The world is full of numbers. We often believe that everyone else is more on top of the numbers than we are, that somehow we missed the right class or lack the right gene, and that we are constantly at a disadvantage in understanding and using numbers. But here’s a secret: nobody really understands numbers, write best-selling authors Chip Heath and Karla Starr in their book ‘Making Numbers Count: the Art and Science of Communicating Numbers’. According to the authors of this book, human brains evolved to deal with very small numbers. And throughout history, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five—anything from six to infinity was known as ‘lots’. So it was a great advance when humans developed additional tools for doing math — systems for counting, numbers and then mathematics. But while our cultural math infrastructure has grown increasingly complex, our brains are still the same from a biological perspective. Numbers can numb those listening or reading them.
Among many interesting examples in the book, I’d like to share this thought experiment designed to know the difference between a million and a billion:
You and a friend each enter a lottery with two large prizes: 1 million dollars and 1 billion dollars. But there’s a catch: The winner must spend $50,000 of your prize money each day until it runs out. Your friend won a billion dollars. You won a million. How long does it take each of you to spend your lottery windfall? As a millionaire, you will go bust after a mere 20 days. On the other hand, as a billionaire, your friend will have a full-time job spending $50,000 a day for 55 years.
1 billion - 1 with nine zeros - is a number. Because it's right there in black and white, we could assume that we comprehend it. But our minds become confused because there are so many zeros in a billion. It surprises us to realize how much larger a billion is than a million. By making you imagine that your friend is spending $55,000 a day for 55 years, this example has made the number ‘click’. It has also transformed our envy into something so real and tangible.
We can’t avoid conversations that involve numbers. Numbers often reign supreme when you’re trying to pitch or to persuade. Therefore, our conversations are going to be more useful if we know how to use numbers to bring what is obscure and distant into the range where others can see it and feel it. In their book ‘Making Numbers Count: the Art and Science of Communicating Numbers’, best-selling author and Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business Chip Heath and accomplished science journalist and behavioral scientist Karla Starr outline specific strategies that will give us the tools to communicate numbers with more transparency and meaning. Here are some of my favourite ones:
Translate numbers to human terms
In their book, Chip Heath and Karla Starr make the provocative claim that if people want to communicate numbers clearly, then every number must be translated. The big question then is why do we need to translate numbers?
People don't naturally communicate in numbers. People that work with numbers are quite familiar with them. However, nearly no one else does. We will lose out on a lot of information if we don't translate the numbers. People who don't understand a number don't just lose the number itself; they also feel further apart from you and your argument. They can stop listening and miss the point. For this reason, you can leave numbers alone when filling out databases, but you must translate them into something more concrete and humane if you want to utilize them in an explanation, an argument, or a presentation.
Using simple contextual phrases or comparisons are particularly powerful in helping people remember numbers better than if they didn’t have a translation. Which one is the easiest to recall? ‘Pakistan is about the size of two Californias’ or ‘Pakistan has an area of 340,000 square miles.’
Focus on 1 at a time
One of the effective ways to help people understand your number is by focusing on 1 at a time, write Heath and Starr in their book. It can be 1 employee, citizen, or student at a time. It can also be 1 workplace, union, or classroom; 1 deal, game, or day. Concentrate on 1 specific element of an experience, object, time, animal or human.
Let’s explain this argument with an example from the book: There are about 400 million civilian owned firearms in the United States. This statement tells us something but it's boring! To connect with people and explain to them how out of proportion the level of holding firearms is in America, we need to translate this boring statistics into something more relatable. It can be like this: The United States has more than 400 million firearms and around 330 million citizens. This indicates that every man, woman, and child owns one weapon. Even after that there are roughly 70 million additional firearms available.
Once we transform those weapons into armed individuals, we start to engage. It leads us to imagine that each infant and toddler in America has one gun. Even after that, there are still enough guns available to arm a sizable army. When we reduce that abstract figure of 400 million to its most basic component, one person with a gun, it makes much more sense and we begin to feel the ramifications.
Evoke emotions wisely
People often see numbers and emotions as separate, almost opposites, like yin and yang. But combining objective analyses with emotive pleas is an effective approach to keep numbers alive, suggest Chip Heath and Karla Starr in their book. The most successful people in history have frequently done this; you should too.
Florence Nightingale is widely known as the founder of modern nursing. She first came into prominence in Britain during the Crimean war. During this time, sanitation practices in army hospitals were poor and troops were being ravaged by infections and neglect. Nightingale volunteered to look at the army hospitals and try to improve their sanitation practices. When she arrived in Turkey, she saw misery. Rats were in full control in the hospitals, and the bandages on the soldiers' wounds were bloody for days. What little food the soldiers got was frequently stale or rotten.
She worked tirelessly to improve the situation. As a brilliant statistician, she collected data throughout. Nightingale had data: In the first 7 months of the Crimiean war, 7.857 troops died out of 13,095. But she was aware that things didn’t happen just because people understood the numbers. The numbers needed to be translated into a more potent, more emotional form that would spur decision makers to act. Her argument: We had, in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign, 600 deaths per 1000 troops from disease alone, a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the Great Plague of London.
In her argument, Nightingale first cut down the figure to something that could compare neatly to other causes. She then found a comparison that would resonate emotionally with army commanders and policy makers. The Great Plague and the suffering caused by it were unforgettable to these Londoners. Her suggestions to improve hospitals were accepted by decision makers. By the end of the war, she reorganized the hospital system and the casualty rates were dramatically reduced. Brilliantly taking numbers and putting them in an emotional context was one of the reasons for her success. She continued with her work of improving hospitals, even after the war.
Like Florence Nightingale, in order to make numbers stick with our audience, we need to help them feel something about numbers. Feeling is important because in a world filled with things that need to be accomplished, our feelings about our alternatives lead us to which one we will choose and how passionately we will pursue and respond to setbacks. By connecting the numbers you wish to emphasize to the emotions that already exist in your target audience, you may transform dull facts into information that inspires action.
Know your audience
It goes without saying that every message should use references that your audience would comprehend. But when it comes to arithmetic and numbers, we frequently forget to do this.
Therefore, the first thing we want to do is to use the MacGyver Principle: start by taking a quick look around, suggest Chip Heath and Karla Starr. See what you can create using items you find around you. Take into account what your audience is familiar with: local references, tools used in your industry, and recent news items.
Give preference to items that simply require a straightforward multiplication while you search. Simple multipliers like 2 or half are easier to work with than 4 koalas or 72 pistachios. When the multiplier was 1, participants in a research had the best comprehension and memory of numerical translations. Social distance rules from different countries during the pandemic such as: two baguettes in France; one hockey stick in Canada; four koalas in Australia; and in grocery stores, you had to remain two shopping carts away - serve as an odd but excellent illustration of the MacGyver Principle.
There is a caveat though. If your audience has specialized knowledge, they may create their own workarounds. For example, shoppers may calculate 20% off canned tuna priced at $2.77 in a jiffy but struggle when asked to compute 20% of 2.77 on their child's homework. This is because familiarity wins! Working with specific sorts of numbers requires less memory when a person is highly familiar with them.
Make your numbers important. Don’t be afraid to have fun with them. Feel free to break any of these rules when doing so makes things clearer. Thank you and please subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t.
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