Dashboards are dead. Long live the dashboard.
/Dashboards are dead.
Long live the dashboard.
Introducing Living Brief and Causal Canvas — two ideas for what comes after democratizing data.
I’ve been saying “dashboards are dead, long live the dashboard” from a few stages — and on a few conference t-shirts — for a while now. It usually gets a strong reaction one way or the other, which is exactly why I keep saying it: it’s pointing at something real. Here’s the fuller version of that idea, and the two concepts I’ve been building around it.
For a decade, business intelligence had one real mission: democratize data. Give everyone their own dashboard, their own query, their own answer. That mission won — pretty much anyone can ask a data question on their own now. But it also made data a solitary act. Everyone has their own screen and their own read on the numbers, and still no shared way to work through a genuinely hard question together. A dashboard was always where the story ended, not where the work happened.
I don’t think the next chapter is another dashboard. I think it’s giving teams a common visual language — a shared picture a group builds and reasons through together, live — so they can actually communicate and resolve something with data, instead of each person walking away with their own interpretation of the same chart.
That idea splits into two concepts, which I’m publishing here at a concept level for the record.
Causal Canvas
The conversation, made visible
Causal Canvas is a live, shared diagram that builds in the room as a group asks questions together — not a chart one person built in advance and is now presenting, but something that takes shape in front of everyone as the conversation actually happens. It can render as a fishbone, a causal network, or a convergence funnel, depending on how the group thinks through a problem, and every piece of it traces back to real, underlying data — nothing on the diagram is generated prose standing in for evidence.
The point isn’t just visualization. It’s what a shared, live-built picture does to a group conversation: nobody can quietly steer the narrative, because everyone is watching the same thing take shape, and nobody checks out waiting for someone else to summarize it later.
Living Brief
Closing the loop, on purpose
Living Brief is a decision-memory layer for that same conversation. When a group actually resolves something — a decision, who owns it, what happens next — that gets captured as a natural part of the conversation itself, not a separate task somebody forgets to do afterward. The next time someone on the team asks a related question, that decision surfaces on its own, with the reasoning behind it, before anyone re-opens a debate the org already had.
Nobody has to be the historian.
That’s the whole idea. Not a permanent record built to catch anyone out, but a way of making sure the hours a team already spent reaching an answer aren’t spent again by someone else six months later, asking the same question from scratch.
I’ll be sharing more about both of these in the months ahead. If you’re thinking about the same problem — a team with plenty of data and no shared way to actually work through it together — I’d like to hear from you.
Hello, World!
