Most dashboards describe quantities that sit still: how much is in each region, each team, each stage. Flow analysis asks where things go instead: which route carries the most, who keeps handing work back to whom, which team everything passes through. Five charts do this work, and two questions tell you which one to start with.

The same table of from-to pairs can feed a Sankey, a dependency wheel, or an arc diagram, and each shows it differently, so the choice depends on what you know about the nodes and what you need to read from them. Below, the two questions come first, then the five charts, then a worked example that runs one data set through three of them.

Two Questions, Five Answers

Start with two questions: does the position of the nodes matter, and do you need to see how much moves or what connects to what?

Does the position of the nodes matter?…