Against communication

Here's part of a conversation I'm having with a Luke Wright, a journalist who's writing about communicating change:

Well of course communication is vital however even the cleverest communication is a waste of effort if it does not meet a vital condition - that the communication is part of a conversation about things that matter to the audience. So, even though I've spent my professional life as a communicator, I don't talk about communication any more, I talk about conversation. A good conversation is, of course, two way, about concerns, stories and solutions that matter to both sides of the conversation. The commonest reasons communication campaigns fail is that they are only about things that matter to the sender, not the receiver; and treats the receiver as a passive vessel for 'truth' to arrive. The vast majority of social marketing campaigns fail for this reason - they are little more that government agencies having elaborate conversations with themselves.

Even though you want to run your story as about communication, I'd like you to ask yourself whether you may be perpetuating 'message fetish', rather than opening up a new and interesting discussion.

In the Arabic smoking story*, for instance, what mattered was the time spent listening to the concerns of Arabic-speaking people and hearing some of the solutions they had spontaneously innovated to their own social dilemmas around smoking, then depicting those solutions in an ad campaign that acted as a virtual conversation, providing solutions to matters they already knew were at stake in their lives. The interesting work was the listening and spotting answers to problems people were experiencing. The communication was not unusual or remarkable. It was just how the solution was packaged. What makes a gift great is how it fits into the peoples' hopes and dreams, not the packaging. In this way, the ad campaign packaged up just the right gift, and the art was in selecting the gift not choosing the packaging.

* See "The Art of Stickiness" chapter on my web site.

The sweet balm of denial

A friend of mine, a self-employed engineer who freely admits to being more than a million dollars in debt, recently told me that the start of Global Financial Crisis thrust him into a period of gloom. Doom-laden headline after headline ground down his optimism and zest. Then, after a few months of depression, he made a terrific decision. He chose to ignore the news. To be specific, he stopped watching TV news. He just blanked it out.

The effect was dramatic. His spirits lifted. He got on with his life. He found that new business kept coming in. His work got done. His mortgage got paid. He discovered that the GFC was something he could safely ignore.

It seems that a lot of Australians may have made similar choices, for the Australian economy has weathered the GFC far better than any economy in the world. According to the Reserve Bank, consumer confidence dropped less than in the other major economies; businesses retrenched fewer workers; and business investment remained surprisingly high.

Instead of slashing their wrists, Australians may have just stopped paying attention to the news and got on their lives.

Denial is a well studied psychological phenomenon (just Google “cognitive dissonance”). As psychologists understand it, denial is all about protecting the self or identity. When someone is presented with information that challenges their identity they experience mental discomfort or dissonance. There are two ways to reduce that discomfort. They can either change their behaviour or they can avoid that information in future. Since avoidance is almost always easier and less risky than change, most people choose avoidance. Or, as J.K. Galbraith put it, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

Denial gets bad rap. Being “in denial” is supposed to be an example of mental feebleness. But there is a potent connection between denial and economic prosperity.

Behavioural economists George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, in their book Animal Spirits, How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism, make a great point about confidence. Confidence, they wrote, is the key “animal spirit” in an economy: “When people have confidence they go out and buy; when they are unconfident they withdraw, and they sell.”

Confidence, they pointed out, is not just a certainty that good times will keep rolling. The word comes from the Latin fido, meaning “I trust”. But trust is not a positive form of mental activity. It’s actually a form of mental inactivity. It consists of not thinking about consequences, of hoping for the best, and assuming that someone has done the risk management. Trust is a low energy mental state and it’s easy to see why that’s so. If we worried about everything in life, we’d go mad. We’d be paralysed with doubt because of all the agonisingly complicated uncertainties surrounding every decision. Lack of trust, that is, the active mental state of mulling over consequences and worrying about details, is something that inhibits economic activity. Trust, that is, not thinking much about the consequences, is therefore much more than bliss, it’s one of the root causes of national prosperity.

Denial is nothing less that the choice to return to a state of trustful ignorance. Being in denial, far from evidence of feebleness, is therefore a fantastic strength. Think about it. Without denial would there ever have been a successful rebellion or revolution in history? No. It would all be too confronting. Worrying about the ranks of muskets and cannon lined up against them would have terrified all those potential revolutionaries into helplessness. And there would never have been a paradigm-challenging idea: no renaissance, no heliocentric theory, no electricity, no penicillin, no stapler. Without denial of the near certainty of failure, all the revolutionaries who made our world would have stayed at home. True, denial can sometimes be a weakness. But very often it’s a great strength.

Now you have to wonder, since Australians have retained their economic confidence far better than Europeans and Americans, what makes us such superior denialists? Americans in particular seem to have gone into a blind panic. I’m just speculating now, but one explanation might have to do with our native self-doubt. Without swollen egos, there’s less far to fall. Stick a pin in Americans’ party balloon and the result is mass hysteria. Deflate our party balloon, and, deep down, we're just not that surprised.

Another explanation may have to do with how sensible we are. Denial, you see, is always easier when it's backed by some evidence. Australians, like practically everyone else in the world, would have been startled into alertness by the sudden collapse of the US economy. Most of us aren't idiots, so before slipping back into the sweet balm of semi-consciousness we would have looked around for some evidence that it was safe to do so. We saw: a government confidently and aggressively responding, local institutions not collapsing and NO ONE ELSE PANICKING. There's a well-established principle in the social sciences called 'social proof' which can be expressed as 'if the people around me aren’t acting like there's a problem, there's no problem'. Thanks to a few comforting real life observations, Australian's seem to have decided that it was safe to lapse back into trust and get on with their lives. What became a contagion of panic in the US and Europe became a contagion of denial here, and we're all the better for it.

