The Tornado Diagram Is One Chart Every Management Team Should See

Tornado diagrams are one of xix esstential visuals for reports and presentations.

Budgeting decisions have a regular rhythm. So do long-term capital planning efforts, at least for those organizations that do them. The normal picture is a staff member walking into the boardroom with a list of capital needs, some type of priority list, and a stack of printed spreadsheets. The board or council usually listens politely and asks an occasional question about the biggest line items. However, the question that everyone wants to understand is: what are the key variables that are driving the budget decision and which assumptions about those variables have the most variability?

A tornado diagram answers it in one picture, if you can get it in front of the room.

The Time I Didn’t Get to Show a Tornado Diagram

I landed in Tennessee around 11 am. Our project manager, Jerry, picked me up. The game plan was to meet our regional manager, Ron, for lunch and then go directly to the client’s office. There we would work with their senior management team to evaluate and prioritize a new compliance-driven capital program.

Jerry waited until we got to Chili’s with Ron to spring his concern on me. “JD, I am having a major problem with that one slide. I don’t understand it. And it's kept me awake most of the night.”

We were on the same team, so I tried to make light of it by saying, “Jerry, there’s no reason to lose sleep over a slide. Let’s talk about it.”

“You know I am an engineer,” he said stoically. “And while I appreciate you sending me the slides a week ago, I didn’t look at them until this past weekend. I just need to understand everything before I let you present something to my client.”

“You’re kidding me,” I thought as I glanced toward Ron. But his eyes told me this wasn’t going away.

As a subject matter expert who was used to dropping in out of the air to solve problems, I knew three things about this situation. First, the reason I was there was because I was an expert (not the project manager), but many project managers trained as engineers never take off their engineering hat. Second, I knew I had to go into supportive mode just as I would with the client. And third, it was Jerry’s client, so it was his call.

So I pulled out my laptop, opened Excel, and shifted my seat to be beside Jerry. I had to try but I knew I was doomed to fail.

After about ten minutes, Jerry said what we all knew he would say, “I just can’t understand this until I can actually focus on the details. Let’s pull this slide.”

“I am good with that,” I stated. “I have another way to cover this. But have you already sent the slides to the client?”

“No, just the agenda and the meeting objective. I don’t like to send the meat of the presentation in advance,” he stated.

“Oh, shit,” I thought. “We have bigger problems than a tornado diagram.”

Sensitivity analysis was just a small part of the meeting, and overall the meeting went ok. The reason I remember this story so well is that I was back in front of them two months later. This time I was explaining a tornado diagram. The executive management team understood it almost immediately; I am not sure that engineer Jerry ever did.

What a Tornado Diagram Actually Shows

The tornado diagram takes its name from its shape; in practice, things at the top matter more than things at the bottom.

A tornado diagram is a modified bar chart built to communicate the results of a sensitivity analysis, run either deterministically or probabilistically. It gets its name from its shape: the input variables with the most influence on the output sit at the top with the widest bars, and the inputs with the least influence taper down toward the bottom. That narrowing of the bars makes it like the funnel of a storm.

It’s a good fit for decisions related to understanding which variables have the most influence on the solution, prioritizing rehabilitation projects, sizing a reserve fund, ranking which assets get the next round of capital, and establishing multi-year budgets. The shape of the diagram does something a table of numbers can’t. At a glance, the tornado diagram shows which variables are actually worth arguing about and which ones are noise.

…the tornado diagram shows which variables are actually worth arguing about and which ones are noise.

 

The Explanation Sequence That Works in the Boardroom

Decision makers do not need a statistics lecture. They need a sequence, delivered once, in this order:

1. The input variables are listed down the left side of the diagram.

2. The vertical line running through the center of the bars represents the central tendency — usually the median result.

3. Each bar shows the range of variation in that central result caused by uncertainty in that one input.

4. Therefore, the inputs at the top of the diagram matter far more to the decision than the inputs at the bottom.

This four-point sequence works almost every time. You can then turn the presentation into an interactive conversation, if the management team or decision makers choose to.

The tornado diagram becomes a standing reference for the rest of the project or program. And once you use it, the management team will request it for their next big decision.

A Built-In Bonus: It’s Also a Quality Check

Here’s a detail that rarely makes it into the slide deck but is worth knowing before you sign off on the analysis: a tornado diagram doubles as its own quality-assurance check.

A tornado diagram doubles as its own quality-assurance check.

Every bar in a tornado diagram should touch the vertical centerline (baseline). If one doesn’t, that input’s variation isn’t actually reaching the output. There is a flaw in the underlying model that the modeler has not detected.

