Issue No. 502 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting notes that “our brains process stories better than statistics.” And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for my 2021 Top-10 Books and Book-of-the-Year.
Translate Dry Stats Into Emotional Moments!
THE STATISTIC: “40% of U.S. adults do not always wash their hands after using the bathroom at home.”
THE STORY: “2 out of every 5 people you shake hands with may not have washed their hands between using the toilet and touching your hands.” (Yikes!)
You MUST read or listen to this book (hot-off-the-press yesterday): Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, by Chip Heath and Karla Starr. I’ve already recommended this book to two CEOs, one national association executive, and a chief development officer. Just look at the tempting section and chapter titles on why you must “translate everything” to up your communication game:
• “Avoid Numbers: Perfect Translations Don’t Need Numbers”
• “Convert Abstract Numbers Into Concrete Objects”
• “Human Scale: Use the Goldilocks Principle to Make Your Numbers Just Right”
On using “emotional numbers—surprising and meaningful—to move people to think and act differently,” check out:
• How to avoid dry statistics by using transferred emotion (Florence Nightingale did this!)
• “Bring Your Number into the Room with a Demonstration” (brilliant!)
• “Selecting Combos That Hit the Right Notes Together”
EXAMPLES (Stats vs. Stories):
What’s the difference between a million and a billion? You could give the dry statistics—but where’s the fun in that? (And who would remember?). So the authors create a story. You enter a lottery to win either $1 million or $1 billion—with a catch. If you win, you must spend $50,000 per day. How long will it last?
• You win $1 million—and “you go bust after a mere 20 days.”
• Your friend wins $1 billion—and it would take her 55 YEARS to squander $50,000/day!
I know. Why read a book about numbers? First—the authors are hilarious! Noting that it would take about two generations to spend $1 billion, they add, “Almost 14 presidential terms” or “one wait to hear your name called at the DMV.” Lol.
The genius of this book (less than 150 fast-reading pages, plus almost 50 pages of fascinating notes) is in the mouth-watering examples of stats versus stories. (Oh, my. I could have used this during my CEO years. Just brilliant.)
STATISTIC (Accidental Deaths): “There are a little more than 50 million people in England, and around 50 deaths each day via accidental causes (slipping in the tub; being swept away in a flooding river; falling from a ladder). The daily risk of dying there in an accident is roughly 1 in a million.”
STORY (Accidental Deaths): “Your risk of dying unexpectedly in England on any given day is the same as your odds of having to guess which date someone is thinking of between 500 BC and August 1, 2200.”
ATTN: CDC AND NEWS ANCHORS! Please, please, please—read Making Numbers Count. Retain Chip Heath as your consultant. Most of your COVID statistics make no sense at all—there’s no context. Dry stats—meaningless. We can’t relate. Chip Heath can help you! Please!
Example: Remember the container ship, Ever Given, that ran aground in a sand storm and blocked the Suez Canal in 2021? Here’s the stat vs. story comparison by two news outlets describing the size:
STAT: “The container ship Ever Given is almost a quarter-mile long.”
STORY: “Imagine the Empire State Building tipped over on its side and blocking the canal. The container ship Ever Given is actually longer than the Empire State Building if you take off the tiny, needle-like antenna at the very top of the building.”
You get the idea: what’s more effective? Dry, mind-numbing stats or “Wow! That’s Amazing!” stories and examples that relate to your own experience?” (I’ve been to the Empire State Building.)
What stats should you turn into stories?
• Homeless meals served
• Enrollment comparisons (students, campers, inmates, church attendance, etc.)
• Year-to-date donor comparisons for the board
• Budget vs. Actual reports
• Inventory excesses?
STAT (true story on inventory procurement): “We’re wasting millions, perhaps 10s of millions on an inefficient procurement system. Here’s a 9-tabbed spreadsheet that summarizes my findings.”
STORY (bringing the demonstration into the room): “Come see my collection of the 424 different gloves that our company is currently ordering. This represents just one minor product that we purchase…”
The demo: Jon Stegner, a business exec, recruited an intern to “track down one of each glove, attached price tags to them, and brought them into a conference room where senior leaders met. Then he poured the gloves out onto the conference room table and invited the leaders, one by one, to come see the ‘Glove Shrine.’”
The result: “The minute anyone saw the Glove Shrine, they immediately jumped to a question, the very one Stegner had wanted them to ask: ‘If we’re wasting this much money on gloves, what else are we wasting money on?’”
