Boeing vs Bloomberg: Visuals are the key to situational awareness

I recently had the career highlight of giving a talk about my book to the Boeing Managers' Association up in Tukwila, WA. As a lifelong airplane fanatic and nearly lifelong pilot, having the undivided attention of one hundred people who build the big airplanes is as good as it gets.

I don't normally show family photos in a business presentation, but this time I had no choice: what better way to illustrate how I got my start in visual thinking and 3D "situational awareness"?

Having thus established my bona fides, I shared an example of how good visual information displays help people make good decisions -- especially when too much information is coming in. (This was an example I'd been waiting for years to share, and with Boeing I knew I had the right audience.)

The example is this. Seventy years ago, it took a crew of five looking at 200 instruments to guide an aircraft across an ocean.

Today, it takes a crew of one looking at two screens to do the same thing. (Not that anyone flies with a crew of one, but they could.)

The most interesting thing here is that the crew today requires exactly the same information as sixty years ago: speed, altitude, orientation, direction, distance, and fuel remaining. What's changed is our technological ability to collect, synthesize, and display that data.

Why not apply the same concepts to other tasks that require the quick analysis and synthesis of vast amounts of data? Financial analysis comes to my mind. With all the computing horsepower we have available today, why do most spreadsheets look exactly the way they did 200 years ago?

Why do we have to pay thousands of dollars a month for a Bloomberg terminal? And where's the financial services equivalent of the pilot's PFD (Primary Flight Display)?

I'm convinced anyone trying to come up with a better spreadsheet should take flying lessons. Nothing forces you to think about better data displays than trying to land in the rain.

Who knows: if the gang at Bear Stearns (not to mention everyone who touched our latest 'special financial instruments') had a better display of where they were going, we could have avoided this latest crash.

After all, there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US in three years. Wouldn't it be nice to say the same thing about the mortgage industry?

Comments

[patrick garrett]

You might want to check out this website:
www.finviz.com

It uses some visual ideas from google, I think, showing selected companies gruoped by industry, and indicates the price of a share of a company buy a proportional size difference between companies in a group, and indicates if the stock is up, down, or unchanged, with color. It also uses a world map giving the equivalent dow jones, s&p, for that country, using the same interface. It seems to cram a lot of information into a picture so one can tell at a glance what is happening in the markets. I would suggest that one not look at it during trading hours, as we all must know by now things are--um--challenging now. But it may be the seed someone needs to make better displays of information to people who need to make decisions in dynamic situations.

[John]

This reminded me of some of the nice work that's been done on business "Dashboard" design.

[Fred Miller]

I absolutely agree.

This is the era of 'Instant'; instant information, instant coffee, etc.

Just the facts, Watson, just the facts!

[Ricardo Olmus]

Excellent example and application of the visual thinking process. Learning how to apply the knowledge creation principles: Capture, Process and Synthesis, is fundamental to a real Strategic Execution and this what is possible with this method.

Deep and very useful concepts