How big is a trillion? How much time is a Nano-second? How far away is the nearest star system? How long would it take by car to get there? Big numbers and conversely really tiny numbers are hard to understand. One thing that has become clear to me is that unless team members develop a personal understanding of what the numbers represent – they will not understand what the data say and compel us to do.

One way to assist your team with this personal connection is to make the numbers real – to provide real life examples that people can relate too. In a recent article I read to make this point the authors sited a stadium that held nearly forty-two thousand people, needing to be filled twenty-four times to show the team what a million users looked like. Once in my life I took empty paper boxes to an event to make the point that one million dollars was a lot of money. I knew few in the room knew what a million of anything looked like so I lugged thirty boxes of paper into the conference room and stacked them into a wall – each case holding twenty packages of paper, each package holding five hundred sheets of paper. That visual let the team know what we had to spend in a tangible way. It made the numbers real and their understanding of the tasks a head of us personal because each of them understood the resources available to us.

Making data visual in this way can keep the narrative from getting lost in the numbers.

PS … a trillion seconds is over 31,000 years. A Nano-second is a billionth of a second. It would take over 81,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri at a maximum space velocity of 56,000 km/h (I didn’t do the math for my 2009 Honda Pilot – though it’s pretty fast).