49. Make Numbers Count: How to Communicate Data Effectively
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Hi, Matt here. I invite you to look into Stanford Continuing Studies. For over 20 years, I have taught in the program. Discover a diverse range of courses available both online and in person to anyone, anywhere in the world. Classes cover everything from fundamental business skills to the fascinating world of AI. This fall, join me for Communication Essentials for Work and Life, a new course designed to enhance and hone your communication skills in various situations.

Each week, guest speakers will join me for interactive lectures and Q&A sessions on topics like persuasion, storytelling, nonverbal presence, and reputation management. The course starts September 24th, and registration is now open. Learn more at continuingstudies.stanford.edu. Data often reigns supreme when you're trying to pitch or to persuade. Yet too many numbers can numb those listening or reading them.

How do we find the sweet spot where numbers are motivating to our audience without complicating our messages? I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. I am really looking forward to speaking with Chip Heath.

Chip is the Thrive Foundation for Youth Professor of Organizational Behavior at the GSB. His research examines why certain ideas survive and thrive while others don't. He is the co-author of many amazing books, including The Power of Moments, Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick. Chip has a new book out, Making Numbers Count, The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers.

Thanks for being here, Chip. I am a huge fan of your work. Thanks for having me. Let's jump right into it. I have enjoyed all of your books, but Made to Stick, which focuses on how to get ideas to stick in a world full of so much information, and Switch, which is all about effective persuasion, continue to have profound impact on my communication. Can you share with us one powerful takeaway from each of these books?

I think the takeaway from Man to Stick is that all of us, as we become experts, experience what we call the curse of knowledge. And the curse of knowledge says that when you're an expert, it's hard for you to imagine what it's like not to know what you know. So if you've ever talked to a doctor or a lawyer, you've been on the other side of the curse of knowledge. You're not trained in those fields. But it also works for everyone.

for any kind of expertise take an 11 year old boy you know and ask him about his favorite video game you'll be on the other side of the cursed knowledge that the lemon you cannot fathom the situation and so the best hint from me to stick is to talk in very concrete ways because because before we become an expert we think in very concrete terms i think the takeaway from switch that i loved was most was discovering the power of bright spots thinking and so it turns out that

Our brains are wired to critique situations. If we've got a public downturn and the sales force has really been hit hard by this, we'll tend to focus on the people that are doing the worst and try to coach them and help them out. What we don't often do is look at the best people and steal their ideas. I think plagiarism is only penalized when we're in school. After that, you can borrow and steal ideas. We're not talking IP here. We're talking if somebody has a great idea,

in your sales force, why not roll that out to the other salespeople so that they have the benefits of having that pitch or that idea or that angle for a customer? And I think we don't do that nearly enough. We don't do it in education. We don't do it in nonprofits. We always try to rediscover things. The advantage that we have with Brightspots is that you can take the best of what's already been discovered. Both of those speak very loudly to me, and I remember them distinctly from reading your books.

The notion of the curse of knowledge looms large in all communication. And this idea of leveraging what you already have, it makes a lot of sense. You're right. We spend a lot of time reinventing rather than leveraging and reflecting on what works and advancing it. So thank you for sharing that. And I love hearing it in your own words. It's exciting to hear it, not just read it. Speaking of your books, in your newest book, you explore how we can better communicate numbers and data.

You make the provocative claim that if we want to communicate clearly, every number must be translated. What do you mean by translate? And what are the dangers of leaving numbers untranslated? I think the danger of leaving numbers untranslated is that we just don't get it.

Some people that run the search engine at Microsoft did some experimenting in this where they took a fact from the literature and they were giving across to somebody who had just done a search. And so somebody was looking for the area of Pakistan. And let's make up a number because I don't have it here in front of me. It's 680 billion hectares or whatever it is. If they also gave people a slight analogy for that, it's about the size of two Californians or five Colorados.

It turns out no matter what phrase you picked out that equated those two terms, people would remember a day later, a week later, six weeks later, much better if they had a translation. And I think the curse of knowledge has an impact on us when we're dealing with numbers. Numbers, people know their numbers very well, but almost everybody else doesn't know their numbers. If we don't translate numbers into something that's more tangible, we're going to sacrifice in a big way.

