Social Change and the Fun Theory

The article How Psychology Can Help the Planet Stay Cool in New Scientist August 2009 points out that the failure of pessimism to change human behavior has been well recognized.  Environmental groups have already learned some obvious lessons: no one likes to be hectored, and preachiness is not a winning tactic. Positive campaigns like "We can solve the climate crisis", run by Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, are a better idea. 

"As social animals, we like to interact with others and take inspiration from their actions. Psychologists are working out how to exploit this to spread behaviors that will help limit climate change. 'My sense is that social networks are going to be important, says Swim."

So what do we do now?  I went in search of web sites and projects seeking to overcome pessimism and embrace optimism, fun and silliness in their efforts to change people's behavior.  

One climate change org that clearly gets the message right is 350.org.  350.org creates unique campaigns and public events that inspire: 

The most amazing thing about this October 2009 event is that it was hundreds of small separate events that were all seen as a "global event" only because they were leveraged spectacularly well through social media.  350.org also maintains strong social media tactics on their website, encouraging members and site visitors to create and share photos showing themselves valuing climate change solutions.

The EcoTipping Points Project (tag line: "models of success in a time of crisis") is dedicated to making the stories of success known.  I found their 100 stories of success very inspiring.  Now we need 100 stories of climate change success.

"Inspiring" is good, and "inspiring" is needed.  But back to silliness…

Halloween: It’s getting scarier by the Climate Reality Project offered this Halloween message on climate change:

1. Climate change is projected to shrink the world’s chocolate supply.

2. Extreme weather, caused by climate change, is bad for halloween pumpkin crops. 

3. There’s reason to believe climate change will ruin the colors of your fall foliage.

Okay, that made me smile.  Plus, all these cute headlines were backed up by data.  I like data, that makes me smile too.

For something sillier, how about some singing climate scientists?

Now that's silly, and silliness is good, right?  Of course, changing people's behavior is what we really need to do.

I think we can learn something from this project funded by Volkwagen.  They call it The Fun Theory!  Enjoy

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Can we change people's behavior through fun?  Let's try.

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Pessimism Has Failed Us

"People have to be persuaded to act on climate change even though the benefit won't be felt for decades", says the opinion piece Positive Thinking for a Cooler World from New Scientist.

"It's hard to find any positive messages: a vegan who doesn't own a car, never flies, takes public transport to work and shares a tiny apartment in a US city would still be told that their lifestyle requires 3.3 Earths. It is hard to see what this is going to achieve, other than disillusioning people who are already doing their bit and telling everyone else that it isn't worth the bother."

Often, negative messages don't work to inspire people to change their behavior.    Intuitively, this has always made since to me.  I went in search of more evidence.  I found this UC Berkeley study.

"Doomsday climate change messages may make the public more skeptical about climate change," says this report published by scientists working at the University of California, Berkeley.  "Far from urging people to take action, such bleak and emotionally-charged warnings over the potential consequences of global warming may have the opposite effect, prompting not only ongoing lethargy but also denial."

"Fear-based appeals, especially when not coupled with a clear solution, can backfire and undermine the intended effects of a message," the report warns.

Study participants were asked to read two distinct versions of a single news article about global warming, each presenting the same factual data on climate change.  One presentation concluding with a positive message highlighting the potential solutions to the problem of global whamming, while the other concluded with a 'doomsday scenario'. 

Notably, those participants who read the more-upbeat version of the story tended to express a greater level of optimism in science's ability to tackle the threat of climate change.

At the same time, those participants who were presented with the pessimistic version of the news story were found to be more skeptical about the threat of global warming - they did not simply respond with a more pessimistic view of the problem, they expressed skepticism that the problem exists!

Pessimism doesn't work; it does not inspire us to action.  NGOs I've worked with have known this for some time.  After all, they read Psychology Today while waiting at the dentists office, just like you and I do.  Still, how to approach thorny nasty problems without being pessimistic eludes most of us, even those of us in the world-changing profession.

Clearly, if pessimism has failed us, what we need is a dose of optimism, fun, and cheer.

Or, as my wife says: "when all else fails, be silly."

I will now go in search of silly approaches to the climate change problem.  I'll report back once I'm laughing hard enough.

Who am I blogging for?

Hal Finney warns us to consider our audience broadly while blogging, because our online content may be more persistent in the future than we imagine.

"These words may be read by some hundreds of people today.  But they will go into the archives and be available for decades.  If only a few people per year read them, then even without great changes, by a hundred years from now the future readers will have outnumbered the present ones."

I'm inclined to take this advice with a grain of salt.  (To use a very old euphemism - one that would probably be too outdated and too culturally-bound for Finney's tastes.)

Not every piece of communication should be prepared for eternal consumption.  Just as there is a place in this word for spontaneous speech, there is a place on the Internet for spontaneous, and short-lived, writing.  My blog may be such a place.

Finney recommends that bloggers speak broadly to all cultures and for all times.  I disagree.  I think that the most important advances on the Internet in recent years have been in usability, and many usability advances have helped us filter, prioritize, and ignore.

On the net, less is often more; the fewer pages I scan while searching, the better.  This means I must filter, filter, filter.

One useful filter is date, another is popularity.  If something old hasn't been accessed and used many times, then perhaps it deserves to go away.  Its just communication, after all.  For most of human history, words died with the person who spoke them.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing.  A mother's babblings to her infant are as important as any speech in the world, but they need not be preserved.  Likewise, an amateur philosopher's musings may be interesting in the time and place for which they were written, but the great value of philosophy is in creating thoughts anew, not preserving them forever.

