-six forms across eight evidence families supplies the vocabulary, with small multiples and statistical charts as its two deep dives. Chapter 4 spends that grammar on the artifact managers actually receive: the six-panel dashboard arc and the monitor–diagnose–decide discipline, a concentration case where the definition rather than the metric decides the answer, and a studio that ends in a one-page board memo. Throughout, one Progresso scanner panel carries the through-line, and the honest endpoint of every page is the next test to run.

2 chapters · 7 articles

What you’ll learn

Translate a vague chart request into a named comparison, and choose the baseline that makes it honest rather than dramatic
Route a business question to the right evidence family — distribution, comparison, time, relationship, geography, multivariate, uncertainty, or business bridge
Decide when small multiples earn their space, and hold scale, window, and order fixed so the panels stay comparable
Read distributions, log transforms, and confidence intervals as descriptions of variation, not claims of causation
Structure a dashboard as a memo — question, KPI, trend, breakdown, drilldown, recommended action — that ends on the next decision, not the pattern