Making Data Resonate

Have you ever tried to communicate an important statistic or highlight an alarming trend but it seems to have no impact on your audience?

If so, then your audience might be experiencing a phenomenon called “psychophysical numbering” - whereby they become desensitized to the number as the number gets larger.

An example of this, an increase from 10 to 20 to feels significant but moving an equal distance from 450 to 460, even though it is the same amount of increase it feels less significant…or “numbing”

Let’s take a look at one more example, 1 billion - 1,000,000,000? is a BIG number. We might think we understand it but that many zeros actually fogs up our brain and make it harder to truly understand. Instead if we said, person X’s net worth is $1,000,000,000 that could translate into, if person X had a full-time job spending $50,000 every day - this money would last him a total of….55 years. By reframing the large number it became palpable and real.?

Let's take a real life of example to solidify this concept.

Florence Nightingale teaches us a lesson in making data impactful...

In the 1850s a figure emerged during the Crimean War that would change the course of the war for the British with effective methods of communicating numbers to leaders. During this time the British had formed an alliance with European and Turkish troops to dissuade the Russian invasion of Crimea. For the British the war had been a disaster, they suffered high rates of mortality not from the battlefields but in the military hospitals. The conditions were so dire in the hospitals that wounded soldiers were “left to expire in agony” The Times of London wrote.

Florence Nightingale, 34 at the time came forward and proposed to the army that she go to the frontlines and help in the hospitals. She handpicked 38 volunteer nurses and took off to Turkey. When at the hospitals she and her team worked tirelessly to improve the conditions the wounded soldiers were in. Throughout this whole process she was collecting data and gathered evidence that her initiatives to improve the hospital’s sanitary conditions lead to a significant decrease in mortality. Nightingale gained celebratory status for her reform of the hospitals.

Following the end of the War Nightingale was determined to ensure that any future wars would not suffer from the inevitable disorganization. She was calling for substantial reform, though she had the clout to speak directly to the queen and high ranking military officials she knew she faced an uphill battle to convince change-averse military leaders that they could not return to business as usual.

For Nightingale? who understood the language of numbers fluently the statistics were clear. But she knew these dry statistics would not be able to motivate and overcome the inertia in the system. The numbers needed to be translated into a more emotional form that would spur people to act. She translated the statistics, in the first 7 month, 7,857 troops died out of 13,095 into

“We had, in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign…from disease alone, a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the Great Plague of London.”

Comparing the death rates to that of the Plague, an unforgettable historical event for Londoners made the numbers more concrete and vivid. Making her numbers elicit emotions in her audiences she was able to ensure that future military campaigns would avoid the same pitfalls she experienced first hand on the front lines.

If you find this topic as fascinating as we do then you'll want to grab this book!

Book Recommendation

Blog Recommendation

If you are looking for a quick read on this topic then check out this Blog post by the Harvard Business Review

"Both colossally large and infinitesimally small numbers can be hard to fathom, because they’re so abstract. Visualization can make data at the extremes easier to grasp."

Next newsletter we will talk more about this concept and some strategies to make your data impactful - so stay tuned!