D36 Dashboards don't drive decisions, people do!

Summary

Are your dashboards actually driving decisions? Or are they beautifully built artefacts that nobody uses? In this episode of unDUBBED, Sarah and Fiona sit down with two of the most respected voices in data communication to tackle one of the industry's most uncomfortable questions: do dashboards actually work?

Amanda Makulec is a data visualisation leader with 15 years of experience and a founding board member and former executive director of the Data Visualisation Society. Andy Cotgreave spent 20 years in data and analytics, 15 of them at Tableau, before co-founding How to Speak Data. Together they co-host Chart Chat - so yes, they have opinions.

The conversation digs into the discovery and prototyping work that must happen before anyone opens a tool, the difference between story finding and storytelling, and why reducing friction often beats adding features. They also get into AI's messy, exhilarating, and frankly terrifying impact on data work.

Whether you build dashboards, manage a team that does, or quietly suspect nobody reads your reports - this one's for you. Amanda and Andy are also co-authors of the Big Book of Dashboards and Dashboards That Deliver.

Takeaways

71% of people surveyed said most dashboards fail - but did you ever define what success looked like in the first place?

The most common mistake is diving into building before understanding what users actually need - discovery and prototyping must come before development.

Dashboards don't drive decisions, people do - the real value of data happens in the conversations it sparks, not the charts themselves.

Reducing friction is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make - data needs to meet people where they already work.

Story finding and storytelling are completely different design paradigms - conflating them is one of the most costly mistakes in data communication.

Pretty data that turns out to be wrong destroys trust faster than almost anything - and AI makes this risk higher, not lower.