Captivate Your Audience Through Design+Data

So often, senior leaders must communicate their strategic and simple vision in a world of growing complexity. They must make decisions – and frequently explain them – based on an enterprise view of their data. It’s getting easier to do this these days through data visualizations and infographics that speak to specific employee and stakeholder audiences. Design+Data is what we call it at Arc Aspicio.

Design+Data is a mindset, an approach, and a set of tools that help teams create solutions, experiment, and discover possibilities. By using empathy to explore the human side of the problem, applying data and visualizations in innovative ways, and telling stories with data, Design+Data helps decision-makers build on insights and quickly act.

Here are a few steps senior leaders can take to connect with their organization and create a compelling case for action:

• Use Empathy+Data to frame the problem and understand the stakeholders, especially in a complex environment. Who are the key stakeholder groups? What do each of them value and prioritize? What do they see as the problem to solve? This subjective approach uses empathy to truly understand the perspectives and frame the problem. A data approach takes a more objective view of what we know about the problem or organization. What data do we have? Is it high quality and useful for decisions? How can we combine data sources to go beyond facts and get insights? Build a fact book of the emotions, facts, and insights

• Use #DesignThinking to explore options to solve the problems or take advantage of the opportunities at hand. We don’t value experimenting and prototyping enough these days. Testing ideas in action can lower risk and save money as you design solutions. Collect data as you develop and test prototypes and experiment with alternatives, so you objectively know which solutions work better. Involve your organization in the prototypes, and work out loud to let your team know how things are going

• Captivate through Design+Data sounds challenging, doesn’t it? We don’t often strive to captivate these days, but we should. More than ever, leaders need to inspire their organizations and employees to overcome obstacles, get on board with a new strategy or solution, and take risks – all so they can celebrate results. Leaders need to take their own risks to captivate their workforce with compelling ideas, stories of failures and successes that helped create the ideas, and qualitative and quantitative data to show how it will work. So, use compelling infographics to tell stories, and use data visualizations to capture attention and then report progress. Data+Design can transform information from unrelatable topics to convincing insights that speak to the workforce in words and stories they can understand

  Data-driven strategies and compelling visualizations can capture the attention and hearts of the workforce as organizations transform to take on new missions and solve complex problems. Introducing data allows risk – calculated risk – to get to the end state more quickly and know that it will work because you started with empathy.

About Arc Aspicio
Arc Aspicio is a management, strategy, and technology consulting firm that takes a mission-oriented approach to complex client challenges. Focused on innovation, Arc Aspicio provides services in strategy, design, human capital, operations, analytics and visualization, technology, and information sharing. The company is known for a strong, collaborative culture that values gratitude, provides leadership opportunities, and explores the future. Our teams use a human-centered approach to working with clients and are flexible and responsive within dynamic Government client environments that often have new priorities and evolving missions. We thrive on these situations and promote continuous improvement and new ideas. And, #welovedogs! Follow us on Twitter @arcaspicio or learn more at www.arcaspicio.com.