One example from my students is years back, I gave people the assignment of convincing people to buy carbon fluorescent bulbs when they first came out. And they were expensive. One bulb might cost $7 and you could get a whole pack of the old condenser bulbs for $4. And yet they saved electricity and lasted longer. And so some of my students sat down and said,

No, we didn't do your assignment where you ask us to talk about the savings on electricity. But one thing that bugs us all is that changing a bulb is always a hassle. And these carbon fluorescent bulbs last seven years as opposed to one year of the normal incandescent bulb. And so they said, here, think about this. If you change that bulb when your child is learning to walk, next time you change it, they're going to be learning about oxygen in second grade. And the next time, they're going to be taking their exam for driver's ed. And all of a sudden,

they made seven years mean something to me. It was such a stunning revelation. I thought I knew what seven years was, but I didn't until I marked it out with the development of a child. I think that's the beauty of it. If we translate numbers, everybody's in a position to get the numbers. Very often analytical people get frustrated because nobody's understanding your analysis. I'd say if you just go a little further and translate those numbers, your analysis is going to have a bigger impact.

So giving that perspective, that comparison can really, really help. And I love that example. Our students are so creative, Chip. I'm often in awe of what they can teach us.

In my coaching and teaching, I find that people see data and emotions as separate, almost opposites like yin and yang or Star Trek's Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy. How can we make data emotional and should we even try? I think we have to make that emotional because emotions are what drives us to act. And so if you think about

Lawrence Nightingale was a hero of mine. She had a career of nursing. So Lawrence Nightingale founded that profession, but she also founded a lot of the statistical analysis that we do in society. She originally came into prominence in Britain during the Crimean War, where she was looking at frontline hospitals and trying to change their sanitation practices so that they weren't killing off soldiers. And she had a very clever graph that made it clear that

The Russians were killing off a certain number of our soldiers, but our hospitals were killing off seven or eight times that amount because of the deaths that would happen once somebody got a wound and it got infected. - Wow. - And so she pursued this not only during the war, but after the war. And so she was brilliant.

at doing things that I think we don't do nearly enough, which is to take our numbers and put them in an emotional context. Wow. Very provocative and very clearly answered in terms of, yes, we need to use emotion when we talk about data and numbers. And certainly it plays off of what you talked about in terms of comparisons earlier. And what you can compare to could be very emotional and have that impact that you want.

So I wonder why we don't do that. Is it that we're just not taught how, or is it that we just figure that knowing the information is enough and we just leave it for people to figure out on their own? And I know you don't know the answer to that. I'm just curious. It strikes me that in all the examples you've used, they've been so provocative. My immediate question is, why aren't we doing this all the time? Do you have some ideas why we don't do this? I think it takes an extra step that after

After you've done your analysis, you just get tired. You're probably two-thirds of the way there when you've got the answer in front of you. You need another third of the time to make that answer into something that people can feel and experience and see in their head. It's just hard to force yourself to do that at that moment because you think, I've got the number. It's the right number.

i'm going to present it and people buy it well they don't necessarily i think that's exactly right and i would add to it that the goal is to get to the answer not necessarily to communicate the answer in a way that people can understand it so part of it is we have to perhaps change what the ultimate goal is if somebody came up with a phrase in a foreign language that they yelled out in a meeting and half the people in the room didn't speak that language you have to

it would be considered rude. And yet we get numbers and a lot of people in the world don't understand the numbers like the numbers people. And there are a lot of untranslated numbers that float around in organizations and in society. I love that comparison because you're exactly right. People just take these numbers for granted without actually understanding them.

You mentioned this notion of a numbers person versus not a numbers person. And I'm wondering what if you're not a numbers person, but you're in a meeting about numbers? What can you do? How can you play? How can you participate? Well, I think the first thing to realize is you are not alone. And even the numbers people in the meeting that didn't happen to do this particular analysis that

It was done by the numbers person who's in the front of the room at that point. None of us are prepared to be numbers people. The second thing to note is that you can force them onto your turf a little bit. Suppose you took a concrete situation and just said, let's imagine that this table that we're sitting at is the budget that we're talking about here. What area on the table do we need to mark out to talk about that expense? You very quickly realize, is this a trivial thing or is this a big thing?

And the analytical person may even be happy to be asked to do that because they can do some calculations on the fly and geek out on it. But they're geeking out in a way that everybody else understands as opposed to a way that everybody else doesn't understand.

So it sounds like you as a non-numbers person have to invite, encourage, maybe conjole and force some numbers people to communicate in a way that you understand and give them that opportunity. The example you gave with the table reminded me of things I would do with my children when they were younger and I was trying to explain concepts, not necessarily number concepts, but I would go out of my way

to make sure that I was explaining it in a concrete visual way to help them understand. So it might be inviting others to communicate with us in that way.

