Lesson 6 of 10 · 3 min
The three lenses
Read a tree for more than its raw values.
The same numbers, read three different ways, surface three different problems.
Variance and Direction are not two separate toggles — they're two settings of one, and only one is active at a time. The default is Variance.
Variance colours a card by how its Actual compares to Plan for the selected month: green if Actual beat Plan by a meaningful margin, red if it missed by one, uncoloured inside a dead band around Plan. It answers "is this number currently good or bad". (The exact percentage that defines that dead band isn't confirmed — the underlying constant wasn't accessible for verification — so treat the colour itself as reliable and the precise cutoff as approximate.)
Direction colours a card by the node's own Positive / Negative / Neutral setting from its panel (7.4) — green, red or grey — regardless of what the month's numbers actually did. It answers "which way is good for this KPI at all", the more stable of the two reads. See the note in 7.4 about a real inconsistency between how the product describes this lens in two different places — it's a product issue, not something to resolve by picking one description over the other.
Confidence is a property of connections, not cards. Switched on, a coloured dot appears on every calibrated edge — green for High, blue for Medium, grey for Low — and high-confidence edges are drawn visibly thicker. Hovering a dot shows at least the confidence level and the lag in months; whether it also shows correlation and sample size wasn't confirmed. This is the direct link back to Calibrate (7.8): only edges that have actually been run through Calibrate carry a dot at all.
Sparklines draws a small trend line per card, over the last six months of Actual, coloured by trend direction. A dashed line is used when there isn't enough history to draw a full line. Formula and operator nodes don't carry a sparkline at all. (The exact anomaly-dot rule and the precise meaning of the dashed state weren't confirmable against the product's own constants — treat the general shape of the feature as reliable, the specific thresholds as unconfirmed.)
- 1Tree tabs, each with its node count, and the tenant's total tree count at the right
- 2Views, and the month navigation with its edit summary
- 3Data layers — Actual, Plan, Forecast, VAR
- 4View modes — Default, Focus, Impact — here set to Impact
- 5Card colouring — Variance and Direction are one toggle, only one active at a time; Confidence and Sparklines are separate overlays
- 6Add Node, Add Formula, Generate via AI
- 7Propagate, Auto-layout, Inspect, Search, the orientation toggle, Calibrate, Delete Tree
ValueWorks 2026.08
Takeaways
Variance and Direction share one toggle — Variance reads this month's performance, Direction reads the KPI's stable role.
Confidence lives on edges, not cards, and only appears once an edge has been through Calibrate.
Sparklines shows six months of Actual; a dashed line means not enough history yet. The exact anomaly-dot and dead-band thresholds throughout this lesson are approximate, not confirmed constants.
Surfaces covered
- VARIANCE (±5% band)
- DIRECTION
- Confidence
- Sparklines (2σ anomaly)
Micro-check
Two quick questions
Practice only — nothing here is scored or recorded.
1. You switch from Variance to Direction on the same card. It was green under Variance; what colour is it likely to be under Direction, if the KPI is a cost that came in over plan?
2. An edge shows no Confidence dot at all, even with Confidence switched on. What does that tell you?