By: Eugene de Ribeaux, CEO, PTG International, Inc. It’s awesome that the Turning Technologies’ Audience Response Units capture sufficient detail that allows us to explore our monthly evaluation data for further insights. For example, in looking at the survey results for the November monthly program, I saw that someone had selected “Strongly Agree” to all three of our key feedback statements:

1. This month’s presentation was relevant to my current role/position.

2. The presentation style kept me engaged.

3. I will be able to apply something that I learned from this month’s presentation.

However, the same person selected “1 (Absolutely Not)” for “I would recommend TOC registration to my colleagues.” Surely our TOC friend did not really mean to strongly recommend AGAINST TOC registration, after having such a positive response to the session? Certainly they instead intended to select “10 (Absolutely Yes)”, right? Would it be ethical of me to change their answer from “1” to “10” to make our Promoter Score look better? (See the October TOC newsletter for an explanation of the term Promoter Score.) Perhaps our November presenter, Terry Newell – who spoke eloquently on the subject of “Ethics and Public Service” – would be able to help me make that call? The 68 people in attendance last month might suggest that we have bigger ethical issues to tackle. But fudging numbers to paint a rosier picture of our accomplishments is a temptation many a person has fallen prey to, whether in or out of public service.

Would it be ethical of me to change their answer from “1” to “10” to make our Promoter Score look better? (See the October TOC newsletter for an explanation of the term Promoter Score.) Perhaps our November presenter, Terry Newell – who spoke eloquently on the subject of “Ethics and Public Service” – would be able to help me make that call? The 68 people in attendance last month might suggest that we have bigger ethical issues to tackle. But fudging numbers to paint a rosier picture of our accomplishments is a temptation many a person has fallen prey to, whether in or out of public service.

Fortunately we have no need to tamper with our numbers to make ourselves look better. A simple scatter plot of November respondents’ average session rating versus their willingness to recommend TOC registration – shown below with a trend line meant to represent the normal responses – demonstrates that our friend’s response (shown in red) is an outlier, and can possibly be discarded for the purposes of analysis. The simple illustration below shows that pictures/graphs can be essential supplements to helping to explain our training numbers. Speaking of illustrating our numbers, how are we doing on our key TOC metrics during our first 3 months of this program year? Let’s take a look.Not bad at all! Terry reminded us in his presentation last month that undergirding ethical behavior is

The simple illustration below shows that pictures/graphs can be essential supplements to helping to explain our training numbers. Speaking of illustrating our numbers, how are we doing on our key TOC metrics during our first 3 months of this program year? Let’s take a look.Not bad at all! Terry reminded us in his presentation last month that undergirding ethical behavior is good character. Likewise, undergirding these strong – and might I see ethically produced! – numbers is quality programming that benefits the Government Learning & Development community, thus showing The Power of the Numbers.