by Walker Royce
Most numeric measures take on two forms: an absolute value (a quantity of something) or a relative value (a measure of one quantity relative to another quantity). Relative values, usually presented as percentages, are commonly used to express two things:
1. A proportion: how much one subset measure is, relative to the total measure. For example:
• 48% of our employees are women.
• 30% of our product sales were to first-time customers.
• About 20% of this book’s pages are devoted to puzzles.
2. A rate of change: how much a measure has changed since a previous benchmark. Examples:
• We added 10% more female employees in 2009.
• Product sales were down 22% over last month.
• Version 2 of this book increased its puzzle pages by 12% over Version 1.
These are valuable and very common measures in communicating objective information. Numeric quantities provide clear and meaningful representations. Here is a sampling that illustrates how vague some words can be. A specific numeric representation would paint a picture with more clarity and meaning.
Word
Numeric Ambiguity
numerous
10 items if describing your to-do list;
19,000 if speaking of fans at a stadium
many
jillions, referring to stars in the sky;
two if speaking about ex-wives
jillions
infinity in some cases;
inconceivably large for the context
hardly any
not zero, but much fewer than expected
a few
more than 1 but less than 5
several
less than 10 but more than a few
giant
10 to 13 meters if referring to squid;
1 inch if referring to ants
tall
over 5’10” if referring to a human;
more than 50 stories if referring to a building
jumbo
181 to 200 per kilo when describing olives;
3 inches if referring to shrimp
genius
IQ > 120 in absolute terms, or anyone smarter than you
idiot
3rd grade mental capability, or an inebriated genius
It is no secret that objective and quantified measures are a critical aspect of communicating clearly. However, many communications use numbers inappropriately and lose credibility through exaggeration, false precision, inappropriate units, or other forms of deceptive misusage. Hubbard defines a measurement as follows:
measurement: a set of observations that reduce uncertainty where the result is expressed as a quantity
Although you won’t find it in a dictionary, this is the essence of how the scientific community defines measurement. Scientists realize that reducing uncertainty is necessary and sufficient to make a measurement useful, especially as they look at things they don’t understand well such as the infinitely large and infinitesimally small. A measure does not need to eliminate all uncertainty to be useful. Given this definition, the value of percentages is easy to see: A percentage adds some further context—namely, a measure relative to some other known measure—so that you can put the measure into a perspective that further reduces uncertainty. Percentages let you add context by comparing one measure to another known value.
Everyone knows that percentages are useful. But it is important to be wary of games people can play with numbers to purposely spin information in a positive or negative way. When someone makes a comparison using only a percentage or only absolute numbers, without enough context, be suspicious. Using one without the other can paint a biased picture. This sort of spinning is most acute in selling and politics, where the bias is in favor of one product or one party or one position on an issue.
When a person is selling a product or an idea, it is natural to present a positive bias that reflects well on their perspective. While the best scientists, teachers, and judges may epitomize some of the exceptions to this statement, there are still enough counter-examples that we must be wary of the natural bias of our human nature. We all need to remember that rose-colored glasses are built into human reasoning and communications.
Here are a few generic examples of bias and ambiguity in the use of percentages.
Sales grew 15% over last month. If last month’s sales were terrible, this number may paint an overly rosy picture.
You added 15 new hires to your organization last month. If the goal was 45 new hires, 15 is not very good performance compared to plan.
Your GPA went up 20%. If your last GPA was 2.1 and your new GPA is 2.5, this may fall short of your parents’ expectations of a B average.
Your 401K account was up 21% over last quarter. If the rest of the markets were up 40%, your performance was relatively weak.
Sales of product A were up 100% and product B only 10%. If product A’s sales last period were only $100,000 and product B’s were $10,000,000, these data are potentially misleading.
The Dodgers won 6 more close games (decided by 1 run) this year than last year. This number is more significant if they won 10 close games last year than if they won 60.
Politician X voted to cut taxes 90% of the time. If politician X voted yes 27 times on trivial tax-cutting bills and voted No on 3 significant tax-cutting bills, this measure may completely obfuscate his stance on tax cutting.
66.7% of doctors recommend this remedy for this afflication.
The last one is particularly interesting. With three digits of precision, you get the feeling that there must be a pretty thorough analysis behind that claim. But what if some advertising drone asked three doctors their opinions and two responded positively? That would make 66.7% an accurate but potentially misleading answer. A more honest measure would state that two out of the three doctors asked recommended the remedy.
