why more data actually hurts your case
the numbers paradox (and how to fix it)
Roundtable meeting. All executive leadership present. 9 o’clock in the morning.
Didn’t have the chance to get a flat white. I’m so done.
Cue scene: Sav, a teeny analyst dedicated to the marketing and sales department, sat between a handful of senior leaders, staring blankly ahead at the baffling atrocity of a slide before us.
My colleague is a wonderful lad. He dresses sharp. He knows how to talk. Popular and well-loved. Ray of sunshine wherever he goes.
But these slides behind him? They were not it.
Sales results rounded to the nearest cent. Three decimal places for no reason. Calling items a 16.7% increase when really it had moved from 6 to 7. Tables that cut across the screen with far too many columns yet missing key conversion metrics we were all looking for.
The results were, on average, good — but there was no green or amber or red on the screen; just walls and walls of tables and texts and numbers and charts with the axes that didn’t make sense and missing legends.
I held my tongue. Praise in public, criticise in private, they say. He was also in a higher position than me and I didn’t want to be that guy. We needed somebody a little higher than him to —
“I’m going to have to stop you right there. I have no idea what you’re saying” said the CEO. “Can you just tell us whether the results were good or bad, and one or two reasons why?”
He didn’t take it too personally but did appear a tad defeated. This meeting happens every month and every time we see some rendition of this interaction happen time and time again.
He tries to present data, bringing more and more to the table, but all his story beats seem to fall on deaf ears despite having a sparkle for storytelling.
After the whole ordeal as we went off to grab a coffee before resuming back to the corporate grind-wheel, he said to me:
“But when you talk, the CEO listens — and that’s because you know your way around data, you bring numbers to everything that you say.”
And while this is very much true, it’s never been about the numbers.
If anything, my colleague brought numbers too. Way more numbers than I ever did.
My difference is that I brought the right numbers — the numbers that mattered to the most relevant people in the room, in the format that lent well to the data presented, spoken about in a calculated and specific way; all findings that we chatted about last week on writing good ass reports.
The numbers I had on the slide were designed to minimise the friction at which the reader needed to read it, so that they could understand everything at a single glance, to leave their headspace open for what I wanted to say.
Data does not tell you what to do. It is simply a tool that supports or rejects your argument.
The real scope of influence is the presentation, story, and memorability of it — all things that sit with the analyst, not the slide — and that’s what we’re talking about today.
Journaling in Public is a newsletter sharing stories and strategies on career, creativity, and clarity — so that the parts you’re quietly figuring out don’t feel like yours alone to carry. If that appeals to you, we should be friends!
Decimal Places have a place (it’s not here)
81.582915% of business scenarios are not scientific in nature.
Sure, use it in your working, especially if you’re in a role that thoroughly prizes accuracy and precision like accounting, engineering, actuarial, science, etc.
But when it comes to presenting to senior leadership, toss anything from the third decimal point onward in the bin — accuracy (the numbers being close to the right answer) is still incredibly relevant but precision (the readings being incredibly detailed) may work against you.
If I see another business manager present a table of twenty cells with numbers formatted like $15,219,885.07 and $7,157,299.15 — I am going to mald like a million suns. Unless there is a compelling reason to present how many cents you got while we operate an eight-figure operation, keep this chump change in your back pockets1.
$15.2m and $7.2m is enough. Maybe even $15.22m and $7.16m!
Minimising the number of digits on display will smooth your delivery, allowing your tables to be understood at a single glance.
If they need a calculator to read your slide, you’ve already lost them.
Give your numbers the right context
Thanks to the pandemic, I spent a lot of my university years in Discord lobbies with avid gamers who are very excited, knowledgeable, and calculating at the games they love but — like new grads, have a notable weakness of not knowing how to frame it for the person who doesn’t understand.
8 points of constitution. 25k points of health. +252 on Sp. Def. 43% damage combo.
My brother in Christ, what does this even mean?
Is that good? Is that bad? Is it used in calculations or is that the flat-out number? How does the defence stat come into play? How much health do characters tend to have in this game? Are you fighting other players or large NPC bosses?
