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Events on Changing Behavior & Sustainability

Published October 14th, 2009 in Credibility Quotient, sustainability | No Comments »

Changing behavior, at the corporate level as well as the individual level, will be key to solving our energy problems and reducing the world’s carbon footprint. (Often it’s the elephant in the room, sharing the sofa with energy conservation.)

Information alone isn’t going to accomplish the task, and a couple of events are coming up that look at this issue. One is the Behavior, Energy and Climate Change conference in Washington, D.C., Nov. 15–18 presented by ACEEE, Stanford’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center and the University of California’s  California Institute for Energy and Environment. (I’ll be there, presenting on Thinkshift’s Credibility Quotient assessment tool in the poster session.) It will bring together industry, academics, policy makers and others to consider the latest research, pilot projects, and more.

One of the main speakers will be Doug McKenzie-Mohr, who’s also presenting a two-day workshop, “Fostering Sustainable Behavior,” Nov. 2–3 in Portland and Nov. 4–5 in San Francisco. McKenzie-Mohr literally wrote the book on the subject, available as a free download from his website (which is loaded with articles, case studies, and forums). Workshop info is on his site; registration is here. (Thanks to the Triple Pundit post by Deborah Fleischer for alerting me to the workshop and the book download.)

Bringing Statistics Down to Earth

Published August 20th, 2009 in communications strategy, marketing, sustainability | No Comments »

Communicating about sustainability inevitably means communicating about statistics—something I think it’s fair to say we all struggle to do well. How do you make huge numbers, often measuring things that are invisible to us (carbon dioxide emissions, kilowatt hours), meaningful enough to make an impression on people?

Carolyn addressed this earlier this year, providing a neat summary of the use of Fermi problems to tackle the challenge. I’m happy to add another inspiration source, a recent Fast Company column by Made to Stick authors Dan and Chip Heath, “The Gripping Statistic: How to Make Your Data Matter.”

As the Heaths point out, some communicators realize that “big numbers fuzz our brains,” and understand that they need to be translated to something that relates to everyday life. Attempts to solve the problem often don’t pan out, however. One particularly useful (if disgusting) example from the column:

Building intuition about numbers is different from shocking people with numbers. We’ve all heard stats like this one (which is real): 27 billion disposable diapers are used each year in the United States—enough to stretch all the way to the moon and back seven times. What to say about this? For starters, it would be a funny joke to play on the astronauts.

But notice that the astronomical analogy blocks any useful intuition. Would we feel better, for instance, if the diapers only stretched to the moon and back once? That would be just as gross, yet it would mean that six out of every seven families had given up disposables.

The problem here is not just relatability (while we all understand that the moon is far away, most of us haven’t been there) but utility: illustrating the abundance of disposable diapers this way doesn’t give us any insight into how big a problem this is or how we might address it. As the Heaths say, “A good statistic is one that aids a decision or shapes an opinion.”

For  example? There are a couple in the column. If anyone has others, I’d love to hear them.

Bad Language: Why ‘Consumer’ Should Get the Boot

Published August 3rd, 2009 in marketing, sustainability | 3 Comments »

I like to work myself into a good froth before posting one of an occasional series of rants on words and phrases that make me want to spit nails. And I’m finally there on consumer, used to identify a person or people (as opposed to business jargon for a market sector).

In fact, I’ve stewed over this one so long others have beat me to it (see Joseph Romm in Grist). But consumer deserves a pile-on. As in, “Consumers value convenience above all else.”

Well yes, consumers would. But would citizens? Parents? Community members? Patriots? Environmentalists/sports fans/gardeners/name your identity here? The use of the word “consumers” to identify people at all times in all contexts encourages us to think of ourselves—and each other—as nothing more than engines of consumption. It frames our view on problems and solutions in a way that narrows the perspective to purely personal concerns (often amounting to unexamined habits) and positions us as passive recipients of whatever’s out there—we can accept or reject, but not direct.

