Making numbers count

Consider this thought experiment designed to help people understand the difference between “a million” and “a billion.”

You and a friend each enter a lottery with several large prizes.

But there’s a catch: If you win, you must spend ￡50,000 of your prize money each day until it runs out.

You win a million pounds.

Your friend wins a billion.

How long does it take each of you to spend your lottery windfall?

As a millionaire, your encounter with runaway consumerism is surprisingly short. You’re broke after a mere 20 days.

If you win on Thanksgiving, you’re out of money more than a week before Christmas.

For your billionaire friend, resources would hold out a bit longer.

He or she would have a full-time job spending ￡50,000 a day for … 55 years.

1 billion — 1,000,000,000 — is a number. We might think we understand it because it’s right there, in black and white, but it has so many zeros that our brains fog up. It’s just “lots.” When we see how much larger it is than a million, it comes as a surprise.

This thought experiment is taken from a new book, Making Numbers Count. by well known behavioural researcher Chip Heath and journalist Karla Starr.

As Heath describes it: “The book is based on a simple observation: we lose information when we don’t translate numbers into instinctive human experience. We do hard, often painstaking work to generate the right numbers to help make a good decision—but all that work is wasted if those numbers never take root in the minds of the decision makers. As lovers of numbers, we find this tragic. The work that is being done to understand the most meaningful things in the world—ending poverty, fighting disease, conveying the scale of the universe, telling a heartbroken teen how many other times they will fall in love—is being lost because of the lack of translation.”

I’m sure most PR practitioners have got the message that data is vital to inform their work – and of course, measurement and evaluation are top of the PR agenda.

But as Heath remarks: “There are great guides for making graphs more stylish and persuasive, or for making infographics that make a complex process easier to understand. But there’s no guidebook and writing guide for the fundamental process of making numbers count—getting people to understand them in instinctive and accurate terms. And because we don’t understand the process, we fear it. When numbers come up, half of us say, “I’m a designer/teacher/lawyer, not a numbers person,” as if casting a spell to ward off a vampire. And the other half of us mumble apologies for the numbers and rush through our presentations before we slink back to our underworld lairs, where we can calculate in peace without facing scorn.”

A situation many PR people will be familiar with.

Also, as Heath notes, “The higher numbers get, the less sensitive we get to them, a phenomenon psychologists have labeled “psychophysical numbing.” Moving on the number scale from 10 to 20 feels significant. But moving an equal distance from 340 to 350, even though it’s the same increase, we feel nothing … that’s “numbing.”

Remember that the next time you are tempted to use the big vanity number in your PR report rather than the much smaller but accurate figure.

The book overall has some great practical tips on how to make numbers count. As he says: “In school, you were force-fed cardinal numbers and polynomial factoring and a thousand other topics, but there was never a lesson on How to Communicate Numbers. (Pop quiz: Which skill turned out to be more important in the work world?).”

PR practitioners may well find this book useful to help them get better at communicating numbers with audiences and stakeholders of all kinds.

15th Greek Corporate Communication Conference

On December 9th last year, I was delighted to take part in the 15th Greek Corporate Communication Conference. It was an excellent line-up of speakers covering a wide variety of topics including ESG, crisis comms, and measurement.

I delivered a session on How Artificial Intelligence & Big Data will affect the future of Public Relations, followed up by a Q&A with Tania Giakoumaki. You can view the recording above.

Many thanks to Dimitris Konstantellos for inviting me in the first place - it was great to be there.

That’s it for issue #9. This newsletter is clearly a work in progress. So all feedback is gratefully received. Please do let me know what you think in the comments. I’m all ears for ideas and suggestions as to what to cover.

Thanks again for reading - and possibly subscribing. Until next issue.