Numbers alone mean nothing. They must be placed in context.
If Melbourne has $350k and Sydney has $400k and Adelaide has $150k, I will come to the conclusion that Sydney is the best performing store.
But if you then told me that the Sydney shop ran twice the number of staff members and expenses as the Melbourne joint, that the Adelaide store is in its first year of business and well-outperforming what the other two did in their first year… the story changes entirely.
Your points deserve context and someone to stand by them, which, on that note —
Know your time comparisons
Easily the most common, clean, and powerful points of comparison is the time series. Familarise yourself with some common acronyms and when best to use them:
YoY - Year on Year, suitable for product lines prone to seasonality.
Chocolate bunny sales will spike from March to April but compare YoY and you’ll actually see whether it’s growth or not.
MoM - Month on Month, effective for fast-moving products with relatively flat seasonality.
Customer complaints after changing a process, active users after you just shipped a new function… you want to see immediate trends.
QoQ - Quarter on Quarter, sits conveniently in-between for products where cycles are longs and single months are too noisy.
Massive enterprise sales deals in which you’ll only reach get one or two per quarter will kill your monthly chart. This normalises it
SPLY/STLY - Same period/time last year, for when you need YoY precision against a non-standard window2.
Black Friday sales are a great example, covering just the first three weeks of November against last year’s first three weeks of November.
Chuck these acronyms together against the right products alongside accurate usage of percentage and percentage points and suddenly you’re a bit of a genius for saying arbitrary things like sales were up 7% year on year.
Which leads us to our next point —
Know your percentage comparisons
Getting this wrong is the subtlest indicator that someone is new to the office environment, especially in the finance world.
We have 50 sales on Monday and 60 sales on Tuesday. That’s a 20% (twenty percent) increase from one day to the next. A relative change. Solid result.
But if this result had improved from 20% to 30% — this would be a 10-percentage point increase. An absolute increase. A better result.
(Equivalent to a 50% increase!)
Be careful which one you use and notice when this shows up in fear-mongering statistics. Incorrect usage can increase your chance of confusing people by 50% (which could simply mean going from a 0.1% change to a 0.15% change — not 50.1% chance — which would be a risk you’re more ok to take!)
Bonus - Basis point
There’s a rarely used term called ‘basis point’ or ‘bip’ for short, which refers to a percent of a percent (0.0001 or 0.01%). This doesn’t get used often aside from highly precision-based systems like financial derivatives trading, which admittedly, doesn’t feature a lot of traditional report writing.
If you happen to toss this out in conversation, at the right place at the right time, you might catch the attention of people in the know3.
Favourable / Unfavourable
On one of my very first board papers, I called +35% YoY revenue growth in a tough pocket an exceptional result — only for it to get crossed out in red marker.
They didn’t appreciate theatrics.
To considerable dismay, something I had to unlearn in my very first corporate role was being emotive in my writing4.
We will talk about language, framing, and mindset in a following section but a pair I’d like to introduce in this passage about numbers are ‘favourable’ and ‘unfavourable’.
Favourable/unfavourable is the most neutral, unemotional, intentionally boring, arms-length set of words you can opt for.
Traffic was 8 percentage points favourable to budget.
Revenue was $14k unfavourable to same period last year.
Call centre team showed favourable performance in their first month.
The account was lost due to unfavourable market conditions.
Yes, you can tack on significantly, substantially, slightly, marginally, and other strengthening/loosening adjects to drive home/soften your point.
No, it’s not a crime to repeat these words over and over again. This would get you hung in creative writing but is the much safer, much appreciated option in the office.
Importantly, favourable/unfavourable has the convenient ability to self-describe whether something is good or bad.
Throughout most of business, we want numbers to go up — revenue up, efficiency up, share price up… but there are a handful of numbers we want to go down. Some of which are intuitive (expenses down, reliance on administration down) while some can be a bit industry-specific that the typical reader might not understand (combined ratio down, claims frequency down).
The cold tactness and self-explainability of favourable/unfavourable will put you in a consistently favourable position. Use is as generously as you need.
