A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data-from bestselling business author Chip Heath.
Across industries from business and technology to medicine and sociology, numbers and data are fundamental to the next big idea-yet these numbers can be challenging to put into context. How do we learn to translate complex numerical relationships, or interpret the nuances of unfathomably large or small figures? Author Chip Heath has exceled at teaching others about making ideas stick and here, in Making Numbers Count, he breaks down six critical principles that help reveal what's compelling about a number and shows how to transform it into its most understandable form. The six principles are:
-SIMPLICITY: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of states and countries.
-CONCRETENESS: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which is easier to envision than "1/100,000th of the size of an atom."
-FAMILIARITY: instead of trying to "wow" with enormity, shrink down the numbers into a size that we can relate to in our daily lives.
-CONVERT TO A PROCESS: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into "2 months of commutes, without repeating a song").
-EMOTIONAL MEASURING STICKS: frame the number in a way that people already care about ("that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer").
-SHOW THE MAP: reveal the big picture (2 degrees of global warming doesn't sound bad-until you realize the last time the earth was 2 degrees cooler was during the Ice Age).
We often think more data will clarify our point, but sometimes it only blurs the message. Making Numbers Count shows how to translate the numbers into a form where their meaning is clear-which is critical for effective communication and discussions in our schools, in our workplaces, and in our overall civic discourse.
