Decision Flow
Decision Flow is the sequence of steps people follow when moving from a change in the data to a change in behaviour. Dashboards are easiest to use when the layout quietly mirrors this flow.
What we mean by “Decision Flow”
Decision Flow is the designed path from “What is the outcome doing?” to “What is driving that change?” to “What are our realistic options now?” It is not a list of filters or drilldowns, but a narrative sequence that makes sense when time and attention are limited.
Why this changes how people read a dashboard
Without a clear Decision Flow, even a well-designed dashboard feels like a collection of disconnected views. People jump between tabs, lose context, and struggle to remember how they reached a conclusion.
- Teams revisit the same questions every week because there is no stable route through the data.
- New team members cannot follow how seniors arrived at their judgment — the flow lives only in people’s heads, not in the dashboard.
When you will feel this term in real life
You feel weak Decision Flow when dashboards are technically correct but cognitively exhausting to use.
- “We keep losing the thread.” — people forget why they opened a chart and what question they were trying to answer.
- “Everyone has their own way of using it.” — there is no shared route, so every decision meeting is a different journey.
Decision Flow does not have to be linear, but it does have to be intentional.
See this term in context
Decision Flow is woven through the Decision Breakdown and Trigger–Cause–Action guides:
Related terms in this glossary
Decision Flow works together with:
When you can describe your team’s typical Decision Flow in one or two sentences, your dashboard is much closer to being decision-ready.