Counting Carrots: From Making Sense to Making Meaning
Ever since I was little, my father would throw simple one-liners that seemed to contain all the wisdom in the world. I can remember my 10 year old self, not able to grasp the idea of someone not understanding the amount of music one can fit in a 128mb MP3 player. It didn’t make sense that such a simple concept could be so complicated to others.
My father then hit me with
“Fine you know megabytes, but I bet you can’t count carrots”.
He then asked me how many carrots would fit in a carrot bag? About twenty…
Then how many carrots fit in a milk crate? Roughly a hundred…
Now, how many carrots fit in a pick-up truck bin? Maybe a thousand…
What about a garbage truck? Or an Olympic pool?
A farmer would know.
This simple discussion humbled me and continues to resonate with me to this day.
Whether it’s about price elasticity, customer lifetime value, or sales, if you hold an analytics-enabled role, chances are you spend most of your days playing with data.
Within the SSENSE Data Science team, we regularly uncover statistics or correlations that feel shocking. It is imperative to communicate these insights to stakeholders as soon as possible to stay ahead of the curve.
In doing so, it is normal to want them to feel the gravity and the magnitude of our findings. Most importantly, we want them to feel prepared to make a decision.
As I explained in my previous SSENSE TECH article, communication between decision makers and data scientists is often a source of frustration; important details can easily get lost in the numbers. Even though an audience may intellectually grasp the facts, they might not be able to relate or connect with it. For statistics and numbers to spark action, they have to do more than make sense — they have to make meaning.
To achieve this, data professionals should develop the reflex of associating data with what’s relatable and familiar to their audience. Understanding how big or how small a number is can turn out to be very tricky for non-specialists.
Here are some strategies you can use to make the magnitude of your statistics both manageable and meaningful for your audience.
Size Matters
In 2018, Astrophysicist Niel Degrass Tyson tweeted “Not that anybody asked, but @JeffBezos’ 130-Billion dollars, laid end-to-end, can circle Earth 200 times, then reach the Moon & back 15 times then, with what’s left over, circle Earth another 8 times.”
While impressive, it is very hard for me to connect with the magnitude of this statistic as I’ve never circled the earth nor visited the moon. Creating a scale on which to compare things is crucial when presenting data, but it’s just as important for that scale to be grounded in what’s relatable or known to your audience.
According to Wikipedia a dollar bill weighs roughly a gram. As it measures 2.61 inches wide by 6.14 inches long by 0.0043 inches thick, we can compute that it has a density of roughly 800kg per cubic meter. Thus, a billion dollar bills would weigh about 1 million kilograms and take up about 1,250 cubic meters. Also, one floor of the SSENSE office is roughly 35,174 cubic meters, so we could fit 28 billion dollars on one floor. It would take just about half of the 9 storey building to fit the 130 billion dollars.
If you’ve never visited our office, that’s the volume of 65 Olympic pools or 2,404 standard 40 feet shipping containers.
Time Is Money
I love using time to compare things because “time is money”, and I have always found money to be an easy way to connect with people’s emotions.
Bill Gates earned 11.5 billion dollars in 2013 which works out to be roughly 33.3 million dollars per day, or 1.38 million dollars per hour. To put that in perspective, we can also say that his walk to the coffee machine and back is worth a staggering $46,296. Building a case to hire someone to get his coffee shouldn’t be too complicated.
Also, everybody hates waiting. Be it for commuting to work, ads during your favourite TV show, or the time it takes to microwave a bag of popcorn.
A great application of this is a mythic story I remember hearing while in school.
Legend has it that a teacher wanted to get a budget approved to update the computer lab back when the software engineering department started to gain traction.
His business case was very simple, the new computers would take roughly 1 second to compile an assignment whereas the old ones would take over 45 seconds. To prove his point, he explained his query to the school’s directors, took out a chronometer and timed 45 seconds in silence before his audience. His budget was approved right away.
What seems to be “only” 45 seconds can feel like an eternity when you have to actually wait through it.
Un-stranger Things
In addition to using size, time, and speed to help your audience understand a number, you can, similarly to the first example, use nouns, people, places, and things that are familiar to them.
Let’s say you have one million users. It’s easier for your audience to get a sense of that quantity if they can mentally visualize it.
Most Montrealers have been to the Montreal Bell Center at some point in their life, be it for a concert or a hockey game. Assuming the rest have seen it on TV, it makes a perfect reference point as it seats just over 20,000 spectators. Presenting numbers to Montrealers, you could say: “Our users would fill the Bell Center 50 times.”
Now if you are presenting in Paris, this example can easily be adjusted: “Our users would fill the Stade de France more than 12 times.”
Looking at what Jeff Bezos’ 130 billion dollars could buy is another approach. Another popular tweet which made headlines when his fortune was shared publicly, calculated that Bezos could buy a new house for every single homeless person in the United States and still have $19.2 billion left over.
This example is brilliant because it equates 130 billion dollars with building 554,000 houses (at the median price) and having 19.2 billion dollars left over. 554,000 houses is much easier to visualize than 110 billion dollars. In his following tweet, Matthew Chapman states that the 19.2 billion dollar “leftover” is still enough for Jeff to be considered in the top 25 richest men in the world, which gives us a better sense of how gigantic that amount is.
Conclusion
Usually, complex statistics are easier to understand when compared to something. It allows your counterparts to grasp scale through relatable size, time, and things.
Data professionals can help their audiences understand the numbers they present by shifting the focus from making sense to making meaning. When people understand the scale of your numbers, they’ll better understand the scale of what you are recommending.
For anyone to feel the urgency to act, they must first grasp the gravity of the issues and understand what’s at stake if they don’t.
Maybe this last comparison triggered something in Jeff. Just a couple months after his wealth was shared publicly, Bezos announced a 2 billion dollar charity fund to help homeless families and children.
But really, how much is 2 billion dollars anyway?
Editorial reviews by Deanna Chow, Liela Touré & Prateek Sanyal.
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