Intro to Dashboards
This is a very special video where I tell the story of the very first dashboard. Whenever I teach dashboards, I always start with this story…
VIDEO SUMMARY
In this video, I am going to give you an introduction to dashboards.
Now whenever I teach people dashboards, whether it is creating dashboards for your company, or creating financial dashboards. I always start with this story. And this is the story of the very first dashboard. So I have gone back through the history books and this is the first time that I have found dashboards in use. Even though we are going to go back in time, this is very relevant today. Because it really illustrates why we use dashboards to begin with.
Now this story centers around someone named Florence Nightingale (1820-1910). She lived at the very beginning of the 20th century in England. She is most famous as the founder of modern nursing. To give you an idea how significant this was, before Florence Nightingale, there were no nurses in hospitals. Hospitals were very different places than they are today. Basically, you would not go to the hospital unless you were expecting to die. Because when you got to the hospital, it was just the patients and the doctors. There were no nurses. That basically means that the patients had to rely on each other to take care of themselves in the hospital. So if you are lying in your hospital bed, and you go to the bathroom in your bed, you are relying on your fellow patient in the bed next to you to help clean yourself off. As you can imagine, often this didn’t happen, and you would lie dying in your own filth. Florence Nightingale came along and changed all that, and it is thanks to her that we have nurses in our hospitals today.
Now I promise, I am going to get to dashboards. Just hang in there with me. There was a conflict in the 1850s called the Crimean War. And this was a war on the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine between Russia and the West. Ironically, it is very similar to the conflict that is happening in the Crimean peninsula today. But I am not going to get into politics. The important point is that Florence Nightingale volunteered to go help the British.
So Florence Nightingale gets to the battlefield and is horrified by what she finds. The conditions in the hospitals are horrible. There was overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Ten times the solders are dying from preventable illnesses in the hospitals, then are actually dying from battle wounds. And in the first winter, over 4,000 soldiers died.
Now let me put this situation in perspective. Florence Nightingale knows how to improve conditions on the battlefield. But she’s a woman. This is happening 75 years before women get the right to vote in England. And at this time, women weren’t even allowed to go to university. The only reason Florence Nightingale knows math and writing, is because her father took the time to teach her himself. So here is a woman, who has to go to Parliament in England, and tell these men how they should be running the military. This is a very difficult situation. And how she did it, was she created the world’s first dashboard.
The thing about Florence Nightingale is she wasn’t only a nurse, she was also a statistician. Specifically in the area of visualizations. She is credited with being the person who popularized the use of pie charts. Pie charts had been discovered 50 years earlier, but no one really knew what they could be used for. They were sort of theoretical mathematical concepts. Florence Nightingale showed how pie charts could be used to understand statistics.
So what she did, was made a dashboard with a form of the pie chart that she invented herself, called the polar area diagram. And I am going to put up the actual slide presentation she created. This is a fairly simple visual, with some brief analysis explaining the chart. What you are looking at in this chart is the large area on the outside of the spiral represents deaths from preventable illnesses. And this is a very powerful visualization of how these deaths dramatically decrease over time.
So what Florence Nightingale did was took this chart and gave regular reports to members of Parliament. And Parliament was blown away. They had never seen anything like this before. You have to understand, before this, statistics were shown as lines and lines of numbers on a page. This was a completely new way to visualize the message, Florence Nightingale was trying to communicate. And it worked. Parliament sent out the Sanitary Commission to clean up the hospitals, and Florence Nightingale saved thousands of lives.
The reason why I tell this story, is because it really illustrates why we use dashboards. Whenever you have accounting information or statistics, there is a story going on there. It is your job to communicate that story effectively. Dashboards are a very powerful tool to help you do that. Dashboards are about using visualizations to communicate a story. And in the case of Florence Nightingale, it even saved lives.
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Neither Zach De Gregorio or Wolves and Finance Inc. shall be liable for any damages related to information in this video. It is recommended you contact a CPA in your area for business advice.