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This week, Susie was asked, ‘How to make statistics sound sexy?’
We get it. Numbers can be boring. You bring up a slide with numbers and the people lose their interest sooner than Ilkay Gundogan scores a goal (well done Gundogan, 12 seconds is really something). Your audience looks glassy eyed and most of them are already planning what to cook for dinner in their heads. So how do you get them to pay attention to you and most importantly make sense of the numbers you are presenting (because all the long nights you pulled off, scrunched over your laptop with 4 mugs of coffee need a payoff, don’t they?). What can you do (besides changing the colours of your graphs and charts) that can keep your audience hooked to your presentation?
Here is a tip from Susie that can help.
Sense of scale:
Most of us can’t make sense of the enormity of numbers when they are in the range of million, billion, trillions. Break it down for your audience.
Here is how you do this -
Statement: Chairman of Mars is John Mars. He is worth an estimated 56 billion dollars.
Here is how you make it interesting -
John Mars, chairman of Mars has 56 billion dollars which means 3000 dollars per minute or 50 dollars per second. If he saw a 100 dollars lying on the floor and knew that it would take him 5 seconds to pick up 100 dollars, it would be a waste of his time.
Why does it work?
Unlike John Mars, most of us do not have 56 billion dollars stashed away in our bank accounts, so it is difficult to fully comprehend how much wealth is 56 billion dollars - all that one can do with it! All of us are, however, familiar with 100 dollars and 5 seconds. We know how much food we can get in 100 dollars or what we can accomplish in 5 seconds!
So, BREAK IT DOWN. Find examples that the audience can relate to.
Statement -
T-Rex was a pretty enormous dinosaur. It could grow up to 40 feet in length and 12 feet in height.
Here is how you can make it interesting -
Juxtapose a photo of T-Rex next to a 6-foot woman/ man (to scale) to give an idea of how enormous a T-Rex is, when compared to a human being.
Statement -
Scientists estimate that there are 1 septillion stars ( 1,000,000,000,000,0000,0000,0000,0000).
How can you make it more interesting -
The universe is vast but there are more grains of sand on earth than stars in the universe.
Get Susie’s point?
So next time you want to engage your audience with stats on your slide, remember to make those numbers relatable. Make them tangible. Translate those to everyday concepts that your audience is already familiar with and good luck on that presentation!
P.S. Note that our inability to understand and handle large numbers is not a personal failure! For the longest time, we did not have to make sense of ridiculously large numbers and could survive just by knowing the number of members in the tribe and animals in the village. Pirahã language, for example, a dialect of an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe from the Amazon does not have words for precise numbers, but instead has concepts for ‘a small amount’ and ‘a larger amount.’ So yes, be patient with your audience and yourself when dealing with, either communicating or comprehending, these large numbers.
