I was recently at a meeting where the below chart was handed out. Download the original from the Brookings Institution to get a better view of the page.
The chart, made by Lael Brainard for her paper Security by Other Means, shows how complex US foreign assistance objectives are. More importantly you can clearly tell that when so many organizations have such overlapping priorities on the same objectives, there has to be waste in the system.
Most of us (by us, I mean you folks reading this post) have probably never worked in government. But we have worked in a corporate environment. Think about how many times you’ve had groups/individuals with authority/responsibility over the same objective. How badly did that slow down the process to get anything done? More importantly how much money was wasted on getting everyone to agree to accomplish something?
I think there is a lot to learn here. Besides the fact that visualizations can be made to make things look more complex than they possibly really are in order to prove a point.