Besides, isn't more valuable to us to communicate naturally, and then use technology to filter, find, and facilitate our communication, rather than forcing ourselves to communicate in the way that happens to suit our current technology?

There is something I appreciate in Finney's advice.  He reminds us to envision our audience, understand who they are, and let them know who we are writing for.  I think all writers would be wise to remember this.

We should write in a way that helps the reader of today understand our frame of reference, and allows the reader of tomorrow to filter.

What am I living for, if not for you,

What am I living for, if not for you,

What am I living for, if not for you,

Nobody else, nobody else will do.

 - Ray Charles

On Steve Jobs, Markos Zuniga, and Bypassing the Gatekeepers

When Steve Jobs died last week on October 5th, I read this quote:

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste,” Jobs once said, “And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”

At first I disliked the "taste" remark as I long ago grew tired of sniping between Apple (a company whose products I admittedly adore) and Microsoft (a company whose products I find frustrating).  Then I noticed in that quote the interesting use of the word "culture".

Most people see Apple Computer as a company contributing 'insanely great ideas' to the computing industry.  Steve Jobs saw Apple's ideas as contributions to culture.

And of those ideas, Jobs most famous victories were designs that made good ideas possible as great products. They weren't always truly new ideas, but were designed in a new way: the iPod, iPhone, and iPad were after all just a music player, a smartphone, and a tablet computer - products that had been envisioned and discussed by others before Apple redesigned them.  Yet when each appeared, it was executed in such a beautiful way, as if no one had thought of it before.  And each fit into the culture of people's lives - a culture in which we were all trying to move faster and share more information without driving ourselves crazy.

The comment on bringing culture into products especially resonated for me because I was reading Markos Zuniga's Taking on the System when Jobs died.  Zuniga writes about 'bypassing the gatekeepers' using the example of peer-to-peer file sharing of music, and how this began to break the grip that a handful of major record companies had over the music industry up through the 1990s, writing "the labels will suffer the indignity of neglect and irrelevance as technology and changes in our culture render them obsolete."

In light of that challenging dilemma for the music industry, I see one of Steve Job's contributions to culture shining more brightly than the others, and for unique reasons.  While launching the iTunes app (again, an MP3 player and not a truly new idea), Jobs was privately negotiating with beleaguered record companies to implement a new kind of digital rights management for selling music.  Once coupled with iTunes, Jobs had engineered an industry shift into selling DRM-free music in most countries across the world.

As a result of these negotiations, Apple's iTunes Music Store birthed a renewed culture of music buyers, music sellers, and music lovers.

The gatekeepers of the recording industry were being bypassed by the file sharers, and although they knew this, someone was needed to help move them toward a new way of doing business.  Jobs, with his proven credibility and vision, was up to the task.  Having helped all us music lovers bypass the gatekeepers, Jobs convinced them to accept a new role in a new culture.  He convinced them to vacate their comfortable seat driving the bus, in order to accept a new seat on the bus next to the artists and customers they were trying to reach.

Culture was moving forward, yet the recording industry felt paralyzed.  Rather than seeking to 'crush the gatekeepers', as Zuniga might suggest, Jobs helped build a needed bridge from a past culture to a new culture, so music lovers and industry could move forward together.

Memes and Memetics

The end of this slide share sent a chill down my spine:
"The idea of memes is itself a meme. You are now infected."

I overheard a conversation the other day.  To be honest it was not really a conversation, it was a podcast, but the meme of podcasts seem pass for conversation these days.  The podcast conversants were all political journalists and bloggers, and they were discussing words that are increasingly overused.

They agreed to never use these words again.  The first they agreed upon was "meme."  The second was "ping me".

I enjoy Richard Dawkins' books; full of fertile ideas:

"When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.  We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes.  But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations.  Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you [but] as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved.  It does not take long to reach negligible proportions… We should not seek immortality in reproduction.  

But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool."

         - Richard Dawkins, ``The Selfish Gene''

Social Networks and Sociograms slide share - week 3

I have seen sociograms before, used to illustrate communication within or between organizations, but I didn't know the language of "sociograms", "steps", and "hubs".  So this was interesting to learn.

Above illustration from M. C. Kegler's studies at Emory University using network analysis to illustrate how collaboration developed over time among Native American tribal members and US government agencies.

I remember studying a sociogram (source unknown) developed from an analysis of phone and email contacts within a large company.  The startling realization from the sociogram was that the company's managers, thought of as being very important to communication, had fewer connections and communications than people without named management roles.  For example, some administrative employees had the potential to wield influence across the company through frequent communications with people at all levels.

These admins may not have recognized the potential of their communications to be influential, and they were likely not formally empowered to wield influence, but they were undoubtedly positioned to be the chief change agents in their organizations if only they would use their networks.

Personal Branding

At the start of our intensive exercise in branding, we were each asked to speak our personal brand.

"I am a tech-savvy conservationist and business developer.  I manage projects and facilitate teams that excel.  I am looking for the next great idea in clean technology."

As our branding exercise began, I was eager to offer others words to help them brand themselves.  It turned out that others were ready and willing to brand me as well.  Although only six or seven students in class knew me at all before before this class began, I was gifted with no less than fifteen branding words during our exercise.

Words that came back to me from classmates...
skilled, insightful communicator
integrates ideas
deep design background
chooses words well
well spoken
combining
intelligent
care
You are a Rock

I especially appreciated that last one.  Thanks, whoever you are.

What I noticed in this exercise is that while emphasizing skills I want people to know about may be the professional introduction people expect, what others remember are more personal impressions.  Perhaps my next challenge is to introduce myself to professional colleagues in a way that invites a more personal impression, and connection.