The second source was from some of the things Tufte said at a recent seminar I attended. (Generally I was disappointed with the session – it felt a bit tired: taking an obvious pop at poor use of PowerPoint, whilst not a word on the awfulness of Infauxgraphics... needs a bit of revision I think.)

Anyway, in describing the provenance of Sparklines, he made the point that when an exec says they want simplicity they mean simplicity of the final message, not the underlying data and equally, they don’t want to walk through or wallow in the data in the actual review... In fact, providing the highest resolution data possible (preferably pre-review) is the best thing to do: delivering transparency, improving credibility, enabling focused Q&A and other more efficient activities in the valuable 1:1 review time.

Net: there’s a need to find time for “low resolution” Ideation reviews and to find time for “high resolution” Information reviews. They’re very different animals.