I gotta stop, but I could list the dozens and dozens of the book’s STAT vs. STORY examples for the next 20 issues… Wait! Maybe Chip Heath and Karla Starr would say: “In the time it will take you to listen to this book, you’ll drink just 7 cups of coffee (aka 7 trips to the restroom—and please wash your hands) and you and your team will easily have stumbled upon at least 17 ways to leverage the art and science of communicating numbers. That’s the equivalent of…” (Well…you get it.)
OK…just one more—on how to “Recast Your Number in Different Dimensions: Try Time, Space, Distance, Money, and Pringles.” (Yikes! “In order to burn off the calories in a single Pringle, you’d have to walk 176 yards, or almost 2 football fields.” Uh…I’ll have just one, thank you.)
STAT (NEA budget): “In 2016, the $148 million allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts accounted for .004% of the federal budget expenditures ($3.9 trillion). Suppose we eliminated it in response to criticism?”
STORY (NEA budget): “Trying to balance the budget by eliminating the NEA would be like editing a 90,000-word novel by eliminating 4 words.”
Ready…set…SPRINT! Gather your team together and start reshaping your dry stats into memorable stories! Suggestion: read the demonstration stories about the speed of a baseball pitch. (Strike Three!) Plus, marvel at Usain Bolt’s speed (19+ seconds) in the 200-meter race at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro (and the narrow margins). If you can clap your hands four times in a second, Bolt crosses the finish line on Clap 1…and by Clap 3, the eighth-fastest person in the world crosses the finish line—“hopelessly out of contention—and the race is over.”
Enjoy! To order from Amazon, click on the title for Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, by Chip Heath and Karla Starr. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (4 hours, 35 min.). And thanks to Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, Inc. for sending me a review copy.
Note: Chip Heath is also the co-author, with Dan Heath, of The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact (my 2017 book-of-the-year). Read my review.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) I couldn’t help myself! Reading Making Numbers Count reminded me of an early comparison question—first asked by Steve Allen on the 1953 TV quiz show, What’s My Line? (He asks the question of the last guest: “Is it bigger than a bread box?”) Click here. Florence Nightingale was “ahead of her peers, by more than a century, she started by equating basket size.” So instead of describing cold stats following the Crimean War in the 1850s (“…in its first 7 months, 7,857 troops died out of 13,095”), she “translated” that into this memorable line: “We had 600 deaths per 1,000 troops”—“a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the Great Plague of London.” What stats in our organization need to be basket-sized—and appeal more to the emotions?
2) If you’re a “Six Sigma” zealot, you could say: “Six Sigma is 3.4 defects per million objects.” Or…use a memorable story: “To achieve Six Sigma as a baker, imagine baking a batch of 2 dozen chocolate chip cookies every night. You could do that for 37 years before finding a cookie that is burned, raw, or doesn’t have the perfect number of chips.” OK, team! In groups of two…here’s one of our boring organizational stats. Turn it into a memorable story! (Winning team gets these chocolate chip cookies!)
Oops! Has attention to detail and clarity been replaced by fuzzy thinking and leaky buckets? Time for a refresh? Visit the 20 buckets webpage here.
Buckets Countdown: The Printing Bucket (#19): aka The Communications Bucket - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates and Tips from John Pearson, with commentary by Jason Pearson (2nd Edition, 2018) - Order from Amazon.
The Printing Bucket Core Competency: “We elevate the power of the written and spoken word and leverage our communication tools to create synergy and alignment between our mission, BHAG, strategic plans, and programs. We believe proofreading and style matters!”
FUZZ NOTE! “I learned to write to burn the fuzz off my thinking,” commented Fred Smith in his pithy book, Breakfast With Fred. The big idea in the Printing Bucket: Use print deadlines to burn the fuzz off your organization’s blue sky plans that otherwise would rarely be committed to the printed page (or the website).
The 20 management buckets are perfect content for the lifelong learning segment in your weekly staff meetings (you do have weekly staff meetings, right?). Inspire your team to begin a buckets refresh over 20 days, 20 weeks, 20 months, or (if you’re young enough!), 20 years! Visit the 20 buckets webpage here.
JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Need help “translating” your dry and boring organizational stats into memorable stories—ones that your raving fans will repeat frequently to others? Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
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