Let me continue a a discussion that I started last week on my blog. Perhaps this is the place for it.
I want to explain why stories that contain numbers are powerful for people like me. I sometimes get the feeling that the Constellation regards numbers as part of an academic analysis. So we need numbers in order to support submission to a peer reviewed journal.
I think that there a large number of people (like me) who are persuaded by a numerical analysis. I don't believe that the numbers are just there to be part of a peer reviewed journal.
I want to give 3 examples.
The second is the Phayao story. That graph is tremendously powerful. It is powerful for me and I have seen its power with others on a large number of occasions.
"On the day you read this column, an estimated 12,000 people worldwide will contract HIV. Ninety percent of them, about 10,800 people, will not learn they are infected until full-blown AIDS hits them --in 2015. Until then, those people will unintentionally spread the virus that lies silently within each of them."
These 3 sets of numerical data tell a story in (for me) dramatic detail.
The first one says, "Here is action that YOU can take."
The second one says, "There is a solution."
The third says, "Here is a very daunting problem."
I believe that there is a large audience out there who are willing to be convinced with data such as these.
We need to be collecting and crafting some of our stories to reflect this 'Way of Thinking'.
I can't agree more... This is the story about Suwat and the two sides of the brain.
We need to get at a point where we can make "our points" as forcefully.