Making Numbers Count

It has been quite a while since I’ve written a book recommendation. I simply haven’t come across much recently that was worth passing on to my readers.

Until now.

In Making Numbers Count, Chip Heath and Karla Starr have produced a comprehensive set of best practices for presenting numbers for maximum effect.

We all know that it is important in business communication to be data-driven, hence the need for numbers to make our case. Yet data is not enough. It’s easy to think that numbers speak for themselves, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Why not?

Persuasive communication is about getting people to act in a certain way. In order to do so, they must first attend to your message, understand it, believe it, remember it, and then act on it. By itself, data supports only action number three. Simply providing numbers without using some of the techniques in this book will guarantee that you leave a lot of persuasive oomph on the table. With these techniques, you’ll be able to grab attention, get your intended meaning across, make it stick in their memories, and evoke emotions which drive action.

Let’s start with understanding. On the face of it, nothing should be easier to understand than a number. We know that 6 is more than 5, and 60 much greater than 6. It’s obvious 43% is bigger than 17%. We know 1/3 is larger than 1/4. (Actually, that last is not so obvious. When A&W introduced a 1/3 pound burger at the same price as McDonald’s quarter-pounder, sales declined because more than one-half of their customers thought it was smaller. Just another illustration why numbers sometimes need a little help.)

On the other hand, nothing is more meaningless than a single number. Is 5 a big number? If you drink 5 ounces of water after a hard workout, it’s not near enough. If you down five ounces of liquor before driving home, it could change your life. Numbers are meaningless except when compared with something we already know.

Exceptionally large or small numbers can be especially difficult to understand. We all know a billion is more than a million, but it really hits home when you say a million seconds is about 12 days; a billion seconds is 32 years.

If you want to manage the meaning, you must choose the comparison. When you present a number without context, your listeners or readers will interpret the number relative to their own experience, which might not prompt your intended effect. If you want your numbers to count—to serve your purpose—you need to choose the proper context. Here’s an example from the book:

59% of Americans polled said that growing trade ties between countries are “very good” or “somewhat good”. When I read that statistic, I thought that since the US has traditionally promoted free trade, it’s not too surprising that 3 out of 5 support growing ties. But, what if I had told you first that of 47 countries surveyed, the US came in dead last by far?[1] (This example also illustrates how you can grab attention with a number by setting up and then breaking an expectation.)

Understanding is a good start, but often you also need to make numbers memorable and vivid.  Abstract numbers tend not to stick in minds very well, so one of the best ways to make them memorable is to make them concrete, often by relating them to something familiar, such as comparing tumor sizes in centimeters to familiar objects (1 cm = pea; 3cm = grape). There are many such techniques in the book.

If you’re going for emotional impact, you will have to make your numbers vivid, especially because even dramatic numbers may fail to make an impression because of psychological numbing. To punch through indifference, we need to think about something that evokes the requisite emotion. Imagine the horror we all feel when learning about a plane crash. What if I told you that the current daily COVID death toll is equivalent to a fully loaded 737 crashing every three hours of every single day?

This post has only given a hint of the myriad techniques you can learn in the book. I don’t want to steal their thunder, and besides, I’ll probably use a few of them in future posts!  The best part of Making Numbers Count is that it’s full of before-and-after examples—77 in all. You could become a more eloquent communicator simply by becoming familiar with the examples, or better yet, follow their advice and try to improve on their efforts.

[1] That survey was taken in 2007; I don’t know comparable stats for today, but that simply underscores the need to provide proper context.