Excerpted from Fast Company, Infographic of the Day: Flow Chart of Obama’s Health-Care Plan, Sep 14, 2009
Charts and infographics have unequaled power to convince and explain. So why aren’t they playing a bigger role in the health-care debate?
President Obama … uses 21st century technologies in an unprecedented ways … but he remains as musty as John Adams, in at least one respect: His insistence to use speeches alone, unaided by charts or graphs, to get his point across … It’s not a terribly efficient way to communicate. Not, at least, compared with graphs.
There’s a business-world fetish with that one powerpoint slide that totally encapsulates a problem. Our culture is quickly growing to accept the idea of a definitive infographic, because infographics are better able to model an issue, in its sweep and complexity, than a mountain of words possibly can. No one, outside of CEO’s at investor meetings and politicians, still communicates with huge groups using speeches alone.
Why shouldn’t last week’s address to Congress have been accompanied by a couple charts?
A summary chart (below) could have be flashed on screen endlessly afterward—more powerful than any meandering quote.
The Homa Files 
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