There are several ways to present numbers, and it is important to communicate them honestly. It is also important as an audience or a listener to be skeptical when the numbers presented fail to tell the whole story.
A useful metaphor for presenting information honestly is evident in how truth is defined in the American justice system by emphasizing three aspects:
The truth: Be accurate.
The whole truth: Be precise enough and include everything relevant.
Nothing but the truth: Don’t be overly precise or add anything irrelevant.
Providing a measure is usually the primary dimension of the truth. Providing a credible measure with the appropriate backup context (like both the percentage and the absolute numbers) is necessary to tell the whole truth. And using accurate data with the right level of precision ensures that you are not misleading people with additional detail that obfuscates the truth. I think a statistics class should be part of every high school core curriculum. Understanding estimates, random variables, expected values, and standard deviations is crucial to many decisions and is a core skill for communicating honestly.
There is one common use of percentages that makes little sense. Has a boss or a coach asked you to give 110%? The use of numbers over 100% is silly. When someone asks you to give 110%, they are referring to your total capacity (either all your heart, all your energy, all your time, or all of something). In that context, isn’t it erroneous to request someone to give 110% of some quantity where all of that quantity is equal to 100%? Either the boss/coach is a moron (they don’t understand percentages), or the boss/coach thinks the employee/player is a moron. In my view, it is a mathematical oxymoron.
Have Empathy for the Audience
Not everyone is expert at composing graphics and tables and presentations. Not everyone is a good writer. However, we all consider ourselves experts at being part of an audience. We watch TV, listen to the radio, watch movies, read books, listen to conversations, and act as an audience several times a day. What do you like in a presentation? Most people like pictures (not descriptions), brevity (not long-winde
d stories reliving every detail), facts (more than speculation), provocative challenges (rather than whitewash that offends the fewest people), debate among alternatives (rather than obvious bias), and clarity (rather than ambiguity). As we prepare a presentation, we should ask ourselves whether we would want to listen to it. We are our own best critics, so we should try to evaluate our presentation from the audience’s perspective.
To have empathy for the audience, we must consider who is in the audience, what their motivations are in being there, and what we want them to remember. Here are a few key questions to consider as you prepare any communication.
Who is in my audience? Would you give the same physics lesson to 8th graders as you would to graduate students? Would you present your employment background to your date as you would to a prospective hiring manager? Would you write the same autobiography for general consumption as you would for your family? No, no, and no. The composition of your audience can substantially affect the way you communicate. Because your message is for them, not just for you, you should tailor your message, style, tone, and content to maximize its effective reception by the audience. This is not always easy, but it is always worth considering. Most audiences are mixed and very difficult to pigeonhole into a typical listener. Don’t let that stop you from examining the common characteristics that most of the listeners will have. There are reasons these people are all reading or listening to your communications. What are some common themes that brought them into your audience?
Why are they here? Within every audience, there are many different reasons for these particular people to want to listen to your topic. Attendance may be required, such as a mandatory meeting or an assignment by a teacher. Some may want to attend because the title of your talk is so intriguing, or because you are known to the audience members to have an interesting opinion, or because their trusted friend or colleague said, “You will enjoy this.” The reasons they want to be there may vary widely.
They expect to agree with you and want to reinforce their opinion.
They expect to disagree with you and want to understand an opposing opinion.
They know nothing about the topic but want to learn.
They know something about the topic but want to learn more.
They are accompanying a friend with one of the reasons given above.
Whatever the reason, you need to consider why your audience is there and attempt to satisfy their motivation. If they are there to learn something, you’d better present something new that they didn’t already know. If they are there to be entertained, you’d better show some flair. If they are there expecting you to sell them something, you’d better demonstrate some empathy and credibility for how you can add value to their life in exchange for money. If they are there to scout you as their competition, you’d better impress them with your credibility and worthiness to compete. If they are there to see one of their colleagues honored, you’d better honor them in an honest and upbeat way. And if they are there to honor a loved one who has passed away, you might want to help them feel positive about that person’s transition.
If the audience is required to be there, your job is more challenging, but pretty simple: Make them happy they came and fulfill their requirement as effectively and effciently as possible.
What do I want them to remember? You want every audience to remember that your presentation was worth their time. Even if they decide to leave early or stop reading your written piece before finishing it, you want to help them make that decision by providing your key points early in your communication. This is why we are taught that good writing and good presentations do three things: tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you just told them. I don’t recommend following that advice verbatim, but there is some wisdom in it.