My team and I have caught real errors this way in analyses handed over by other consultants, simply by checking whether every bar crossed the centerline before it ever reached a decision maker.

The tornado diagram earns its keep twice: once as a communication tool for the room, and once as a review tool for whoever is responsible for standing behind the numbers.

Presenting It Well

A few habits that are worth building in.

1. Lead with the picture, not the labels

The input list along the left edge doesn’t need to be legible the first time the diagram goes up; only the shape does. Legibility matters later, when you drill into a specific input.

2. Keep the color palette disciplined

Shades of black and blue for the bulk of the bars, sharper colors like green and red reserved for the one or two points you actually want remembered.

3. Trust the executives

Technical staff often want to dive into the math faster than the audience is ready for; decision makers usually get to “the top matters more than the bottom” before their own advisors expect them to. After all, most executives want to know what time it is and not how the clock is made.

Why Tornado Diagrams Belong in Your Toolkit

Capital planning, risk-informed decision making, and budget prioritization all run on the same underlying question: which assumptions are worth management time, and which ones aren’t? It really gets to the central ideas of sensitivity, criticality, and priorities. A tornado diagram answers those ideas in one visual. It tends to become a visual that's requested again and again once it’s on the table.

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This piece draws on material from JD Solomon’s book Communicating Reliability, Risk, and Resiliency to Decision Makers, along with tornado-diagram guidance previously published on Communicating with FINESSE.

Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand

What Do Tornado Diagrams and the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes Have In Common?

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Need help getting started? JD Solomon Inc provides solutions for program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment.

How State Environmental Commissions Function Like Rules Committees

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Author's preface: I often get asked about how environmental rulemaking works in North Carolina. This article is a bit off the beaten p[ath but hopefully you will find it informative and somewhat interesting.

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Complying with the rules and making the rules are two different things.

State environmental commissions are one of the most misunderstood structures in state government. They are not ceremonial boards or public-comment sessions with a fancier name. And they are not advisory panels that meet a few times a year to bless whatever staff has already decided.

In practice, environmental commissions function much like rules committees. They are the same kind of body that governs decision making in legislatures, professional associations, and major competitions. Their purpose is simple. Internal staff should not set all the policy and direction behind the rules. Commissions provide the external balance and cross-user perspective that good rulemaking requires.

What Rules Committees Actually Do

Rules committees exist to create structure and fairness. That holds whether you are talking about sports, competitions, or professional associations. Most serve two related functions. They establish how decisions get made and they put a buffer between the staff who administer a program and the rules that govern everyone under it. Some go further and build in public transparency and formal appeal rights as well.

In legislative bodies, rules committees determine how bills move. In competitions, they set eligibility, scoring, and appeals. Commissions play the same role in environmental governance. They set the rules of the game so regulated entities, citizens, and agency staff all operate under a clear, predictable structure.

Without a rules committee, the people who administer a program also write the rules for it. That is rarely a good idea.

Why Environmental Agencies Need One

Environmental regulation is a classic case of high stakes, high complexity, and high conflict. Air quality, water resources, waste management, and land development all involve competing interests and technical detail.

Agencies implement federal programs, manage permits, enforce violations, and respond to emergencies. With that much operational responsibility, it is easy for internal staff to drift toward setting policy through administrative action rather than deliberate rulemaking.

Environmental commissions prevent that drift.

North Carolina, Alabama, California, and Texas built commissions on this premise. Commissions ensure that rulemaking is not driven solely by internal priorities, staff interpretations, or day-to-day operations. They bring structure to the process, forcing rule changes to be vetted publicly, openly debated, and adopted through a transparent, multi-member body.

Built for Cross-User Representation

Rules committees work because they bring multiple viewpoints to the table. Environmental commissions do the same.

Depending on the state, commission seats are set aside for industry, conservation groups, engineering and science professions, legal or public-interest backgrounds, and the general public. North Carolina's statute goes further still, reserving seats for a physician, an agricultural representative, a hydrologist, a biologist, and someone familiar with local government, among others.

Cross-user representation is about balance. Rules need to be technically sound, economically reasonable, and publicly defensible. Commissions provide that balance in a way an internal staff structure simply cannot.

This sets up a pattern that shows up across rule-making bodies well outside environmental governance. The people who enforce the rules are rarely the dominant voice at the table. Environmental commissions follow the same logic.

The Pattern Shows Up Everywhere

Look at how rules committees work in other fields, and the pattern holds.

Major League Baseball's Competition Committee has eleven members. Six are team owners, four are players, and one is an umpire. The umpire, the person who actually enforces the rules on the field, is a minority voice. The committee is built around those who compete under the rules, not those who officiate them.

