The Beer Nobody Brewed

Pour all 350 answers from a survey into one glass and you get a beer nobody brewed. Medium body. Medium bitterness. The exact color of a waiting room. It’s technically drinkable, and not one of the 350 would order it twice.

That glass is the topline. I just sent a survey out to 350 people, and when I started talking about it, nobody wanted a sip. They skipped right past the totals and asked the same thing: how did the people who answered one question one way answer the others.

The gold is in the cut. The drinkers who said one thing, and what those same drinkers said next. That’s where the glass separates back into the people who poured it…people with habits and reasons and a short list of breweries they’d drive an hour for.

This is why a chart still needs a person. Not to make it. Software will build a hundred charts in the time it takes to pour a pint. The person is there to pick one. To know who will actually show up to the meeting, what they already believe, what they’re quietly worried about, and which single slice would get them to change something by next month.

When my staff pulls a bad keg, I call the brewery myself. Nobody on either end of that call wants the whole tap list read aloud. They want the one thing that happened to their beer. The survey is that call, done 350 times. A brewery doesn’t need my data. It needs the slice that looks like its own drinkers, handed to the people who can actually change the beer.

A visualization isn’t a report. It’s a decision about what somebody else sees first, and it was always a decision, even back when it was pretending to be neutral.

So choose the question on purpose. Then let the answer be rude.

“Show what gets the result we want” can mean finding the one cut that finally gets a brewer to fix the label nobody can read from across the bar. It can also mean squeezing the numbers until they agree with you, which is a sales deck wearing a lab coat. The first one is generous. The second one gets found out.

And go easy with the knife. 350 people goes fast. Slice by favorite style, then by age, then by how often they go out, and you’re quoting eleven people like they’re a market. (The pivot table will never stop you. It’s the most enabling coworker I’ve ever had.)

The finer the cut, the quieter you should say it.

Stay Positive & Your Graph Should Have Remnants Of A Knife Somewhere