Reflection Visualisation

Challenge and Selection

I am a high school student and I work on a lot of group projects. Recently, I took part in a group project whose goal was to finalise a strategy for investing. Obviously, investing is a very complicated sector and requires thorough analysis and everyone’s investing style differs. As the group lead, the first tool I used to solve this problem of differing opinions was visualisation. A visual representation of each of our methods and knowledge is the best way to identify the common elements, unique elements and damaging elements. Everybody represented their strategies through Venn Diagrams.

Application

I asked each of my team members to make a Venn Diagram for each element of their strategies. Elements of strategies can be represented by words and most strategies have a variety of common words meaning common elements. The strategies can be developed entirely from scratch or be taken from existing strategies.

For the activity, I gave my team members each a piece of paper and colour pencils. This way they could highlight different parts of their strategies. I asked them simple questions that their strategies should follow. 1) Is the strategy for the long term or short term? 2) Does this strategy involve a lot of risk, if so how do we mitigate it or compensate for it? 3)Why should this strategy be chosen, as in, how much profit do you expect from this strategy? With these basic questions my teammates started drawing their venn diagrams for their respective strategies showing different aspects of their strategy with different colours.

The Venn Diagrams are powerful tools to understand and portray information. In his 1977 book, Exploratory Data Analysis, John W. Tukey writes “the greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see”. These diagrams helped us see the flaws in our strategies and the advantages of others. It also helped us see how other aspects of a strategy can be used to develop our own. Our final goal was to make one final strategy.

Insight and Approach After aligning all our strategies and looking at the intersection of the venn diagrams we made a list of common elements. Then we analysed a company based on our strategy to check how accurately it could analyse the company’s losses or profits. Using deviation graphs we analysed how our predictions matched that of the real company’s graph. As expected, since we combined all our strategies and took the best parts of them, our strategy was more accurate than each of ours could ever be.

It is amazing how visual representation can explain the most complicated things easily. I have used visual tools before and they have never failed to deliver. It can help bridge many gaps in communication or just in general visual representation is the best way to depict information. It has also helped me understand team coordination.

