It not only makes one distinctive, but a new perspective on old information is a powerful driver of innovation.I recently finished reading a wonderful book by Steven Johnson entitled The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. The creative use of displaying information is a real talent with real returns. This is a lesson that can not be stressed too strongly to managers today. It showed how a new way of displaying information can bring new insights and understanding. This map is considered iconic by information-presentation affectionados such as Edward Tufte, and rightly so. This map pointed with a fatal finality to the polluted pump as the source of every death occurred to people who took their water from this pump.

What makes this story particularly interesting is how Snow built his “Ghost Map.” He plotted on a street map where the deaths occurred. The pump handle was removed and the death rate plummeted. Eventually his extensive campaigning convinced authorities that the local water was contaminated and this was causing the disease. Snow suspected this wasn’t the case, but being an empirical scientist, he needed to observe the scene and provide proof of what he suspected.Īs Snow visited the sick and observed the day’s disasters, he kept extensive notes, sometimes in collaboration with a Minister in the area who shared his concern and his ideas. He also was living in the Soho neighborhood of London when a particularly virulent outbreak of cholera occurred.Īll the received medical wisdom of the time assumed that the disease was caused by some sort of airborne miasma, encouraged by the overcrowding and pestilent environment of this teeming area. One of the first physicians to understand and use chloroform and ether, he became a physician to Queen Victoria, helping her deliver her innumerable children with far less pain. He was born poor in Northern England and had to get an education by force of intellect and character. John Snow was a true outsider to Victorian professional medicine. The excitement of the book is how one man understood how to cure this plague and how he used a new way to display information to do so. The book is about something as messy as information, excrement, and how its disposal caused an outbreak of cholera in Victorian London. The Ghost Map shows how information actually works in the world. In my days as an Information management consultant, I believed, as did all my colleagues, that if people were just shown correct and feasible information they would act in accordance with it – they would follow where it led.

Ghost map