The Chart that Saved Lives
After I took some time off recently, I came back and said that one of the things I had learned was that I still believed in communications as a career. What I meant was that I think that communications are important to people's lives. It gets minimized by some people as being manipulative...or we are called spin doctors...but my belief is that good communication makes people safer. I also believe it can make them better employees, better consumers. Good communication--understanding--makes the way for people to live better.
One of the best examples happened this week. Many people have been struggling with drastic measures taken to combat the coronavirus, but it appears that one graphic changed the conversation, you can see it above.
It's beautiful. Here's some commentary on it.
Later he makes what is, to me, the salient point: this graph is saving lives.
Think about that. With one chart--one simple chart--someone has changed minds and created a situation where understanding breeds compliance and positive action.
We all know that bad communication can be damaging...Edward Tufte has a famous case study about the Challenger disaster and how a bad powerpoint slide might have been at the center of it. What we don't do is accept that the converse is also true. We have a tendency to orient our default thinking to mitigation, damage control and sell ourselves and the people counting on us short.
To me, this graph is an inspiration--you will see it everywhere today. It is a truly brilliant piece of communication. It's a reminder that when we do our job right, people benefit.
Thankfully, we all typically work on a less grandiose scale. But we all work on change management, which is what this is, essentially. And one of the tenets of change communications is you have to create the basis for why change is necessary in the first place. We should all aspire to do it this well...even if all we are doing is changing a reporting structure.
Last thing. We can have a little pride, too. What we do matters.
(Last note because I can't resist: if you follow Carl's twitter feed, you can see lots of people from Camp Never-Gonna-Get-It suggesting adding "just five things" to make the graph perfect. We've all been in a meeting with that person.)