What Hans Rosling Taught Me About Numbers on Dashboards

In his chapter on ‘The Size Instinct’ he cautions the reader to always ‘Compare the numbers’. He says,

The most important thing you can do to avoid misjudging something’s importance is to avoid lonely numbers. Never, ever leave a number all by itself. Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare with.

Be especially careful about big numbers. It is a strange thing, but numbers over a certain size, when they are not compared with anything else, always look big. And how can something big not be important?

There it was. That’s what was troubling me about the ad.

Admittedly, 2000 Cr is a huge number. And in the insurance industry, that number in disbursements is meant to make you feel confident. Signal trustworthiness. More claims paid = more likely they'll pay mine. Right? Well.. Rosling would push back..

To really make sense of the number, 2000 Cr, wouldn’t it be more useful to compare it to other major insurance providers, maybe see it as a percentage of actual amounts claimed, or see those ratios across a number of companies.. Without context, numbers can be misleading, and frankly not that useful.   

In this case, it’s not useful to you as a customer, and maybe you could dismiss it as clever advertising. But if I think about it in the context of MEL in the impact sector, it makes me think about various dashboards, where lonely numbers around output metrics, or statistics from surveys stand out. 15,000 people trained or 85% response rate on a chatbot and so on.. Either too big, becoming less believable, or too small, making one feel despondent.

And unlike insurance advertising, these numbers shape decisions about where resources might go, which programs get scaled, what interventions get funding.

When a standalone metric is all you have, you can't tell if you're succeeding or failing, if you should double down or course-correct. The number might make you feel confident or concerned, but it won't help you decide wisely.

So next time you come across a lonely number, take a moment before reacting, and ask a few questions. Try and tease out other numbers so you can understand that original number in context.