Tell them what you are going to tell them: Use a catchy, meaningful title and a concise introduction.
Tell them: Keep the body of your message concise and punchy. Be accurate and use the right level of precision to make your points.
Tell them what you just told them: Summarize concisely and memorably, reinforcing what you want them to remember.
Practice Sequential Translation
When you present in foreign forums where the audience does not understand enough English to appreciate your presentation, you may have to resort to translation. There are two forms of translation: simultaneous and sequential. Simultaneous translation involves the audience wearing headsets like you would see at a United Nations meeting. Remote translators are listening to you and simultaneously translating for the audience as you walk through the presentation. In such circumstances, it is imperative for speakers to speak slowly and with good diction, avoiding jargon, accents, and colloquialisms.
Sequential translation is a different experience. It can provide more fidelity in the translation and much more room for interaction with the audience than simultaneous translation. The speaker presents a few sentences and waits while they are translated for the audience. The presentation moves at roughly half the pace of normal, forcing the speaker to present each slide in half the usual time or to present only half the material. This has proven to be a great mechanism for training people to be concise and hone verbal presentations down to the bare essentials to make the key points. This is what every presenter should do in every presentation, and going through the process under game conditions is a great exercise. Each time the translator is translating what you just said, you can focus on what the next key point should be and how to say it concisely. If you can set this up as the method for practicing, rather than doing a typical dry run, you will benefit.
PREVENT ORAL TEDIUM
A good speaker can make good material more understandable and more memorable. A good speaker can make weak material tolerable by using the audience’s time effectively to emphasize the highlights and ignore the weak stuff. A presentation might be interesting, compelling, and earth-shattering, but the audience won’t know this without someone emphasizing the important points and leading them through the material.
A poor speaker with good material can distract the audience from understanding it. A poor speaker with weak material can torture an audience by forcing them to waste time. The combination of a bad presentation and a bad speaker who insists on addressing every bullet and reading every word on every page is deadly. How many times have you sat through a presentation that was not a briefing, but rather a prepared speech, with sentences or paragraphs extracted from some written prose and pasted into PowerPoint slides? Aaauuuggghh!
Having fidgeted through a jillion ineffective presentations (and delivered a few myself), I have observed some recurring characteristics of speakers that annoy audiences. Here are some tips for avoiding these bad habits.
Don’t spend a lot of time introducing yourself, your role, or how much experience you have. These preliminaries may be necessary to get people into the audience, but once they are there, they want to hear your message, not your resume.
Don’t read your presentation material. This is another good reason to use graphics. You must explain them, and they can’t be read like bulleted words. The audience can read, and they expect you to add something to the presentation as a speaker. Narration is a waste of their time and they will resent it.
Use a laser pointer only in the rarest circumstances where you need to point to a specific detail that is not easily seen on a graphic. Most speakers use a laser pointer as a crutch to point at the words they are reading on the slide. Don’t insult the audience by pointing at words as you read them. Laser pointers should be banned. They distract the speaker and the audience in most presentations.
Only use humor if you are comfortable with it and it fits into the context of your talk. The last thing you need to communicate clearly is the uncomfortable feeling you experience when a joke flops. When I first started public speaking, I was presenting in front of 1200 people at a large industry conference. I started off with a joke that I thought was funny and
pertinent. The silence in the room after my punch line was so loud, I could barely continue. That incident left an indelible scar; I didn’t tell a joke during a presentation for 10 years.
Don’t act. Be yourself, speak with some inflection, use hand gestures if they feel comfortable, and move around if you need to. If I have a choice, I speak from the audience’s right-hand side. Perhaps I am not an ambidextrous speaker; I don’t know, but I am more comfortable on the right. Whatever it takes, get comfortable on stage and be yourself.
Don’t sacrifice accuracy and credibility by substituting (false) precision.
Don’t overuse adverbs like actually, basically, fundamentally, and frankly. Consciously work to eliminate annoying speaker idiosyncrasies like too many ums, or saying “…right?” at the end of each sentence. Don’t use “I would argue…” or “It should be noted…” or “It is interesting to note…” Just argue, note it, or make it interesting.
Get to the Point
It is unusual to face an audience filled with people who are completely ignorant about the topic being presented. Therefore, you probably don’t need to spend half your presentation introducing the context and the problem that you are addressing. Most people in an audience want to hear your recommendation, perspective, or approach, not a rehash of why this topic is important. If they didn’t already think it was important, they wouldn’t be in the audience.