The Power of a Tsunami Chart

Storytelling. Pictures. Graphics. All are effective tools for communicating complex information in a clear easy-to-understand way. A good visual can provide the clarity needed to see the reality of the current situation in order to make difficult business decisions.

This reminds me of the story of the Tsunami Chart.  During the early months of a major engineer-procure-construct project involving hundreds of engineering packages, the project hit a bottleneck.  Engineering packages submitted for review piled up in a backlog. This delayed the current schedule and posed a risk to activities weeks, months and years later in the project.  We had a challenge before us. We needed help from senior management outside our organization, and needed to make the reality of the situation as clear as possible.

We needed to figure out a way to get their attention so that they fully understood the size and potential impact of the problem.  How could we help them look ahead to see the cascading impact on future work?

The team created a simple visual to show the towering backlog of work that was building and would come crashing down like a wave to flood the people responsible for the next phase of the work. They named this the Tsunami Chart and printed it in vibrant color on 4-foot-square paper to present at every status meeting until the problem was acknowledged and resolved. The chart displayed a brick for each engineering package, stacked according to its delivery date, with each late package shown in red. It was clearly obvious from the towering stack of red bricks that we faced a huge tidal wave of work that would get worse if action wasn’t taken right away.

The visual worked. It got the attention of the decision makers and they immediately took the action necessary to resolve the issue.  This wasn’t the only graphic we could have used, but it enabled us to present a clear, unequivocal picture of the facts, to speak truth to power.

It’s true: a good picture is worth a thousand words.