Be careful what you quote for
My controversial take is to use external data with a healthy dose of caution.
In my experience, and perhaps because I haven’t worked in an extraordinarily large conglomerate, is that external data is almost always used in a convenient, cherry-picked, McGuffin type way.
It rarely articulates the point I’m intending to make, fills the arbitrary box of doing your market research, and is almost always employed to tell people how good you are relative to industry5.
However, if you don’t include this, you are sure to be asked about it. This is most prevalent when it’s the first time you’re presenting a specific insight or project where you have no year-on-year data to compare to.
Alas, choose something — but do your research on it.
Make sure it’s not data for the sake of data, but one that actually drives your storytelling.
Let this data point put into context how you’re doing against the industry, how close or distant you are, give insight on the current state of the world, and either explain or contradict what you’re seeing internally. Be sure it’s linked, referenced, and credited appropriately.
And when it comes to reports you’re not only writing but presenting… but sure to know what the hell it means.
Boards of directors have a notable habit of questioning external data, not out of vileness, but because it is by nature taken out of context. You report is written by your hand with its methodology and thinking ingrained throughout it — this data point has been taken elsewhere, from a report which they have not read.
They WILL ask about methodology. They WILL ask for validity. Do your research and hone your ability to explain it before you’re caught red-handed on a report you didn’t even write.
Do the math for them
The very first thing we talked about in this series is the “What’s in it For Me?” framework — the belief that everyone walks into a meeting room with an ulterior motive, and that reports need to be written with their incentives, ambitions, and fears in mind.
The same applies to the numbers in your report.
What we’ve discussed here is general advice as to not present numbers that cloud and elude judgement. We want to make it as easy as possible for senior management, who are just as flawed and sometimes more numerically-challenged than you are, to digest and comprehend what you’re saying.
And so I leave you with a saying that I more or less just made up to take away from this: “Do the math for them.”
150 quotes, 60 bound? That’s 40% conversion rate.
$75k of sales, 5 staff members? That’s $15k revenue per head.
50 stores last year. 35 stores this year? That’s a 30% decrease.
You don’t have to show all your working. In fact, you probably don’t, as that’s best left in the Excel than placed haphazardly in the appendix. Just have an awareness of what the key metrics in your industry are, the key performance indicators in the roles of your audience, and have them at front of mind at every stroke of your numpad.
When you serve your numbers on a silver spoon, it opens their headspace to take in the insight.
Make it easy to listen — and they will.
some substacks i’ve read recently and really enjoyed:
what writing consistently for 8 months will do to you - by lina 🌿
I turned a mail club into my full-time job - by Brittany V Wilder 💌
Why I Built the Rotten Tomatoes for Names - by Emma Bryant 🏷️
Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom! Journaling in Public is a newsletter sharing stories and strategies on career, creativity, and finding magic in the mundane.
These next few weeks, I’ll be taking a more career-based approach in how to write good ass reports that get heard, separating analysts whose data falls flat and analysts who get heard and influence decision-making. It’s a bit more professional standing than my usual work but I’m hoping that my plenty insight, plenty whimsy continues to shine through.
All posts will be free in the foreseeable future but any forms of support — likes, comments, messages, free/paid subscriptions, coffee donations — are so tremendously appreciated. Yours truly, Sav.
NOT CORRUPTION MIND YOU. Please share any cents including GST to your accounting team — just not the CEO.
SPLY/STLY is not a standard term in business, so at times, you may need to define this!
Or they have no idea what you’re talking about and you’re sitting there trying to explaining what a bip is without sounding patronising,
Which, thankfully, does not apply to this newsletter! I can be as whimsy and unhinged as I’d like, and sometimes even push this style into my day job. Refer to the ‘host first, presenter second’ order of thinking in part one.
I’ve never included in my report a benchmark that shows my company unfavourably against industry standard and honestly you probably shouldn’t — but this just shows how biased you can be when including/excluding these.
Thanks for the shout out Sav! And love the article, some real gems in here I will be holding onto. "Data does not tell you what to do. It is simply a tool that supports or rejects your argument."