58 Kellogg Insight YOU HAVE A GREAT IDEA TO GROW your business, and it’s based on solid data. How do you convince your skeptical boss, staff, or clients of your brilliance? Show them your data visually, says Northwestern professor Steven Franconeri. “People might think that visualizations are pretty and they’re icing,” he says. “That’s not true. They are indispensable, abso - lutely indispensable.” Around 40 percent of our brains are devoted to visual comprehension, according to Franconeri. “It’s critical that you use that machine.” Data visualization has been around for more than 100 years. Florence Nightingale was an early pioneer who used a visualization to prove that more soldiers died while lingering in unsanitary hospitals than on the battlefield. But in the past decade or two, data visualization has become more sophis- ticated. The technology for displaying data has improved, and research is establishing best practices for communicating data visually. This classic data-visualization example was created by Florence Nightingale to show that more soldiers were dying from preventable diseases after battle (blue) than had died from wounds on the battlefield (red). Credit: Wikicommons Based on insights from Steve Franconeri