Chip Heath is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a New York Times best-selling author. He has co-authored four books with his brother Dan Heath, including, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” and his latest book, “Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers”.
Chip’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages and he has consulted with such organizations as Google, The Gap, and The Nature Conservancy. You can learn more about Chip and his work at www.heathbrothers.com.
Why we’re bad at numbers.
All too frequently numbers run together as an abstract jumble.
Here’s an example: For many of us the difference between 1 million and 1 billion is amorphous. We know it’s a big difference, but now just HOW big.
But consider it this way: If you counted to 1 billion one second at a time it would take 12 days. Count to 1 billion in the same way and it would take 32 years. The massive and vivid difference, right?
There’s a methodology behind Chip’s new book, “Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers,” which spells practical advice for simplifying numbers and ensuring they resonate.
“We’re really good as humans at recognizing at a glance number up to about five, but after that, we’re in bad shape,” says Chip, who explains why we should regard math as a kind of foreign language and treat it as such.
We would never insert a random phrase from an unfamiliar language into a PowerPoint presentation, and we should handle data the same way. Because for many people, it might as well be a foreign language!
When you see numbers in your presentation, circle them and ask: Is this accessible? Does this need more translation?
There are tools (which Chip’s book provides) for making numbers stick. For instance, studies indicate that it’s easier to remember that Pakistan is 340,000 square miles when the correlation is drawn to the size of two states of California combined. That image and the associated number? It’s more likely to stick.
Making numbers concrete. It’s really not hard!
As with any other concept, there is a cognitive, even emotional component to understanding how numbers equate. And, without that connection, it’s very difficult to achieve the “aha” or motivational moment we want when communicating with one another. But there are tools to close the gap. The questions you want people to engage with are:
- Do I want to do this?
- Do I think it’s important?
- Do I think it’s necessary?
The challenge is figuring out what makes something sticky because that’s what cements desired change – and quickly.
As an example, Chip explains how concretizing data can bring it to life – and spur people to action. He cites the statistic that 40% of people don’t wash their hands after using the restroom, which sounds bad but doesn’t necessarily motivate any behavior in response.
By contrast, if you tell someone that two of the last five people you shook hands with had not washed after using the restroom, they’ll be reaching for hand sanitizer in no time!
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The Curse of Knowledge.
If we make the assumptive leap that any given thing we’re discussing is common knowledge, we fall prey to what Chip calls “the curse of knowledge.” The better we know a subject, the harder it becomes to imagine that someone else can’t picture exactly as we can – which often results in a lot of tuning out.
The remedy? Foremost, it’s about concretizing unfamiliar concepts that are de facto abstract. You have to paint a picture, which can be done with a myriad of tools that Chip’s new book provides. It doesn’t have to be complex, requiring a backstory with lots of characters and plots. It just needs to be clear and compelling.
Chip shares an example from one of his graduate courses: He asked students to brainstorm ways to inspire consumers to adopt new lightbulb technology that was more environmentally friendly and saved money by using 25% less electricity compared to conventional bulbs.
Some of his students outplayed their professor, coming up with a far more compelling story: The universally understood reality that people hate changing light bulbs. The fact that this new bulb technology meant bulbs would now last seven years was motivation enough, but became even more “sticky” when students added to the pitch a visual: If your child is in second grade today, he or she will be in high school the next time you need to swap out this bulb. By making the benefit clear and concrete, they were changing the story and making it powerfully persuasive.
The case for rounding numbers.
Chip makes a compelling case for why we should always round up when we’re talking in numbers or stats. Our brains recognize up to four or five numbers quickly and easily. Beyond that our brains only have limited memory capacity.
By rounding a number like 498,635 to 500,000 it makes it exponentially easier to retain. “This is something engineers and physicists and doctors do all the time. They look for a quick and dirty calculation.
Because what they want to do is get in the ballpark of something that has a magnitude that they understand,” says Chip, “and you can’t do that when you’re carrying around all these extra digits.”
The opposite can happen with rounding down: When things are advertised for $19.99 instead of $20, it occupies people’s minds, not with the additional digits that haven’t been rounded down. Instead, the mind simply drops digits, rounding to $19 (despite the fact that the item is only one cent away from $20), and then the preoccupation shifts to I’m getting a bargain!
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There are 6 trends that are transforming leadership forever do you know what they are and are you ready for them? Download the PDF to learn what these 6 trends are and what you should be doing about each one of them. These are crucial for your leadership and career development in the future of work!
How framing numbers can render them comprehensible.
Another trick for making numbers stick is by framing them in a way that is not only understandable but evocative.
For example, Kaiser Permanente developed a new procedure that would drastically reduce sepsis at their hospitals and save 149,000 lives a year, which is significant. But would it be significant enough to motivate hospital staffers to adopt new behaviors?
It certainly was, once it was equated to the total number of breast and prostate cancer deaths annually combined. “Now all of a sudden, that sepsis work seems really, really important.
Because we take two of the most actively resourced, socially motivated (cancers) in communities of people who have suffered from disease and this is more important than either of those. It puts things in a broader perspective,” explains Chip. It’s possible to similarly animate psychographic and demographic profiles.
A woman in her early 30s with 1.5 kids is a lot less compelling than the fleshed-out portrait of a human being who exemplifies those statistics.
“Imagine that you tried to form a living, breathing human being out of those statistics?” says Chip. That consumer demographic would now be a flesh-and-blood woman standing in the grocery store, harried, with two toddlers going in different directions. The story is now both accessible and relatable, and therefore likelier to stick.
More about animating statistics, projections and other data.
“How do you breathe life into a number or that statistic? And what does that actually mean?” Chip shares the example of numbers that bounced around Silicon Valley a lot at the height of the dot.com boom.
Experts were projecting return rates of 18% annually – the equivalent of creating $1.3 trillion in value over the decade ahead. Sounds great, until you break it down.
The giddiness mutes pretty quickly when that projection is re-framed as the challenge to guarantee a market hit like eBay or Facebook every six weeks for ten years straight. “Yeah, that’s crazy.
So, by breathing some life into this statistic, you’re actually in a position not only to understand but to be convinced in your mind that this is not going to be possible,” says Chip. “So, it’s not just a translation of a number, it’s actually helping you think about the number in a clearer way than you would have before.”
TOP TIPS
- Whatever you do, do something to bring numbers alive.
- It’s okay to start small. If you can’t translate all the numbers in a presentation, pick just one as a beginning.
- Framing is everything. Use comparisons to create perspective. A $200 billion worldwide gaming industry sounds big, but it sounds REALLY big when it’s framed as 10x the size of the music industry or 4x the size of the movie industry.
- Perceiving and understanding numbers concretely means seeing entrepreneurial opportunities you might otherwise miss. (Awards shows for gamers?)
- You can be Superman. Rendering numbers user-friendly is like learning (or teaching) people how to see through walls!
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There are 6 trends that are transforming leadership forever do you know what they are and are you ready for them? Download the PDF to learn what these 6 trends are and what you should be doing about each one of them. These are crucial for your leadership and career development in the future of work!
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