Debt Reporting: Data vs Information

I want to share a really simple exercise I did with some junior debt managers earlier this year. .

It came about when I was reviewing some of their debt reports. After my review I said, somewhat troubled, that there was a lot of data in the tables but not much information. The debt managers were taken aback and quite quizzical. What did I mean?

I asked them to do a simple exercise. It didn't involve sophisticated debt instruments or complex calculations. It was as basic as they come.

I wrote down 5 arbitrary numbers, for example, 35, 4, 13, 27, 52. I asked them to take those numbers and tell me what they could do with them. What operations could they perform?

Initially, they couldn't come up with anything (a bit of overthinking perhaps). Then, one junior manager said, well, you could add them up and get the total. Correct. You could find the average. Correct again. They became far more animated in their answers.

Here are some of the things they came up with: averaging, finding the median, summing the numbers, finding the percentage share, the percentage change, the ranking (from highest to lowest, lowest to highest), and identifying the outliers. Not exhaustive but definitely illustrative.

Think of the numbers as data, and the operations you performed to make sense of the data, as information. They got it.

How much of this was being shown in the tables or text of their reports? Where, for example, was the ranking of creditors, what was the average annual growth of the debt, what share of the debt were contingent liabilities?

The happy ending to the story? They took their report, relooked their data, and transformed their report into informative content that told their country story and allowed for meaningful analysis.

Sometimes going back to basics is everything!