{"id":380,"date":"2010-05-14T11:00:39","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T10:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.idenk.co.uk\/ideasdigest\/?p=380"},"modified":"2010-10-04T09:48:47","modified_gmt":"2010-10-04T08:48:47","slug":"take-time-to-get-the-picture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/take-time-to-get-the-picture\/","title":{"rendered":"Take time to get the picture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>PowerPoint often gets a bad press as a medium for communication. The Metro newspaper, for example, suggests that army generals are resisting being presented with graphics like the one below (taken from a <a href=\"http:\/\/msnbcmedia.msn.com\/i\/MSNBC\/Components\/Photo\/2009\/December\/091202\/091203-engel-big-9a.jpg\">report on stability in Afghanistan<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-382\" style=\"margin: 10px;\" title=\"mindmap1\" src=\"http:\/\/www.idenk.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/mindmap1.jpg\" alt=\"mindmap1\" width=\"416\" height=\"315\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/mindmap1.jpg 928w, http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/mindmap1-300x227.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 416px) 100vw, 416px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an interesting example of why not to take the headline at face value and the impact of the author&#8217;s prejudgments on the tone of the piece:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the graphic almost certainly wasn&#8217;t created in PowerPoint<\/li>\n<li>there are no\u00a0bullet points<\/li>\n<li>take a second and you discover that it tells you a lot quite quickly (eg they think there are 11 big factors affecting the situation, you can see what those are and get a sense of how they fit together).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In fact, this is an example of a systems map.\u00a0Even for those not involved in creating it or trained in systems modelling, this sort of graphic can be useful in informing and stimulating thinking.<\/p>\n<p>It only needs us to take a few moments to look properly at something to start seeing what&#8217;s really there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PowerPoint often gets a bad press as a medium for communication. The Metro newspaper, for example, suggests that army generals are resisting being presented with graphics like the one below (taken from a report on stability in Afghanistan). It&#8217;s an interesting example of why not to take the headline at face value and the impact [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25],"tags":[69,177,99],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":616,"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.idenk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}