Clarity Strategic^TM

I'm currently working on a book, which will capture some of the most timeless content of my now-outdated Rhetoric for Engineers, and make it relevant to folks who need to communicate numbers. I don't have a catchy title yet (sorry), but I do have catchy anecdotes. Like this one.

Once, before the Excel Era, one of my jobs was statistical programming for engineering and manufacturing and I had done some pretty regression plots. So one day, a buddy brought some business history for one of our burgeoning product lines. "Do the same thing with this stuff," he said, "and plot me a trend line out to three years."

So I did, and I found that the best data fit was a exponential curve (in blue) indicating that business would level off. The confidence bands (red and green) showed that extrapolations of more than nine months were even more useless than usual. I handed the guy the beautiful graph along with a paragraph to explain it.

In short order, he came back in and told me the VP (now he tells me!) who needed this graph was making a presentation to the HOME OFFICE, and he couldn't "carry bullshit" like this in front of THEM. The VP had drawn a nice straight line with a big marking pen (BLACK) through the data points showing doubling of sales every year. "Fix it!" my buddy told me, "and take off those extra curves."

After that I tried to work only on engineering experiments where the message was to be found in the data and not where the data was to be adjusted to suit the message. The moral of this tale is, "it's not enough to know the audience; you also have to know where the audience is going to repeat the story."

What you want to see here is that the real data does something significantly different from the "data" this particular management team wanted to see. Plan ahead for a story like this.