The "Bureaucratic Mandala": Why your beautiful A3 is failing.
- hidet77
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
In Japan, we have a phrase, “Government ponchi-e,” which is sometimes compared to a mandala. It refers to the overly complicated, everything-in-one-place charts you often see in government documents and policy presentations.
At first glance, these diagrams can look impressive. They feature colorful arrows, boxes, icons, and detailed labels, all packed onto a single sheet—usually A3. They give the impression that “everything is covered” and that a huge amount of work has been done. But if you try to read them, you quickly realize how difficult they are to navigate.
This is a classic example of poor information design: cramming every detail onto a single page without first organizing the content. The result looks smart and sophisticated from a distance, but up close it’s hard to read, hard to understand, and hard to use for real decision-making.
Why does this happen? There are a few common reasons:
1. Fear of leaving things out – People worry that if something is not on the page, it will be forgotten or criticized later, so every item gets added: “just in case.”
2. Lack of a clear audience – When the diagram is meant for “everyone,” from senior leadership to front-line staff, it ends up speaking clearly to no one.
3. Mixing purposes – One page tries to do everything at once: explain the background, show the current situation, outline the strategy, list all projects, and define KPIs.
4. Decoration over communication – Visual elements are added to make the slide look rich, rather than to guide understanding.
Good information design starts long before you open PowerPoint or any graphic tool. It begins with a few basic but powerful questions:
1. What is the one main message?If your reader remembers only one thing, what should it be?
2. Who is this for?A busy executive, a technical expert, or the general public? The level of detail and language should change depending on the audience.
3. What decision or action should this trigger?Are you asking for approval, explaining a problem, or proposing a solution?
Once those answers are clear, you can start structuring the page. In practical terms, good information design usually involves:
1. Clarifying your message.Write down your key point in one sentence. That sentence should be visible or at least strongly implied on the page.
2. Structuring the information logically.Group related items together. Separate background from conclusions, strategy from operations, inputs from outputs.
3. Deciding what to leave out.Not everything needs to be on the main page. Supporting details can appear in an appendix, in notes, or in separate documents.
4. Choosing a layout that guides the reader’s eye.Use hierarchy—titles, subtitles, spacing, and color—to show what is important and in what order to read.
If you skip these steps and just keep adding more elements to a single sheet, you end up with a “Kasumigaseki ponchi-e”–style diagram: visually dense, conceptually messy, and ultimately ineffective. It might satisfy stakeholders who want to see everything “covered,” but it fails the only test that really matters: does this help someone understand and act?
The lesson is simple: don’t start by filling the page. Start by organizing the story. Decide what you want to say, to whom, and why. Once that story is clear, the design of the page becomes much easier—and you’ll never need to create a Kasumigaseki-style mandala again.
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