Chapter 1 — Practice-on-your-own hints

Why Principles First, AI Later • Companion page • Last updated 2026-07-18

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Short diagnostic hints for the two Practice on your own problems in this chapter. Attempt each problem before opening the hint. Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.

Problem 1 — the Copilot-generated churn dashboard

Restated: A support team asks Copilot for «a churn dashboard for the leadership meeting.» Copilot returns a page with (a) a large card labeled «Churn rate: 12.4%», (b) a bar chart of churn by product line, (c) a line chart of churn over the last six months, (d) a small table of top-five churned accounts. Name three plausible-looking failures on the page and the Part I principle each one violates.

Show a diagnostic hint

Diagnostic cue. Name the audience and decision first, then test whether the dashboard supplies the needed comparison, emphasis, and measure.

Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.

Problem 2 — the eleven-second dashboard

Restated: A colleague sends you a Power BI dashboard they built in eleven seconds via Copilot. They ask «does this look right?» Write the one-question response you would ask them, and the reason that question is the highest-leverage one to ask before you look at anything on the dashboard.

Show a diagnostic hint

Diagnostic cue. Ask for the audience and decision before reviewing a dashboard's visual craft.

Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.

Related on this site

About the three-tier Practice format

Each chapter of the book closes with a three-tier Practice block adapted from Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s course-adoption pattern in Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice!: Practice with us (one worked problem with full solution in the book), Practice on your own (open problems with complete answers in Appendix G of the Practice Workbook; this page offers short diagnostic hints), and Practice at work (an open-ended prompt to apply the chapter’s move to a live artifact). This page hosts the middle tier.