Why Visualizations Fail, Making Baseball Less Boring and Secrets of Squid Game | Non-Obvious Insights #291

Dear Newsletterest,

Can the MLB really make baseball less boring? How did Squid Games become Netflix's most streamed series ever? What makes well intentioned data visualizations sometimes fall short? When Slack dominates business conversations, what happens to company culture? Should the World Cup take place every two years instead of every four? Explore these questions and more in this week's Non-Obvious Insights newsletter!

Inside MLB's Desperate Mission To Make Baseball Less Boring

I have always found baseball boring, but it seems the sport is facing a crisis from it's own fans. As "moneyball managers" form teams based on stats, the game gets less exciting. The result is longer games where "hits are near historic lows [and] strikeouts are at historic highs." In other words, games have gotten more boring. One MLB executive described the solution this way: "what comes out of our research is that fans want more baseball in the baseball game." Wow, I hope they didn't pay too much for that groundbreaking research.

The solutions they are testing, though, are pretty creative, "including letting batters try to steal first base, making the bases bigger and easier to reach, strictly limiting visits to the mound by coaches, and using robot umpires." There is a lot of resistance to these changes among players - but the sport needs to do something to reverse the decline. One solution no one seems to be suggesting, though, is reducing the number of games. If there were less games, maybe fans would care more about each one. Although, those robot umpires do sound pretty awesome.

Visualizations Don't Always Work, Especially If You Forget To Tell A Story

This week a nonprofit called Climate Central released a visualization tool that allows you to move your cursor across a rendering of a famous global destination and see what will happen to that place as a result of climate change. Each site ends up under water after a "multi-century sea level rise after 3.0°C." The problem with this nicely designed illustration is that it fails to have an impact for multiple reasons.

First, and most importantly, there is no time scale offered. The average person has no idea how long it would take for sea levels to rise by 3.0°C ... but the term "multi-century" makes it seem like this is only something we'll have to worry about 300 years from now. Secondly, the destinations they have chosen to depict are not widely known. Instead of the Lalbagh Fort in Dhaka, why not show the Taj Mahal in Agra? Their list of destinations has many other obscure locations, such as a Church in New Haven, CT. Finally, each of the depictions solely focuses on rising water levels. What about extreme weather? Uncontrollable fires? Desertification? Those climate related issues are not depicted.

I don't mean to poke holes in what is clearly a noble and well intentioned effort ... but it is a good learning opportunity for all of us as well. Simply visualizing data without thinking about the story that is being told is unlikely to resonate or create real understanding or behavior change. The story is everything.

How Slack Became The Soul of Business, And Is Here To Stay

My team adopted Slack long before I did, but that's part of the story of how this tech platform edged out nearly every other chat tool to become the backbone of internal communications at tens of thousands of companies, schools, political campaigns and organizations. Often promoted as the solution to email overload, the tool is deceptively simple and as this article explores, it has enabled a new era of transparency and bottom-up communications within many companies. It has also gamified business conversations and offered a backchannel that can often enable negative conversations.

What happens when corporate cultures are built around the hashtag based conversations that happen on Slack? And who are we professionally when more of our time is spent working remotely and our identities must be embedded in every topic-based chat message we send? These are not-so-simple questions that the rise of Slack is fueling as the modern workplace becomes more reliant on digital collaboration tools instead of face to face conversations.

What If Parents Are The Ones Holding Kids Back From Their Potential?

LEGO commissioned research from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender In The Media and got some pretty surprising results. The attitudes of kids themselves were what you might expect. "74% of boys and 62% of girls believe some activities are meant only for girls and some are meant only for boys." Among parents, though, "85% are more likely to think of scientists and athletes as men than women and 89% were more likely to think of engineers as men than women." The differences in perceptions between parents and kids were the most disturbing result from the research.

When kids feel limitations on what they can do based on their gender, it may often start with their parents. Since I'm assuming most parents would never want to do this intentionally, what the research seems to suggest is that parents' unconscious beliefs and behaviors demonstrate this intolerance to their children. In other words, children learn their limitations from us. LEGO made their own move to try and change this, announcing they will make all toys gender-neutral.

Why Some Countries Want the World Cup To Happen Every Two Years

The Olympics happen every four years in part because it takes that long to construct all the venues. The world's biggest soccer event doesn't require this same commitment to infrastructure. Most cities already have stadiums, and the World Cup regularly spreads early games in its competition out to many different locations, so there is a debate raging right now among the sport's administrators across nations about whether to consider hosting the World Cup every two years instead of every four. Those who support the idea suggest that more money would become available to smaller nations and it would create more opportunities to develop the sport and players. The wealthier nations say it will create too many logistical problems and could negatively impact player health. The fight seems to be driven by those countries with wealth and privilege and those without.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories ...

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. In case you're looking for some more reading this week, here are a few other stories that captured my attention ...

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Why Visualizations Fail, Making Baseball Less Boring and Secrets of Squid Game | Non-Obvious Insights #291

Inside MLB's Desperate Mission To Make Baseball Less Boring

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