THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE WILL NOT BE QUANTIFIED

As long as non-profits continue to describe their achievements numerically – “We saved 363 acres of farmland” or “Our programs serve 3,000 people very year” – we’ll continue to suggest that numbers alone are unlikely to inspire action unless they are presented in human context – “connecting the dots.”

Here’s an excerpt from a recent Op-Ed in the NY TIMES exploring the relationship between data and how we, as humans, make decisions:

"As much as we’d like to believe in “science over fiction,” decisions in the real world require negotiating between what we think the data means, what human value we’d like to assign to it and what stories about it we can get others to accept. Data alone is not knowledge, and it is certainly not wisdom. It rarely says as much as we think it does."