College football works the same way. The NCAA's Football Rules Committee is built mostly from head coaches and conference administrators, the people who coach and compete under the rules every Saturday. On-field officials are not part of it. Oversight of officiating runs through a separate national office.

The National Speech & Debate Association runs on a similar model. Its Competition and Rules Leadership Committee has at least seventeen members, and by rule at least three-quarters must be active coaches from member schools. Judges are not part of the equation at all. The people who prepare students to compete, through their coaches, hold the seats, not the officials who run tournament rounds.

Technical standards bodies follow the same principle, and this one will feel familiar to engineers. NFPA, the organization behind widely used fire and life-safety codes, caps every technical committee at one-third membership from any single interest category, whether that is manufacturers, insurers, or the enforcing authorities who apply the codes. No single interest, including the regulators, gets to dominate the committee that writes them.

Environmental commissions follow the same logic. Agency staff, the referees of environmental regulation, are present but not dominant. The structure ensures that the people who must comply with the rules have a meaningful voice in shaping them.

The Problem This Solves

The core problem is straightforward. Internal staff should not set all the policy and direction behind the rules.

Staff expertise is essential. Staff judgment is valuable. But staff perspective is inherently shaped by the agency's operational responsibilities, internal culture, and regulatory pressure. Without a commission, rulemaking can become an extension of agency operations rather than a structured, balanced process.

Environmental commissions solve this by functioning exactly like rules committees. They bring oversight, structure, and cross-user representation that keeps rulemaking balanced and defensible. They remain one of the most important governance tools for making sure environmental rules serve everyone, not just the agency that administers them.

The Rules Are Being Kept Fair

Rules committees exist so the referees do not also write the rulebook. State environmental commissions are no different. The next time a commission meeting looks slow or overly procedural, remember what is actually happening in the room. The rules are being kept fair.

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JD Solomon is currently in his third term as the chair of the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission (EMC). The fifteen-member EMC is the state's environmental rulemaking body.

Human Performance: Don’t Stop Your Root Cause Analysis Too Soon

Generic labels like 'training' and 'communication' feel like closure. They rarely are the cause.

Root cause analysis loses its value the minute we settle for surface-level explanations like ‘human error,” “inadequate training,” or “poor communication.” These labels feel comfortable yet rarely reflect the real causes. Getting to the root causes and meaningful improvement begins only when we push past the easy answers and examine the systems and decisions that shape front-line performance.

The real cause is usually one question past where most RCAs stop.

From the Real World

I was working with an engineering director to help his team develop a new approach to root cause analysis. He invited me to sit in on one so I could form an opinion of what they were doing.

The format was fine. What concerned me was how casually the team stopped digging once they reached human factors. I also knew the director was proud of, and sensitive about, his current program.

At the end of the debrief, I asked one more question anyway. “Does ‘inadequate training’ really get to the heart of the matter?”

“Sure,” Rick said. “Our training budgets have never been adequate, and they’ve been cut hard this past year.”

“I see that a lot,” I said. “But why is it inadequate? Or why has it been cut?”

“Good questions,” Rick admitted. “It’s sort of always been that way, but it’s gotten worse under the new HR director. She’s not meshing well with some of us on the management team.”

“That might be worth exploring in your RCA and your mitigation strategies,” I said, and let it go.

Six Ways Root Cause Analysis Gets Cut Short

RCAs stall before reaching the root cause in roughly half a dozen predictable places:

• Inadequate equipment failure analysis

• Poor design

• Human error

• Procedure not followed

• Inadequate training

• Poor communication

The last four deserve the closest attention. They are the categories RCA teams and facilitators reach for when they want to close a case; however, they are not the ones that explain what actually happened. Generalization (lower resolution) confuses the issue instead of clarifying it.

People generalize when the evaluation turns toward management-related issues.

Human Error Is a Verdict, Not a Cause

“Human error” is a subjective judgment that’s always made in hindsight. It points a finger at the individual and ignores the work process around them. The line between “human error” and “heroic action” is often just the outcome. People generally want good results. That’s exactly why a facilitator has to focus on the process, not the person, and manage by work process rather than by blame.

According to Mark Galley, a blame approach looks like this:

• Looks for “the cause,” meaning a person or group

• Asks “who did it?”

• Focuses on the individual who failed

• Uses top-down problem solving

• Ignores the work process

A systems approach looks different:

• Looks for causes within the system

• Asks “why did it happen?”

• Focuses on the task that broke down

• Moves problem solving closer to the work

• Manages by work process

Organizations that manage by process accept that everyone is fallible and still achieve high reliability. That acceptance is a defining trait of a high-reliability organization.

