A friend pointed me to a free article in the Harvard Business Review called “Crap Circles� (how can resist taking a look?) in which the author (Gardiner Morse) illustrates and discusses the logical flaws of the elegant, circular graphic.
I think we all have a hesitation to find fault with a graphic that seems to illustrate something that we want to believe – that business process have a cyclical nature. Some do: Investment yields more revenue, which leads to more profit, which yields more investment, and so on. Some processes are linear: think up the project, work on the project, finish the project. But we still cling to that circular graphic. And as great as many of these graphics look, some make no sense. Morse’s examples, mostly drawn from project management presentations, show project maturity heading back to the start-up phase in one and project termination leading to deployment in another. Oops.
I did a quick search on Google for “lifecycle� images in the .gov and .mil domains and came up with a few nonsensical graphics. By way of disclaimer, like the HBR author Morse, I’d like to say that these images are taken out of context, which may have cleared up the confusion. And yes, the numbers 1 through 4, do imply some progression from start to finish, but we’ve still got that circle motif:
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