Visual Business Intelligence – To Err Is Human

My revision of Alexander Popes words, “To err is human, to forgive, divine,” is not meant to diminish the importance of forgiveness, but instead to promote the great value of errors as learning opportunities. We don’t like to admit our mistakes, but it’s important that we do. We all make errors in droves. Failing to admit and learn from private errors may harm no one but ourselves, but this failure has a greater cost when our errors affect others. Acknowledging public errors, such as errors in published work, is especially important.

I was prompted to write this by a recent email exchange. I heard from a reader named Phil who questioned a graph that appeared in an early printing of my book Information Dashboard Design (First Edition). This particular graph was part of a sales dashboard that I designed to illustrate best practices. It was a horizontal bar graph with two scales and two corresponding series of bars, one for sales revenues and one for the number of units sold. It was designed in a way that inadvertently encouraged the comparison of revenues and unit counts in a way that could be misleading (see below).

I would not design a graph in this manner today, but when I originally wrote Information Dashboard Design in 2005, I had not yet thought this through.