Unlocking The Persuasive Power Of Numbers
This proposed new course targets employees who in one form or another have the responsibility of presenting numbers to management. Most of them would be finance staff but can also include sales, marketing, customer care. Within NGOs, monitoring and evaluation staff would be a prime example.
As an ex-accountant, it’s obvious to me that this course is long overdue. It is not offered in any institution in any guise, as far as I can tell. I have looked for short-courses or workshops that remotely touches on the subject and found none.
Most employees have excel skills; but no one is teaching them how to make their communication of numbers and figures impactful. For example; When visualizing data, which graph/chart fits the situation. This course has a deep section on “Fundamentals of data visualization” based on a book with the same title, by Clause O. Wilke. Infact, the entire course is based on a collection of 4 books ie “Making Numbers Count-the art and science of communicating numbers”,“The visual display of quantitative information” and “How to write reports and proposals”.
The bulk of the content, however, is a tool-kit for translating numbers so that your audience instinctively relates to them and remembers the magnitude. This makes it more likely that they will take the action you need them to. Many examples are used for illustration.
Here, I provide a simple outline of the course. In full, it is probably a 2 day session but can be adopted to fit a minimum of 3 hours.
Course Objective
This course is all about presenting numbers effectively.
It is unlikely that you will ever go through an entire day without encountering numbers. Yet, numbers remain intimidating to most.
According to Patrick Forsyth, author of “How-to-write-proposals-and-reports”, most people assume numbers will confuse them. Unfortunate, given that the intention, most of the time, is the opposite. Numbers are meant to clarify.
The second reason for number blindness is that people can only conceptualize amounts in the range of their bank accounts. Picture this; If you had 1M and spent 50k daily, you exhaust your funds in 20 days. If, however, you have 1B and spend the same 50k daily, it will take 55 years to clear!!!
Lastly, the sheer volume of numbers we encounter daily is overwhelming.
Course Objective
This course will give you effective ways for translating numbers into instinctive human terms. This is the bare minimum for getting your audience to stay engaged.
A recurring theme will be “Your Audience”. That’s the first and last take-away.
Two scientists at Microsoft Research, Jake Hofman and Dan Goldstein, believe in this idea so strongly that they’ve spent the better part of a decade spearheading a project known as the Perspectives Engine with a simple goal: develop tools that make numbers easier for humans to understand. For example, intead of saying Pakistan is 340,000 square miles, add a brief perspective phrase…like, that’s the size of 2 californias.
Counterintuitive, yes.
“The largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons on Mars, is about 300,000 square kilometers in area and about 22 kilometers (14 miles) tall.”
OR
“The largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons on Mars, covers an area as big as Arizona or Italy. It’s so tall that if you tried to fly over it during a normal crosscountry plane flight, you’d crash into it halfway up the slope.”
“Throughout the first 18 years of his career in the NBA, LeBron James scored over 35,000 points.”
OR
“Throughout the first 18 years of his career in the NBA, LeBron James scored an average of over 27 points per game.”
2,842,900
OR
3Million
How would you make “the distance to the nearest solar system is 4.25 light years” immediately understandable to your average audience?
The amount of meat in one serving should be the size of a deck of cards is better than saying “3-5 ounces”
Convert Abstract Numbers into Concrete Objects
Convert Abstract Numbers into Counts of Objects
Human scale
Only 0.025% of the world’s water is drinkable.
OR
If you fit all the world’d water into a 4 liter jug, only a teaspoon of it would be drinkable.
This is achieved through:
Comparatives, Superlatives and Category Jumpers
Make it personal
Instead of:
“There’s a 20% chance of experiencing a mental illness in a given year, and a 50% chance of being diagnosed with a mental illness in your lifetime.”
Use:
“For every 5 people, 1 of you will be diagnosed with a mental illness this year. At some point in your lifetime, either you or the person across from you will be diagnosed with a mental illness.
Instead of:
“A normal platelet count ranges from 150,000 to 450,000 platelets per microliter of blood. Your recent blood work showed that your platelet count is 40,000. That’s way too low.”
Try:
“Normal scores for platelet counts are expressed in thousands, and they range between 150 to 450. At 50, we won’t let you travel. At 10, you’re at risk for spontaneous bleeding. You’re at 40.”