Great presentation. One comment. We can’t eat percentages!

That was the takeaway a brilliant CEO once gave me. I was 27 years old, as green as fresh celery, and had successfully finished my first presentation to the C-suite. It took me a few decades to grasp what he meant.

One of the worst subjects I ever studied was statistics. Reams of boring numbers, analysis up the whazoo and those damn conclusions. My biggest takeaway was that we can make numbers say ANYTHING. When we are clever, we can make any trend, any set of numbers, any combination of numbers say whatever we want them to say. Worse, we don’t need to see or know the complete picture to make those conclusions.

I bring these two seemingly disparate ideas up because the one thing we have successfully done over at least the last fifty years is reduce pretty much everything to a numbers game.

Groceries, car repairs, deaths, murders, hurricanes, illnesses, miles logged and jogged, profits and losses, fired employees, gig workers, weight gain and loss, donations and taxes. Absolutely EVERYTHING is based on a number, a statistic, a so-called neutral fact. In theory, those numbers are ground zero. The neutral place we can all begin to form our opinions, forge our lives, and move forward.

EXCEPT

Humans are at the center of absolutely everything. The good, the bad, the ugly, the unmentionables, the worthy, the gifted, the disabled, the ones who enjoy the thing and the ones who hate the thing.

And when we talk in numbers, financial models, statistics, and percentages, we dehumanize our world.

We ignore or forget that real humans are behind every single number. We ignore or forget that real humans form the basis of every single statistic we can generate.

Real humans were involved in every single murder, disease or accident that has ever happened. Yet we report more on the ghastly numbers than we do the people.

Real humans were involved in every single sales transaction that every company had. Yet we focus on the growth rates, not the humans. Every. Single. Time.

That dehumanization means we don’t need to pay attention or focus on the fundamentals driving the statistics. After all, none of it happened to us; we’re not involved in that line of service, business or thinking, and frankly, what are the odds we ever will? Think about that!

Take the messages about the wars in Europe. There are huge numbers of casualties, hundreds of strikes, lots of drones, and gobs of money thrown around. Yet, how much coverage is there about how many real humans have been sacrificed, lives destroyed, and futures forever changed?

We all hear how productivity has risen or fallen by a certain percentage. Few know what that means, yet it MUST be good/bad. We all hear about how the world will end if we don’t cap the increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees. We have no idea what that means. Yet, we are constantly bombarded with messages reinforcing NO MORE than 1.5 degrees.

This week,

My guest on the podcast is an actuary from the land of Scotland. All he does is deal with numbers, statistics and probabilities. I find him fascinating because he is leading the charge to change how risk models are calculated. He and his team make a compelling case for embedding the human factor into the modelling and the conclusions.

For example, had the ideas he and his team use, been in place, the Titanic would not have sunk, the Space Shuttle Challenger would not have blown up and maybe, just maybe, we’d understand and accept how the increase in hurricanes, wildfires and the scorching temperatures is related, and frankly, won’t be stopping anytime soon.

None of us can understand any of the data we are inundated daily about the climate change situation. All of us can bend the data in any way to fit the narrative we want to believe. The whole climate change thing has been dehumanized, just like every other thing we live with these days.

My guest makes a superb case for tossing out the old ways of thinking and doing, getting greater clarity from more informed sources, harnessing the strength of AI and humanizing the entire experience.

I hope you will join me on the new five-part series I’m calling What We Don’t Know about Climate Risk Modelling.