HBR: Crap Circles

I rarely laugh out loud while reading humor, let alone while reading a magazine like the Harvard Business Review, but that's exactly what I just finished doing after reading a short article by Gardiner Morse titled "Crap Circles." In it, Morse comments on the sometimes absurd misuse of the ubiquitous circle of arrows that we have grown accustomed to seeing in presentations, articles and websites. An example that I found online is shown on the right. If someone is presenting information on concepts that are inter-related, people tend to represent them as an interconnected circle without thinking of the appropriateness of representing them as one concept feeding into another until the chain feeds back on itself to begin the cycle again. Morse shows egregious examples from unspecified corporate websites. In one example, a project reaches completion only to revert back into a concept phase--a project life cycle only Sisyphus would understand. In another example, a two-stage circle shows product demand growth leading to supply growth which leads back to product demand growth, depicting the business plan equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

 

I'm particularly (perhaps overly) amused by this article because last week I contemplated creating my own misinformed circle for a presentation that I just gave today. I wanted to get rid of my bullet point list of inter-related research with a graphic and initially thought, "Hey, I'll make a colorful circle of labeled arrows!" After some thought (and, thankfully, without actually creating the graphic), I realized that the circle concept made no sense at all for this case: one research project did not feed into another in a linear manner until the chain fed back on itself. The relationship was not so straighforward. So, I eventually created a graphic showing one concept platform supported by two research concepts, with the whole thing sitting on a large foundation representing that theories upon which eveything is based. Visually, it represented exactly how I thought of the research approach, better than a circle and better than a bullet point list.