A sentence like “Consumers care more about perceived effectiveness and than about exposing their household to hazardous chemicals” will be accepted as a truism. Yeah, consumers are like that. Would the sentence “Parents care more about perceived effectiveness and than about exposing their household to hazardous chemicals” seem quite as commonsensical? I’m going to say no.

I’m also going to take a vow: I will never again use the word consumer to refer to a person or people. (I admit it, I’ve done it.) And at the risk of sounding preachy, I think everyone who writes or talks about sustainability issues should do the same. The words we use to describe things affect how we see them. And even when we’re shopping—perhaps especially when we’re shopping—we need to stop seeing ourselves as simply creatures who buy things.

Matching Communications to Cognitive Habits

Published April 22nd, 2009 in communications strategy, green marketing | 2 Comments »

The cover feature in the The New York Times Magazine’s recent “Green Issue,” “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?” delivers rich food for thought for communicators. The article delves into what decision science research tells us about how people respond to environmental issues. Basically, our tendency to undervalue future benefits, assess risk based on emotion, and deal with a “finite pool of worry” spells trouble for efforts to deal with climate change.

It’s a long article not amenable to summarization, and it’s worth reading in full for the insights it provides on how we might communicate more effectively about climate change solutions.  For example, this nugget: a fee for carbon pollution described as an “offset” gets much more support than one described as a “tax.” Turns out it’s not necessarily the principle of paying for pollution that people object to; it’s the negative loaded term “tax” that inspires rejection.

That’s no surprise, you might think, but in environmentalists’ discussions of the pros and cons of a carbon tax, “people won’t accept a tax” is always a main con. Calling it something else to make it more palatable doesn’t seem to have emerged as a solution. People may fear that it won’t work because the public will see it as a dodge, but that may be true only when you’re using alternative wording that’s already been tagged as misleading and has its own negative connotations–”fee” instead of “tax,” for example.

Such solutions lead author Jon Gertner to an interesting ethical question: is this unfair manipulation? Gertner writes:

[Elke] Weber and David Krantz, two of the co-directors of CRED [Center for Research on Environmental Decisions], have given the matter a good deal of thought, too. ‘People need some guidance over what the right thing to do is,’ Krantz told me. But he said that he was doubtful that you could actually deceive people with decision science into acting in ways that they don’t believe are right. ‘Remember when New York tried to enforce its jaywalking laws?’ he asked. ‘You can’t enforce stuff that people don’t believe should be done.’

I’m with Krantz: what’s the harm in helping people get to an end they want (and I think most people, even if they don’t see it as a priority, would like to halt climate change) by working with their brains instead of against them? Read the article and see what you think.

Feeling Good Isn’t Enough

Published April 2nd, 2009 in sustainability | No Comments »

A new report from the World Wildlife Fund, “From Workplace to Anyplace: Assessing the Global Opportunities to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions With Virtual Meetings and Telecommuting,” is worth checking out. It includes background research on the drivers for and barriers to adopting telecommunications technologies among policy makers, business leaders and end users. Not surprisingly, saving the environment isn’t a key driver—in fact, it’s the lowest-ranked reason for videoconferencing. Efficiency, saving money and social improvements top the list, confirming that to encourage lasting behavioral change, communicators need give people a payoff beyond simply doing the right thing and feeling good about it.

As an aside, the headline, “Report: Teleworking Could Cut U.S. Climate Emissions in Half” on the Sustainable Life Media news item first alerted me to the study. It made me say “Wow!” But it tells a different story than the research report, which estimates that telecommuting and virtual meeting tools worldwide could cut CO2 emissions by about 3.5 million tons by 2050—the equivalent of half the United States’ current emissions. The headline implies that if U.S. businesses boosted telecommuting, virtual meetings and the like, we’d cut our emissions in half—I only wish that were so.

Update, 4.04: Sustainable Life Media has changed the opening sentence of its piece in response to my comments. I have to add (as I should have the first time around), SLM has terrific editorial standards, and if they were less than pros, a slip like this wouldn’t be worth a mention.

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