Statistics, emotions, Bill Gates and Hillary
Michael Pollock
excerpt from Bill Gates commencement address at Harvard on June 7.
Your follow-up question will bear on the Hillary Sopranos video - so
stay with it!
Gates has talked of discovering problems and addressing them. He goes
on to say:
"The final step - after seeing the problem and finding an approach -
is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and
failures so that others learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to
show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to
be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these
diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also
to help draw more investment from business and government.
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show
more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work -
so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global
health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives.
Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life - then
multiply that by millions. ... Yet this was the most boring panel I've
ever been on - ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it.
What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come
from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of
software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I
love getting people excited about software - but why can't we generate
even more excitement for saving lives?
You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the
impact. And how you do that - is a complex question."
Here is the whole of Gates' speech: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/06.14/99-gates.html
So let's consider the Hillary Sopranos video. http://www.hillaryclinton.com/
She got our attention for sure - and we felt something - though it
said nothing about needs or programs or outcomes. Certainly nothing
about statistics. For a moment there we probably felt more than when
we hear the staggering numbers of people living without health
insurance, or below the poverty line.
Was this a good call on her part? Anything we might do differently
when we tell our stories?