18 Apr Gain a competitive advantage by translating the numbers of your business…
Gain a competitive advantage by translating the numbers of your business…
Numbers don’t come naturally to most people (unless you are an accountant!). Most of us are actually not great when it comes to understanding numbers.
If you were presenting something to your team and you replaced one of the English sentences with something written in German, they would not understand what was being presented and would require translation.
It is the same with numbers. At best, everyone’s brain processes numbers like a second language, so when presenting your numbers to your team or customers, you should remember that they may not speak the language fluently, even if you do.
Numbers can reveal truths about the world that the human mind does not intuitively grasp, but only if you become a translator of numbers.
Take your audience from confusion to clarity.
Translate complex numbers into simple numbers or, even better, into stories with an emotional connection, and your customers and team will start to understand the numbers you are sharing and see the value and importance of them.
Numbers are only useful if they make sense to everyone, so translate them.
Chip Heath and Karla Starr have written a brilliant book called Making Numbers Count – The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers. Here is a great exercise from the book on the importance of translation:
Before you present your numbers to your team or customers, go through your presentation – your letter, document, PowerPoint, or whichever form of presentation you are using, and circle all the parts where you are presenting numbers.
Then look at the paragraph either below or above the numbers to see where you have translated them. This paragraph should start with phrases such as:
- To put that into context…
- To put that into perspective…
- What this means is…
- Think of it this way…
- That means…
- By comparison…
If you have used these phrases, then you are using the numbers to make your point. If not, then you need to think hard about how to translate them effectively, changing the ‘German’ to ‘English’.