There are some things in understanding numbers that are just hard for some people. I'll take myself personally. Probability is hard for me. I believe in streaks, for example. So if I flip a coin three times in a row and it comes up heads those three times, I actually suspect that it will likely come up heads again. And it's a legitimate fair coin. You've been on a lot of debt money.

Right. Yeah, right. Exactly. And so I guess, is there something we have to do in terms of education or learning for ourselves just a little bit more about how numbers work that you think is important too? I think that a great numbers person, I think, is even better than Superman because they not only see through the wall, they can help other people see through the wall. And so there's a sense in which if we get the numbers right, it's worth that extra 20% of the effort to translate things into the right terms because

none of us are good at probabilities, and none of us are good at fractions. And one of my favorite examples is, it turns out 40% of Americans don't wash their hands necessarily when they're using the restroom in their home. And one of my PhD students said, "What that means is that two of the last five people that you shook hands with hadn't washed their hands before shaking your hand."

And all of a sudden that's the same number, it's 40%, but we're bad at picturing probability and we're really good at picturing two out of five people shaking our hands. And so I think that's a testament to the fact that some things are really hard for us. And if we can make those things tangible and concrete,

we're going to bring on many more people onto the onto the playing field and we're going to motivate change in a very dramatic way i mean when you said 40 of people don't wash their hands after using the restroom i thought oh that's kind of disgusting but when you said two out of five i i immediately looked around the room and thought where's the hand sanitizer so it definitely changes behavior as well before we end i'm wondering do you have any last thoughts you'd like to share about how we can better communicate about data and numbers

I think numbers are incredible things because they take us to places that we

we haven't been on our own and we couldn't get to without the numbers. Think about the jumping ability of frogs and what would it be like if people could jump like frogs? This is the kind of discussion you have with your kids at home. It turns out we did the calculations for that. There are some people that could dunk from the free throw line in NBA, but nobody's ever dunked from the three-point line. Well, if you had the jumping ability of a frog, you could dunk from the three-point line. Up to

of the other team. And suddenly you've got a conversation you have with any sports fan or any kid and they understand and engage in the same way on a topic that we wouldn't have thought about before. Very often what we found over and over again is by running the numbers, what we experienced was a sense of awe. It's like, wow, I didn't know that was how important that ability was. There's a lot of power in

And doing this kind of analysis that brings on profound emotions and motivates people, like you said before, to change. Well, I really appreciate you sharing not just that last bit of advice, but the advice you've shared before. And I see you standing tall with a cape flowing behind your back as as math man instead of Superman helping us understand because you're right, there is a superpower involved in that.

So before we end, Chip, I always ask people the same three questions. I'm hoping you're open to answering these questions with me. Is that okay? Sure. All right. So question number one, if you were to capture the best communication advice you ever received as a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would it be?

The single most important thing that we found in making ideas stick is be concrete. But concrete is an abstract word, so I would say paint a picture. And in parentheses, I would say don't tell a story. And I think the second is important, not because I'm against storytelling, because that's a second level of thing. And really our fundamental goal as communicators is to paint a picture, be concrete at every moment, and then the story will emerge from that.

I love it. And in fact, people will create their own stories if you paint the picture well enough. And that's where it really is internalized. So paint a picture. I like it. Thank you. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

I have to go with one of my scientific heroes, Daniel Kahneman, one of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 as a psychologist. And there's this running disciplinary feud between economists and psychologists that you know he must be good to get a Nobel Prize in economics despite the disciplinary differences. But he is a brilliant communicator because he always talks in very concrete ways.

They're provocative. Absolutely. I have seen him speak and I've read his work and he's very good at that. Let me ask question number three. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I would say that you want concrete message, this emotional message.

and tell it in as simple a way as possible. Those are the top three. It's all about being concrete, emotional, and simple. And you have done a great job today in all three of those aspects for us. I thank you, Chip, for your time and for your insights.

Your ideas are incredibly helpful across all of your work, but especially for helping us to understand how best to present numbers and data. I encourage everyone to read Chip's new book, Making Numbers Count, The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers. I had a chance to read a preview copy, and let me tell you, as far as the numbers go, on a scale of one to 10, it is certainly an 11. Thanks again, Chip. Thank you.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Produced by Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. For more information and episodes, visit gsb.stanford.edu or subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, find us on social media at stanford.gsb.

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