Charting your executive summary

I've been trying to incorporate best practices for data visualisation into my work for some time now, but I've always found myself frustrated by one very key element of my presentations - the executive summary. I ask my team to maintain a high standard when it comes to finding the right visual for the story we want to tell, but often we end up slapping a text heavy executive summary onto the front of the presentation which we inevitably end up spending half of the presentation working through. So, recently I've challenged myself to think differently. Is it possible to chart the executive summary? 

I think the answer is "yes, sometimes". 

One area where I've had success recently is with summarising trial results. When evaluating the results of a trial the executive summary needs to convey the key outcomes that were measured and tell stakeholders what action needs to be taken as a result. With smaller trials it can also be very important to explain how confident we are in the results. Doing this visually can help to explain confidence intervals to non-technical audiences.

My executive summary looked something like this (obviously all the numbers here are made up):

By expressing all of the metrics as percentage impacts, it's possible to plot them on a single chart. For the key metric, metric 1, the short comment to the right gives a value to this impact. The rest of the presentation gives more specifics on the other metrics.

There were a few key design decisions made in producing the visual:

• The order of the metrics - metric 1 is the key metric and hence is positioned at the top. Metric 2 is explained by metric 3, so it makes sense for them to be together.
• Each item of commentary is aligned against the bar which it comments on.
• The mid point markers (labelled as "measured impact") are large enough to stand out, without being so large that they make it hard to identify the value they are showing.
• The confidence interval bars are a lot narrower than I would normally use for a bar chart. This is to focus attention on the mid point markers. I found that wider bars meant the mid point markers got lost.

With a view similar to this, I found that I was able to talk through the entire project from one slide. It's got me wondering what other situations lend themselves to a charted executive summary?