Book review of Making Numbers Count by Chip Heath and Karla Starr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the beginning of this year, a book by Chip Heath and Karla Starr titled Making Numbers Count appeared. It is subtitled The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers (but should have added Almost Exclusively Just Using Words). I think it is a good but not great book. Toastmasters and others learning to give presentations will find much of it useful.  

 

Publisher’s Weekly had the following brief review:

 

“Stanford business professor Heath (Decisive) and journalist Starr (Can You Learn to Be Lucky?) deliver a mixed collection of tips for making data more easily understood. Based on the premise that human brains can’t easily work with large numbers, the authors provide ways to break down, reframe, and convert them into everyday comparisons or analogies. It’s helpful, for instance, to use concrete objects as size references (‘a deck of cards’ sticks with people more than a three-to-four-oz. portion size); to use culturally relevant comparisons (the Covid-19 pandemic’s six-foot social distancing guideline is illustrated by a hockey stick in Canada and a surfboard in San Diego); and if something is hard to grasp, to convert it (how long it takes to walk somewhere can be easier to interpret than how far away it is). Though the authors write that their tips are aimed at both ‘numbers people’ and ‘non numbers people,’ the text tends to read like a corporate training course, and their somewhat dismissive view of math as incomprehensible and useless in the ‘real world’ will strike many as blatantly wrong. Still, ‘non numbers’ people will find plenty to consider.”

 

Three of their rules are:

 

Rule #1. Simpler is better. Round with enthusiasm.

Rule #2. Concrete is better. Use whole numbers to describe whole objects, not decimals, fractions, or percentages.

Rule #3. Follow the rules but defer to expertise. Rules 1 and 2 may be trumped by expert knowledge.

 

On page 19 they tell this story:

 

“More often than not we don’t even make sense of the complicated number in the first place. Alfred Taubman, former CEO of the A&W restaurant chain and author of Threshold Resistance learned that lesson the hard way when his company tried to introduce a third-pound burger at the same price as the McDonald’s quarter-pounder. More than half the customers thought they were being ripped off. ‘Why should we pay the same amount for less meat?’ they said.

 

The value of the new A&W burger depended on consumers comparing two fractions: 1 / 3 and 1/ 4. But fractions are difficult for everyone, because they’re parts of things as opposed to whole objects. We like to count things, and fractions don’t equal ‘things.’ So, we jump to the closest available whole numbers. 4 is bigger than 3, so we mistakenly infer that a 1/ 4 pounder is a bigger burger than a 1/ 3-pounder.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We can use a simple bar chart (made with Excel or PowerPoint) to show graphically that a third-pound (four-twelfths) burger is exactly a third (or one-twelfth) bigger than a quarter-pound (three-twelfths) burger.    

 

On page 25 their example is:

 

“2 out of every 5 people you shake hands with may not have washed their hands between using the toilet and touching your hands.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That fraction also can be illustrated graphically using icons for another comparison, as shown above.  

 

Chapter 6 is titled Convert Abstract Numbers into Concrete Objects. On page 37 they open it with Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s old example for showing what a microsecond means:

 

“This piece of wire is the distance your signal could have traveled in the microsecond you wasted. It stretches 984 feet, about as long as three football fields.”   

 

But when you look in the Notes at the back of the book, you will find that Hopper later did the comparison with a nanosecond. Now the distance is just 0.984 feet, or 11.8 inches – which you can hold in your hand.  That can be represented with a simple visual aid - a plastic bar cut from a coat hanger. You can hand everyone in the audience a length of thin copper wire to keep as a souvenir from your speech.  I blogged about that back on April 19, 2011 in a post titled Gigahertz, nanoseconds, Grace Hopper, and a plastic coat hanger.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On page 38 they finally get around to showing their first graphic - comparing tumor sizes with foods as is shown above in a table. They don’t use a graphic again until page 113. That is in Chapter 16, titled Make People Pay Attention by Crystallizing a Pattern, Then Breaking It. Clever words are good, but words and carefully thought-out images can be even better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, the example is of Steve Jobs showing a cross section of thin Sony TZ laptop computer (minimum thickness at front edge, 0.8”), overlaid with his Apple MacBook Air (minimum thickness, 0.16”).    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are lots of examples displayed (as shown above from page 45) via a pair of boxes: a white one at left with a comparison, and a blue one at right with a better version. Curiously the text above those boxes mistakenly refers to CFLs as being Carbon Fluorescent Light-bulbs rather than Compact Fluorescent Lamps.

 

Chapter 8 is titled Human Scale: Use the Goldilocks Principle to Make Your Numbers Just Right. We need to use comparisons which have a place in our world. Multiplying a number by the U.S. population will result in something impressively huge but almost unfathomable, like 5.7 billion gallons per day. (That’s how much water we use for flushing our toilets). On July 12, 2016 I blogged about How to make statistics understandable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In that post I divided the 5.7 billion gallons per day up to produce a per capita number of ~18 gallons, as shown above.

 

To be memorable when you speak, think carefully about your words, but also consider using images.