believed<\/em>\u00a0by someone about themselves.<\/p>\nI do have mugs … and cards and potentially a shirt and hat declaring me all sorts of “dad of …” honours including I believe “Greatest dad of all time.” But the panel of judges includes only my children and while it’s important to note the fact that I control their allowances and bedtimes may only be correlation to their decision to bestow upon me these titles, the argument could be made there is strong causation.<\/p>\n
And here’s the rub: we’re a headline driven society now. We don’t read column inches, we barely give a story on a webpage one scroll if it doesn’t promise us the chance to participate in a quiz or poll. So my headline is true and I can confidently declare myself the greatest dad to ever walk the face of the earth or I can hope you are baited into clicking and only then do you get the whole story.<\/p>\n
Okay, no I’d like permission to introduce an M. Night Shyamalan twist to this post.<\/p>\n
These cherry picked and partial-story statistics aren’t always a bad thing.<\/p>\n
I teach a class at a local college, Business Culture & Collaborative Practices<\/em>. It’s all about understanding how to recognize workplace culture, how you can inform the culture and how to accomplish goals in group situations. The final assignment is to create a presentation for people who plan conferences, pitching a particular city as the next place they should host their conference. Throughout the assignment the students become quite familiar with the cities they are researching. They know the seasonal temperatures and climate, what other events are happening, what capacity hotels and conference facilities have, crime rates, access to public transportation and more.<\/p>\nMost often, the students don’t really feel they have done a great job. I think it’s because the students in my class don’t aspire to be helping conference planners and it feels a bit unfamiliar to them. But here’s how I encourage them:<\/p>\n
I ask them if they are proud of their presentation and if they truly appreciate what they have accomplished. They usually give a Luke warm reaction. I then ask them “How many people in Canada do you think have this amount of knowledge on conference planning in your city? Do you think 3.5 million people do? Okay about about 350,000 people? No, 35,000 people? Maybe 3,500? Could it be as few as 350 people?”<\/p>\n
They usually agree it’s somewhere around 350 and 3,500 people. I then explain that there are 35 million people in Canada. So if they are one of 3,500 people that makes them in the top .001% of people with expertise in this area. This makes them really happy and I believe helps them appreciate what great work they have done and can do into the future.<\/p>\n
So sure, statistics in a headline doesn’t tell the whole story, but when it serves as a means to an end, is it so bad?<\/p>\n
Questions to ask myself:<\/p>\n
\n- Is it actually so bad? Am I perpetrating an ethically ambiguous path?<\/li>\n
- Clarity cures frustration – should we standardize how statistics are reported?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
<\/p>\n
[1] \u201cHow Fake Social Media Lives Can Leave You Feeling Inferior: Valiant Living Men’s Treatment Center in Colorado.\u201d How Fake Social Media Lives Can Leave You Feeling Inferior<\/em> | Valiant Living Men’s Treatment Center in Colorado, https:\/\/www.valiantliving.com\/blog\/how-fake-social-media-lives-can-leave-you-feeling-inferior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And I have the mugs to prove it. After the 15th\u00a0consecutive year I had this honour bestowed on me unanimously by the judging panel, I made the decision that I would wait until I hit the 20 years or maybe even when I eclipsed the quarter century mark that I would start to speak publicly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":175,"featured_media":30927,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2310],"tags":[2592],"class_list":["post-30920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-doctor-of-leadership-3","tag-chivers-dlgp02","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30920"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30929,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30920\/revisions\/30929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}