Learning objectives
By the end of this node you can:
- Decide whether a relationship belongs in a diagram, a table, a chart or a sentence, and defend the choice against the strongest alternative.
- Name the five diagram families, state the question each one answers, and pick the family from the message rather than from a template gallery.
- Draw a process diagram with correct step, decision and loop notation, and add swimlanes only when the actor changes what the reader should do.
- Build a flow diagram of money or goods that satisfies its conservation check, and use the check to find a transcription error before the diagram ships.
- Construct a two-by-two whose axes are defensible claims, state the cut rule for each axis, and report what the matrix hides about the underlying ranking.
- Render a published framework as a visual without turning it into decoration, attributing the author and the book in the sentence that names it.
- Apply proximity, similarity, enclosure, continuity and closure to make a crowded diagram readable, and measure the proximity ratio you achieved.
- Align and space diagram elements on a stated grid, computing box widths and gaps from the canvas rather than nudging them by eye.
- Use icons, labels, arrow verbs and a single accent colour so that every mark on the diagram carries information, and check the accent's contrast ratio.
- Recognise the diagram that should have been three sentences, measure its objects-per-fact cost, and delete it.
Prerequisites & connections
Builds on. Nothing outside this branch is required. The arithmetic used here is percentages, weighted averages, one standard deviation and one correlation. If you have already worked PR1.03, the object mechanics will be familiar and you can draw faster; if you have worked PR2.02, the colour discipline below will read as the same rule applied to a different object. Neither is a gate, and the branch is designed so that a learner can enter here.
Feeds forward. PR3.02 takes the diagrams you can now draw and puts them inside a ghost deck, where an exhibit is sketched rather than built. PR4.01 and PR4.02 order the claims that your diagrams support. PR5.01 to PR5.03 supply the archetypes where process maps and two-by-twos actually appear, and the consulting deck template in particular assumes you can draw one without help. PR7.01 runs the whole sequence on one analysis.
Four neighbours own material that touches this one, and the boundaries are deliberate. PR2.01 owns chart-form choice for data, so when a section below says a quantity comparison belongs in a sorted bar rather than in a picture, it names the rule and moves on rather than teaching it. PR2.02 owns decluttering and colour as data-visualisation craft, including the one-accent formula and the contrast check; both are applied here to diagram objects rather than to chart marks, and the underlying rule is not rebuilt. PR2.03 owns the action title and the one-message test for a chart, which is the same test applied here to a diagram. PR1.03 owns object mechanics: grouping, the selection pane, shape defaults, animation and export. Where a section below tells you to align five boxes on a computed grid, it gives you the arithmetic and assumes you know which menu performs the operation, because the mechanics module owns that menu.
One further seam runs sideways rather than forward. CN1.02 owns the issue tree and hypothesis-driven structuring as consulting practice, and an issue tree is a hierarchy diagram. What is taught here is how to draw one so it reads; what is taught there is how to make one that is genuinely exhaustive. A beautifully drawn tree that overlaps at the second level is still wrong, and no drawing rule catches that.
1. When a diagram is the right form
Start with the question the reader is holding. If the question is "how big", "how many" or "how has it moved", the answer is a chart or a table and a diagram will only add distance. If the question is "how does this work", "who touches this and in what order", "where does the money go" or "what has to be true for the recommendation to hold", the answer is structural, and structure is what a diagram encodes natively.