We lean on how something feels when making a fast judgment.
More quotesTwenty charts can lose to one coffin.
That is uncomfortable, particularly for people who pride themselves on being “data-led”. But data has a design problem: it compresses consequence. A casualty figure is essential for understanding scale and almost perfectly shaped for emotional escape. A photograph restores the person that aggregation had to remove.
The commercial version is less grave but just as familiar. A dashboard shows 600 failed checkouts and the bug waits in the backlog. Then somebody watches one customer tap the dead button six times, sigh and leave. Suddenly the meeting has energy. A charity can publish the full size of a crisis, yet one honestly told human story gives the audience something it can picture. Road-safety percentages matter; the empty chair explains why.
The obvious danger is emotional theatre mugging the evidence in an alley. One vivid case may be unusual. A dramatic image can make a small risk feel enormous or turn an unrepresentative anecdote into policy. Numbers without people become anaesthetic; people without numbers become manipulation.
I would use both, and give them separate jobs. Statistics establish whether the problem is real, how common it is and whether anything changed. A concrete scene makes the consequence imaginable. If a sales deck contains nineteen charts and no recognisable moment from a customer’s life, it is not rigorous. It is hiding behind arithmetic.