Making Data Resonate
This week my friend Ahmad Chamy is taking over The Data Daily emails. He’s the Founder/CEO of D Cubed Analytics a Healthcare Analytics firm specializing in Power BI and Microsoft suite of technologies. This week he’s writing about how to communicate effectively with data (either in Healthcare or anywhere else). Check out the emails from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
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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, is 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.
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 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. 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.
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.
Ahmad
For The Data Shop
p.s. If you find this topic as fascinating as we do then you'll want to grab this book! Book Recommendation “Making Numbers Count” by Chip Heath & Karla Starr
