Chip Heath - Making Numbers Count in Education

Heath’s journey began with studies in engineering, then a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. Today he teaches organizational behavior at the Stanford School of Business and co-authored four bestselling books with his brother Dan.

“I’d been teaching a course at Stanford on the marketplace of ideas,” Heath said. “I had done a talk with a Silicon Valley group, and the theme was what we can learn from urban legends about messaging. And my editor saw an account of that talk and said, ‘I think this could be a book.’

Heath liked the idea and pitched it to his brother. In 2010 their first book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, became a New York Times bestseller.

Heath’s latest book, Making Numbers Count, works on solving the problem of making sense of large numbers for people. “How do you get across meaning in those numbers given that our brains are not prepared for doing that,” Heath said. “If you talk about millions versus billions, those are numbers we hear all the time. Well, if you’re counting off a million seconds, it would take you twelve days to count off a million seconds. Do you want to know how long it would take to count off a billion seconds? Well, it would take you thirty-two years.” These types of comparisons make people see the relationship of numbers differently.