Explain it with something they know

Here is a small thing we've been thinking about. The unit you pick to describe a cost matters more than the number you put next to it.

We were sketching an energy table for a client recently. Blog posts, images, short videos, long videos. All measured, properly, in joules. A blog post came in at about ten thousand. A half-hour video came in at a couple of hundred million. An LED bulb running for an hour, for reference, around twenty-nine thousand.

The numbers were accurate, and useless with it. You could feel the room slide off them. Nobody could tell you, without doing arithmetic, whether a video was a bit more than a blog post or a thousand times more. Which is the whole thing you want to know.

We briefly considered the other direction. Trees. How much of a tree would you have to burn to make that video. The maths works, roughly, and it lands with an image. The only issue was it also turns an ordinary working decision into a small act of guilt, and no one was looking for that, no one wanted to feel instantly bad. So that concept was parked.

What we went with, in the end, was cups of tea.

A cup of tea is roughly the energy a kettle uses to boil some water. Not precise, but we didn't need to be, we just needed to explain what the table was actually saying, and let the room take it from there.

Then the table redrew itself.

Two of those three columns landed badly. The joules were accurate and impossible to compare. Ten thousand against two hundred million is just two big numbers next to each other. The bits of tree were accurate and pictureable, but every row read like a quiet accusation, and nobody had come in looking to feel bad. Only the cups let people put one number next to another without flinching.

The conversation changed on the spot. Someone asked whether a long video was really worth its two thousand cups, or whether the team made them because they could. Someone else said two cups felt fine for a hero image and silly for a thumbnail. Nobody had been able to grip any of that ten minutes earlier.

What happened next is the part that matters. Once the ratios were legible, the client looked at the long videos and decided they didn't actually need them. The videos weren't pulling their weight against the initiatives they cared about, and two thousand cups of tea per piece wasn't a cost they wanted to keep paying. They toned the video plan down.

That's the deeper win. A clearer unit didn't just help them understand the tool. It helped them decide not to use a bit of it.

Most technical briefings for non-technical audiences fail in the same quiet way. They're accurate. They're complete. They arrive in the units the engineer happens to work in. The room nods politely and decides on vibes, because the briefing gave them nothing to hold.

We've been picking units more carefully since. A few things we noticed along the way. The first is whether the reader can picture the unit without doing arithmetic. If they have to pause and convert, the unit has already failed. The second is range: if the smallest item sits at a thousandth and the largest at half a million, you're back where joules put you, and people will glaze over the same way. The third is the emotional load the unit carries. Trees were accurate and pictureable, but every row read like an accusation, and a unit that triggers guilt (or self-congratulation, for that matter) closes the conversation instead of opening it. The fourth, and the one we keep coming back to, is where the unit comes from. Joules come from physics. Trees come from ecology. Cups came from the kitchen down the corridor. Daily life usually wins.

Translation isn't the footnote. It's the brief.

Pick a unit the room already knows the price of, and people will make better calls, including the call to use less of the thing you just sold them.