The system that keeps Power BI visuals from being great (and how to beat it)
Have you heard the saying "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"?
This is actually a cognitive bias concept that is about over-reliance on whatever tool is on hand.
It also reminds me of Peter, Paul and Mary's "If I Had a Hammer":
Or maybe Queen is more your speed?
This hammer saying came from a speech given in 1962 at a education research conference by a professor of philosophy, Abraham Kaplan. He was talking about how scientists had (have?) the habit of formulating problems in a way that solving them requires only the skills they are already have.
"We tend to formulate our problems in such a way as to make it seem that the solutions to those problems demand precisely what we already happen to have at hand."
Abraham Kaplan, 1964
Warren Buffet also referenced this saying 40 years ago when complaining about financial data analysis that was kinda useless:
...it's simply that the data are there and academicians have worked hard to learn the mathematical skills needed to manipulate them. Once these skills are acquired, it seems sinful not to use them, even if the usage has no utility or negative utility....
Warren Buffett, 1984
So both of these old white guys are basically talking about what I'll (and probably others) call "tool bias". If someone (or a group of people) know a certain set of things, the tendency is to use only those things to solve problems. Not that they can't learn new things, only that inertia and momentum plots them along a certain path, and it's hard to deviate from that path.
A variation of this concept is *everywhere*. If something seems really hard to change (ie. how an org does things, how systemic racism is everywhere, even though most of us know it's horrible, etc) it's because things are systemically hardwired that way.
Power BI is visually limited by an over-reliance on a “system” and we can all beat that system to design Power BI reports that are great and user-friendly.
Read the full post on TraversData.com
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Watch out Fredericton, BC.
In May, I’m headed to Fredericton, New Brunswick (a small but lovely city on the east coast) for the annual conference of the Canadian Evaluation Society.
I’ll be presenting a talk that has been growing and evolving at different conferences over the past year. It’s about how Data Literacy initiatives *never* work as planned and why that is, and how to fix it with Data Visualization.
Let me know how YOU are beating the system. Hit reply and let me know.
Take care,
Joe.