Brian Hughes, co-founder of Sologic, describes the same instinct to stop too soon. “Often we stop investigating once an error is found,” he writes. “This is a mistake.”

He calls his alternative the “Cause +2” strategy: look at least two levels of causes beyond the error itself, because “an error should not be the end of the investigation, but the beginning.”

“Often we stop investigating once an error is found. This is a mistake.” – Brian Hughes. 

Procedure Not Followed Is a Starting Point, Not an Ending

Facilitators often treat “procedure not followed” as a stopping point. It should be a starting point. Asking “why wasn’t the procedure followed” invites a shrug: “I don’t know,” or worse, “I don’t remember,” because the question is too broad and nobody wants to incriminate themselves.

Better questions are specific:

• Which work process wasn’t followed?

• Which step within it broke down?

• Which part of that step?

• What was the person actually seeing or doing at that moment?

Walk through the details of that process once you have real answers, and map out the specific steps.

Training Doesn’t Explain What Failed

“Inadequate training” tells you nothing about which knowledge was missing, which step was misunderstood, or which condition prevented correct performance. Concluding that training is the root cause leads to one flat solution: retrain people. That rarely touches the underlying system, and it hides the real causal factors, things like unclear instructions, incorrect assumptions, missing evidence, or conflicting priorities.

Bob Latino has made this point for years. In The ‘Soft Side’ of RCA: Management’s Role in ‘Effective’ Training, he argues that “training alone is not the panacea to a facility’s problems,” and describes how companies use training as “managerial therapy.” They send a person or group to a class and assume the need is satisfied. As Latino puts it, “the training investment turns out to be a waste of money” when it substitutes for real causal analysis.

Training alone is not the panacea to a facility’s problems. – Bob Latino 

Communication Is a Process, Not a Cause

Saying “poor communication” describes what happened, not why it happened. It doesn’t tell you which message, which detail, or which assumption broke down. Mark Galley puts it plainly, “Communication is not a cause. It’s a process.” Every communication failure traces back to specific causes like missing information, ambiguous wording, flawed assumptions, incorrect timing, or inadequate verification.

Communication is not a cause. It’s a process. – Mark Galley

Latino raises the same flag from a different angle. In What Are the Root Causes of Ineffective Communication?, he argues the term has become so generic it’s meaningless for corrective action, and asks the question that matters: “How can we act on ‘poor communications’ without understanding what causes such miscommunication?”

Stopping at “communication” costs an organization more than a neat finding. It costs clarity about the actual mechanism of failure, solutions that change the system, and the chance to learn how information flows.

From the Real World (Part 2) - Bill Isn’t the Problem

“Why?” an assistant department manager replied when I pushed during a different engagement. “Because communication is always part of the problem. That’s true everywhere I’ve ever worked.”

“But in this case,” I asked, “why was it poor communication?”

“Because Bill’s a poor communicator.” Everyone laughed, including Bill.

“Let’s sit with that,” I said. “If Bill is such a bad communicator, why do we let him be the bottleneck for the process?”

“That’s just how we do it. Whoever assigns the work explains what’s needed, and everybody does it a little differently,” the manager said. “Part of the problem is some people don’t know what to do even when it’s explained correctly.”

“Everybody,” the engineering director interjected, “one thing JD is going to bring is more attention to the places we’ve been stopping, like communication and training.”

I smiled.

Don’t Stop RCA Prematurely

Stopping at human error, or procedure not followed, or training, or communication hides the deeper organizational factors that actually drive failure. Mid- and senior-level professionals have to insist on specificity and evidence if we want lasting system improvement. The organizations that succeed look past the symptoms and address the causes embedded in their management systems.

Where does your last RCA stop, and is that really the root?

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References

Galley, M. (n.d.). The Root: Root cause analysis blog. ThinkReliability. https://blog.thinkreliability.com/author/mark-galley

Hughes, B. (2021, February 1). Encouraging employees to own up to mistakes at work and how to minimise future problems. Training Journal. https://www.trainingjournal.com/2021/business-and-industry/encouraging-employees-own-mistakes-work-and-how-minimise-future-problems/

Latino, R. J. (2020, March 20). The ‘soft side’ of RCA: Management’s role in ‘effective’ training. Reliability. https://reliability.com/root-cause-analysis/the-soft-side-of-rca-managements-role-in-effective-training/

Latino, R. J. (2021, April 22). What are the root causes of ineffective communication? A healthcare case study. Accendo Reliability. https://accendoreliability.com/root-causes-ineffective-communication-healthcare-case-study/

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Need help getting started? JD Solomon Inc. provides practical solutions to align problem-solving, root cause analysis, and executive communication at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment.

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JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram^®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method^©. He is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.