Design
When dashboards mislead executives
Misleading dashboards rarely lie outright. They soothe. Green dominates, axes start wherever the story looks kinder, and equal tile sizes imply equal importance. Executives leave comforted and under-informed.
Five habits to retire
1. Symmetry for its own sake. A neat four-tile grid can hide that only one tile changes decisions this quarter.
2. Traffic lights without definitions. Amber means nothing if the threshold lives in someone’s head.
3. Averages that erase tails. Mean remediation age can look fine while a cluster of critical items ages past commitment.
4. Captions that narrate the chart. “Revenue is up” wastes the only sentence a director may read. Prefer “three entities breached the aging band.”
5. Tool defaults as design. A financial auditing app will happily fill space. Your job is to refuse the fill.
Executive audit dashboards earn trust when they make discomfort early and specific. That is harder than a pretty mosaic — and far more useful in committee.