Current talk about the Obama Administration’s trouble with transparency reveals a strong parallel with sustainability-oriented businesses: it’s easy (and sounds so nice) to say you’re committed to transparency; try to deliver on that promise and you’re likely to encounter walls of uncertainty, fear, and bureaucratic resistance.

When transparency means revealing unfavorable or unflattering information (and it usually does to some extent), companies and institutions often get cold feet. They consider the negative publicity that could ensue and decide they can’t risk it. What they often fail to consider is the risk of continuing to hide and the benefits of public confession.

Someone’s bound to find out your secrets eventually, and then you have no control over the story. On the other hand, social psychology research, along with plenty of anecdotal evidence, shows that organizations that acknowledge problems—and say what they’re doing to address them—are perceived as more credible. Telling the truth makes you trustworthy. This is why attention to challenges is a factor in the Thinkshift Credibility Quotient™ (see an earlier post on how this applies to companies introducing advanced technologies).

You may be familiar with one of the best examples of transparency and acknowledging challenges: Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles program, which traces the company’s products through the supply chain. If not, here’s a look at the site in action:

I look up a jacket, and the website tells me the sustainability “good” (it’s recyclable), and the “bad” (the waterproof finish uses a chemical that persists in the environment). It also tells me they’re researching alternatives, but for now the finish stays because it’s essential to performance.

The fact that they’re telling me a negative thing makes the positives they point out all the more credible. It also has the interesting effect of making me as a potential purchaser share responsibility. They’ve told me about the chemical; if I want to reduce its incidence, I can forego waterproofing. If I want the waterproofing, I am partly responsible for the sustainability problem. Nice, huh?

More evidence that “save the planet” is bad messaging: Suzanne Shelton of the Shelton Group reports that her firm’s recent national survey of people identified as green buyers found six myths about green “consumers,” including that their top concern is the environment and that their main motivation when reducing energy use is to “save the planet.” The stat there: “When asked the most important reason to reduce energy consumption, 73 percent chose ‘to reduce my bills/control costs’ and only 26 percent chose ‘to lessen my impact on the environment.’”

This shouldn’t really be surprising. A growing body of research suggests that we’re hardwired to focus on the immediate and undervalue future benefits. Marketing gurus have been hammering home for decades the need to answer the key buyer question, “What’s in it for me?” And really, how would you expect people who are treated and see themselves as “consumers” to behave? (A topic I ranted on recently.)

Yet “save the planet” and its variations continue to appear in marketing and advertising by sophisticated companies and nonprofits. Either they believe there are more treehuggers out there than there are; they’re committed environmentalists themselves who can’t believe that everyone else won’t see the light when it’s pointed out to them (the classic error of mistaking yourself for your market); or they just want to paint themselves as green by communicating that they think saving the planet is a good idea. Regardless, it’s time for a new pitch.

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.