Law #5: “Watkins’ Law” – There are always patterns [i]

First, let’s talk about “The Good.” David Byrne, writing in the introduction to Gareth Cook’s book, The Best American Infographics, 2013, describes the power of the infographic as:

“…an inbuilt ability to manipulate visual metaphors in ways we cannot do with the things and concepts they stand for — to use them as malleable, conceptual Tetris blocks or modeling clay that we can more easily squeeze, stack, and reorder. And then — whammo! — a pattern emerges, and we’ve arrived someplace we would never have gotten by any other means.”

He could just as easily have been talking about the data mining and analytics process, except that the process is much slower and more methodical than the expression “whammo” suggests.[ii]

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