Yes, denial: our saving grace; our life boat in a storm; our national treasure. Let’s give it the respect it deserves.

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This piece is not just frivolous. Denial is something change agents struggle with every day. Denial has it’s own logic: it’s driven by the fear of not being able to manage the unfamiliar. Trying to “drag people out of their comfort zones” is a recipe for failure simply because the human capacity for denial is infinite. A solution is to focus on increasing people’s confidence or self-efficacy (in other words, EXANDING their comfort zones), an approach which minimises the fear that drives denial!

* Malcolm Edey, Assistant Governor, Reserve Bank of Australia, The Economic Landscape in 2009, www.rba.gov.au/Speeches/2009/sp_ag_040309.pdf

Permission to innovate

Institutions tend to be lousy innovators.

Why?

Partly, I think, because power-holders don’t put their reputations on the line to push novel ideas. Also, nowadays, because employees are so crazily overworked after decades of so-called ‘productivity’ reforms.

Innovation, like all things, needs permission and a space to thrive.

I stumbled across this nice example of a public corporation that's doing it right.

South East Water in Melbourne has a board at the entrance to their staff cafeteria that records the passage of staff-initiated innovations from ‘raw idea’ to ‘evaluated’ to ‘testing’ to ‘project’ to ‘success’.

Beautiful!

It’s a conspicuous signpost that says ‘permission to experiment’, and ‘we value your ideas’.

(Thanks to the energetic Rebecca for posing with the board.)

In love with a CEO

Not really, but I was tempted after hearing Dr Kathy Alexander, the CEO of the City of Melbourne, talk at a local government emerging leaders forum. I took five pages of notes in 20 minutes. She has uncommon common sense and uncommon candour, perhaps because she started her career as a psychologist, then a health promoter, then a health CEO before becoming a city manager.

A few (heavily paraphrased) notes:

As a health promoter in South Australia she listened to women in an isolated community talk about the stale fruit and veg being sold expensively by the only grocer in the neighbourhood. When they suggested getting a bus to drive to the fruit markets, she arranged the bus, effectively putting a group of feisty women in competition with the local grocer, who finally rose the occasion and lowered the price of his offerings.

What a good idea – using a health dept bus to drive people to a fruit market instead of a hospital.

Her view on council customer surveys: “I think surveys are just cheating”. (Because most council managers word them to justify the status quo).

In charge of a regional health promotion unit, she got her staff onto the streets and interviewed 7,500 residents, asking them one main question – “what three things would make your community healthier”. So many pointed to the noxious 24/7 air pollution from a Sims Metal plant in town that she took the plant on on, supporting the formation of a citizens’ action group that successfully took the state government to court to enforce air quality standards. No longer able to ignore the community in this safe seat the state government later launched a major community development program.

To the perennial problem of councillors who think they are elected to make decisions without community’s input: “Community engagement is a way to find the right political answer.”

To the perennial problem of what to do about moribund community advisory committees, without causing a riot by simply closing them down: Reopen their membership, BUT ALSO redefine their terms of reference: instead of ‘advising’ on the views of young people or indigenous people or whatever, their role is to ‘oversee engagement’ with those groups. Brilliant.

The “Colleen Communities” of this world, the “usual suspects” who sit on innumerable council committees, can “become incredibly powerful and fight like crazy to stop real community participation.” You can never make any engagement process truly representative, but every increment of diversity makes it more representative. Broadening the voices drowns out “Colleen Community”.

A great community engagement strategy is to “make your problem their problem”. So, if you have a devil of a job balancing a budget, ask community forums to balance it for you. She told the story of a recent state-wide consultation in Victoria about setting the balance of expenditure in health care. 40 community forums (called ‘boards’) were set up, and, overwhelmingly recommended spending more on preventative health. Even a father whose son had been saved in an intensive care ward said that more money should be shifted from high cost clinical intervention to prevention.

Her conclusion: “A fundamental principle of community engagement is being willing to give up some power.”

Deutsche Bank's dunderheaded climate change message

My friend Sean just told me about Deutsche Bank's huge carbon counter in Times Square. Here's a picture of it. It supposedly counts the number of tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I have to be careful to moderate my language here, so I'll just say: What idiot thought of this?

It's exactly the "message" I'd use if I wanted to psychologically disempower people doing anything about global warming: a huge, seemingly unstoppable, blood-freezing, onrush of authoritative numbers, mathematically cataloging the road to doom. A slap in the face for anyone naive enough to believe change is possible.

This is an example the "in-your-face" theory of change that assumes that, if people aren't (in this case) reducing their carbon emissions or lobbying governments, then they haven't had the problem smashed sufficiently hard in their faces. If that doesn't work, what next? Children with dead polar bears tattooed on the foreheads?

Al Gore talks about our "hope budget" and the need to keep it in the black. Such dunderheaded corporate social advertising grinds hope into the dust.

Here's an alternative: a giant widget in Times Square that shows the number of dollars invested in sustainable energy, or the size of the carbon trading market. Or how about the amount of money that Deustche Bank has invested in same. THAT would be statement of commitment that others would talk about and emulate.

Even a humble sign can be great

Just got back from training the staff of Environment Bay of Plenty in New Zealand. NZ's regional councils are interesting beasts. The do the work that a host of state agencies would do other countries, everything from water quality, to air pollution, to road safety, to planning for 'Smart Growth'.

While I was there I saw a couple of great signs.

First, a perfect example of 'framing' in terms of the audience's values. I don't just want a hole, I want water!

And here's another stand-out, a sign with heart. Who says love and waste management don't mix? It's not quite "Don't mess with Texas" but it's up there. I understand NZ's new National Government has lost interest in sustainability issues and reduced funding for this, amongst other efforts.

Big mistake...this is the best recycling logo IN THE WORLD. Don't lose it.