A great numbers person, i think heis even better than supa man with his can not only see tho le, they can help other people see through the wall. And so there's a sense in which, if we get the numbers right, it's worth that extra or 20 % of the effort to translate things into the right terms. One of my favorite examples is, it turns out forty percent of americans don't wash their hands necessarily when they are using the rest after using thet nteir home. But we're bad at picturing probability, and we're really good at picturing two onod five people shaking theur hands.
“We have to make data emotional because emotions are what drive us to act,” says Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior and author of the new book, Making Numbers Count: The Art of Science of Communicating Numbers. In this interview with podcast host Matt Abrahams, Heath talks about ways that data and statistics can be used to illuminate — or obscure — our message. “A lot of people in the world don’t understand numbers like the numbers people,” he says. “And there are a lot of untranslated numbers that float around in organizations and in society.”
Heath suggests thinking about numbers like a foreign language we need to “translate” for our audience: “If we don’t translate numbers into something that’s more tangible, we’re going to sacrifice in a big way.“
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