Introducing the Global Excel Airbus Multi-Level Challenge
By Hiran de Silva
Almost everything we see on social media about data visualisation follows the same pattern.
Take some static data.
Turn it into a chart.
Add some colour.
Perhaps animate a transition.
Job done.
These videos are extraordinarily popular. Many have been viewed millions of times. That popularity tells us something important: the dominant mental model of data visualisation today is static data converted into visual form.
But before we go any further, it is worth unpacking what we mean by static data.
Static data is a dataset that exists as a snapshot. It does not change until it is refreshed, replaced, or re-extracted. Once visualised, the chart itself is also static. It may look dynamic, but nothing is moving underneath it. There is no continuous feedback loop between data, behaviour, and decision-making.
The scenario we are concerned with in this challenge is fundamentally different.
We are interested in data that is constantly changing. And more importantly, data that is changing precisely because people are responding to it.
This introduces an entirely different behavioural dynamic.
Consider a simple real-world analogy.
If the speed limit is 30 miles an hour and you are driving at 30, everything is fine.
If the speed limit suddenly drops to 20, you respond by slowing down.
If it increases to 70, you respond again.
Your behaviour is continuously shaped by changing conditions. You are monitoring, interpreting, and responding in real time.
This is dynamic data in its truest sense.
And yet, despite the fact that most real-world decision-making works this way, the overwhelming majority of data visualisation content focuses on static representations. That raises an interesting question.
If dynamic, behaviour-driving data is so central to how we live and work, why is it so under-represented in how we visualise data?
That question sits at the heart of the Global Excel Airbus Challenge.
Why This Is Not Another Excel Challenge
We are all familiar with Excel challenges and competitions, including high-profile events such as the Microsoft Excel World Cup.
These formats have their place. But they are constrained by necessity.
They involve a single person.
Working on a single spreadsheet.
On a single machine.
Solving a single, isolated task.
This is not a criticism. It is a practical limitation of esports-style competition.
The challenge I am proposing operates in a completely different territory.
We are not interested in moments of private spreadsheet brilliance.
We are interested in collaborative processes involving hundreds of people.
People who may be geographically dispersed.
People who may not communicate directly with each other at all.
Their only point of coordination is the model and the process itself.
We are not building something to win a trophy and be applauded.
We are building something that must continue to work indefinitely.
It must function as a live, ongoing solution.
It must survive real-world use.
It must evolve.
Because real systems always evolve.
Requirements change.
Loopholes are discovered.
Unintended behaviours emerge.
New constraints appear.
A viable solution must be adjustable quickly and safely, without triggering heavyweight governance processes that are completely disproportionate to the problem at hand.
This introduces non-negotiable architectural principles that simply do not exist in single-user, isolated tasks.
When there are no other stakeholders, you can do almost anything.
When hundreds of people depend on a process, you cannot.
The Missing Category in Excel Education
At present, there are no competitive challenges, case studies, walkthroughs, or masterclasses that seriously address this level of scale.
What dominates the landscape are challenges that can be demonstrated in five minutes.
Local.
Isolated.
Single-user.
Even when challenges are frequent and entertaining, they do not test collaborative, unattended, long-running workflows.
They do not test systems that must work across locations.
They do not test extensibility.
They do not test governance-friendly agility.
And crucially, they do not test what happens when level two or level three arrives.
Anyone who has worked in the real world knows what happens next.
A new category appears.
A new calculation is required.
An intermediate result becomes necessary.
And because this was not anticipated, patchwork begins.
Complexity increases.
Fragility increases.
Risk creeps in.
Spreadsheets start being emailed.
Files become geographically dependent.
Logic becomes scattered across sheets and workbooks.
Eventually, something breaks.
Single-level challenges do not expose this reality.
Multi-level challenges do.
You may feel confident at level one.
At level two or three, you suddenly realise that the original architectural decision was flawed.
At that point, you have two choices.
Patch and hope.
Or stop, rethink, and redesign the fundamentals.
This challenge is designed to make that moment visible.
Simplicity as a Design Goal
There is another requirement that is often overlooked.
The solution must be simple to explain.
Not simple to build.
Simple to explain.
It must be explainable on a whiteboard.
With coloured pens.
To senior stakeholders.
This matters because when people scroll through solutions to even simple, local challenges on social media, what they see is often extraordinary complexity.
Cryptic formulas.
Dense logic.
No explanation of how or why it works.
The natural assumption is that if something simple looks this complex, then something 100 or 1,000 times more challenging must be unimaginably complicated.
This challenge series is built on the opposite premise.
We are aiming for solutions that are orders of magnitude more effective, more scalable, more productive, while being simpler to reason about, simpler to explain, and simpler to operate.
That may sound like a tall order.
That is precisely the point.
Why Multi-Level Matters
The Global Excel Airbus Challenge is deliberately multi-level because real systems unfold over time.
The first approach you take is rarely the final one.
What looks obvious at the outset often proves insufficient later.
Multi-level challenges force participants to confront that reality.
They reveal whether an approach was merely clever or genuinely robust.
They shift thinking away from tools and features, and towards architecture, principles, and long-term behaviour.
And that is the territory this challenge is designed to explore.
This Is Only the Beginning
This first challenge addresses data visualisation, but not in the conventional sense.
It is not about turning static data into charts.
It is about creating visual structures that allow people to see, understand, and respond immediately to changing conditions, without training, without explanation, and without technical knowledge.
That is a very different bar.
Part One of the Global Excel Airbus Multi-Level Challenge accompanies this article.
Many more will follow.
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