Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 49. Make Numbers Count: How to Communicate Data Effectively

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

“We have to make data emotional because emotions are what drive us to act,” says Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior and author of the new book, Making Numbers Count: The Art of Science of Communicating Numbers. In this interview with host Matt Abrahams, Heath talks about ways that data and statistics can be used to illuminate — or obscure — our message. “A lot of people in the world don’t understand numbers like the numbers people,” he says. “And there are a lot of untranslated numbers that float around in organizations and in society.” Heath suggests thinking about numbers like a foreign language we need to “translate” for our audience: “If we don’t translate numbers into something that’s more tangible, we’re going to sacrifice in a big way.“ Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn,  Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedIn ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

Hi, Matt here. We have two days left before we close our listener viewer survey. A big thank you to all of you who have already provided feedback. Please take a few minutes to share your input on the show. We still have a few prizes left to give to lucky respondents. Go to FasterSmarter.com.com. To give us your input. That's FasterSmartter.com.io slash survey. And now a word from one of our sponsors.

Their support allows us to bring you quality content free of charge. If you've ever thought, I know I can do more, but something's holding me back. You're not alone. Whether you're navigating career growth, seeking better balance, or wanting to communicate with more confidence, coaching can help you bridge the gap between intention and action. At strawberry.comme, you'll get matched with a professional coach who's trained to help you clarify your goals, build lasting confidence, and make intentional choices professionally and personally. This is not therapy. It's not consulting. It's a thought partnership designed to help you take action with more clarity and purpose. I strongly believe in the value of coaching. All of us can benefit from the help of a coach.

Visit strawberry.combe slash smart to get matched up with your coach today. That's strawberry. dot me slash smart and get 50% off your first coaching session. It's the most affordable time ever to see if coaching is right for you. 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 Abrams, 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 He.

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 Momentum, 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 Maine 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. If you ever talk to a doctor or a lawyer, even on the other side of the cursed knowledge, if you're not trained in those fields. But it also works for, it needs to be.

kind of expertise. Take an 11-year-old boy, you know, and asking him about its favorite video game. You'll be on the other side of the cursed knowledge that the 11-year-old cannot fathom that situation. And so the best hint from me to sick is to talk in very concrete ways, 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 situation. And so if we've got a public and a downturn 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. And so I think plagiarism is only penalized when we're in school. And after that, you can borrow a steal ideas. And 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 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 that in education we don't do it nonprofits we always try to discover things the advantage that we have with bright spots is 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 uh the the the notion of

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 this where they took back from the literature and they were giving across to somebody who just done a search. And so somebody was looking for the area of Pakistan. And let's make up a number because they 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 a Mexican has about the size of two Californians or five Coloradoes. It turns out no matter what phrase you picked down 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 progressive bulbs when they first came out. And they were expensive. One bulb might cost $7 and you could get a whole pack of the condescent 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 asked 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 that normally condescent 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 drivers at.

And all of a sudden, they made seven years mean something to me. It was such a stunning, stunning revelation. I thought I knew what seven years was. But I didn't until I marked it out with the development of the child. And so 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. And 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. I'm often in awe of what they can teach us. In my coaching and teaching, I find that people see data in 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, the 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 in to 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, just made 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 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 in 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? I know you don't know the answer to that. I'm just curious. It strikes me that in all the examples of 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 you've done your analysis, you just get tired.

And so you're probably two-thirds of the way there when you've got the answer in front of them. And you need another third of the time to make that answer into something that people can feel and experience and see in their head. And 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, it would be considered rude. And yet we've got numbers. And a lot of the 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.

And so suppose that you took a concrete situation and just said, you know, 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? And 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. they're deeming 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 failure. You bet on a lot of that moment, 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 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 rest after using the restroom in their home. And one of my PhD students said, you know, 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 numbers, 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 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 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 haven't been on our own and we couldn't get to without the numbers. And so you 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 your kids at home. Yeah. And it turns out we did the calculation of the bad. And there are some people that could dunk from the free throw line in NBA,

but nobody has ever dumped from the three-point line. Well, if you had the jumping ability of a frog, you could dunk from the three-point line of the other team. Wow. And suddenly you've got a conversation you have with any sports fan or any kid, and they understand and engaged 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 doing this kind of analysis that brings on profound emotions and it 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 math man instead of Superman, helping us understand because you're right, there is a superpower involved in that. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors.

Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. If you've ever felt like you're trying to do everything yourself, especially when the stakes are high, you're not alone. One of the biggest shifts I see in effective leaders growing their organizations comes from focusing on the right things. But that's hard to do when you're stretched thin. You need to be able to delegate some tasks to competent professionals. That's where Upwork can really help. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across areas like marketing, development, data and analytics, and more. It gives you fast access to specialized talent so you can move quickly, fill key gaps, and scale your work without taking on full-time overhead. You can browse

profiles, review past work, and get support scoping your project so you can hire with confidence. It's a simple way to focus your time where it matters most. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWRK.com. Upwork.com. And now back to our conversation. So before we end, Chip, I always ask the same 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 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 the abstract words. 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 is communicate, is to paint a picture of 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. Dan LeChanel Connman won the Bell Prize in economics in 2002 as a psychologist. And there's this running disciplinary views between economists and psychologist 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 way that are 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 intelligence, as simple the 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 ten, 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 in episodes, visit gsb.stamford.edu. Or subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, find us on social media at Stanford.gisb. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives.

It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast Talk Smart.