Generating Principles for Analysts, Part 1

I was reading the Overseas Development Institute's Exploring the Science of Complexity today (more on this again), which I found through Duncan Green's blog From Poverty To Power.

One of the examples it gave of the generation of complex behaviour from simple rulesets was that of the US Marine Corps who apparently use "Capture the high ground", "Stay in touch", and "Keep moving" (I haven't managed to confirm this, though the principles are certainly in keeping with the maneuver warfare principles of John Boyd).

Regardless, the question is begged... what might these be for analysts?

I think I got a line on the first one a few weeks ago when I was facilitating a workshop about the main points in Tufte's books. He spends a fair amount of time in The Display of Quantitative Information on how graphs are made up of "data ink" which conveys information, and "non-data ink" (including chart junk), which doesn't. One of his examples takes the original graph (Linus Pauling, General Chemistry (San Francisco, 1947), p. 64.) ,


Source: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte

and with the non-performing non-data ink removed (and just a little bit of data ink added), we have

Source: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte

Much better - reads at a glance.

It occurred that the concept of data ink vs non-data ink is another way of expressing the signal to noise ratio.

Errors are a form of noise. Lack of clarity is noise. Extraneous information is noise.

So... Maximise Signal:Noise as a first generating principle. Not bad.