
Making Numbers Count
How to Translate Data into Stories That Stick
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Narrated by:
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Kathe Mazur
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
Making Numbers Count is a lively, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to turning cold clinical data into a memorable story.
Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five - anything from six to infinity was known as 'lots'. While the numbers in our world have become increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. Yet the ability to communicate and understand numbers has never mattered more. So how can we more effectively translate numbers and stats so that the data comes alive?
In Making Numbers Count, Chip Heath and Karla Starr argue that understanding numbers is essential - but humans aren't built to understand them. Drawing on years of research into making ideas stick, they outline six critical principles that will give anyone the tools to communicate numbers with more transparency and meaning. Using concepts such as simplicity, concreteness and familiarity, the authors reveal what's compelling about a number and show how to transform it into its most engaging form.
Whether you're interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm or just explaining how many Cokes you'd have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world.
©2021 Chip Heath and Karla Starr (P)2021 Penguin AudioI genuinely like the idea of converting numbers to something more tangible but felt some of the alternative versions were worse. I guess though that that speaks to #Rule 3: Defer to Expertise
Concepts are great but some pants examples
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loved it
Great for people struggling to articulate value
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how to deliver numbers with impact
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However, there are a number of issues with the book:
- it is very U.S. centric; I lost count of the number of times it talks about "baseball scores". They mean nothing to me. It's ironic that a book exhorting us to use relatable numbers then goes on to use a number the majority of the world will need to infer the meaning of.
- The first couple of chapters tell you all you need to know and, if you are working with numbers and learned anything meaningful then maybe a different career is in order.
- Some of the examples are, in themselves, not intuitive and I found myself "translating" them into numbers that meant more to me. One example is a part where a clunky fraction is used instead of a more intuitive percentage and another where a sample size is reduced to such a small number as to mean the first reaction is ask why such a small sample size was used (I think it was something like 1 in 3 respondents thought x, whereas it would be more informative to say 100 from the 300 respondents etc.)
It feels like a good idea that could have been a medium sized article stretched into a book.
Disappointing.
A simple point, repeated. Then repeated again.
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Not one of their best
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