How should we talk about climate change?

In recent days there’s been much discussion about the ‘banned’ advert from the 10:10 climate change campaign, which was withdrawn after it had upset a number of people with its cartoon violence images of environmental campaigners blowing up recalcitrant members of the public. Find out more background on the ad and see the video itself here.

I’m not bothered about whether the ad was offensive or not – my problem with it is that it simply wasn’t very good. The aim was to bring the issue of climate change back into the headlines, which it did, but for the wrong reasons as it (again) made environmental campaigners look like clumsy amateurs. It was patronising and one reached the end of the video thinking ‘what was the point of that?’.

It lacked any real sophistication or irony, and as a result may have reinforced many people’s prejudices about environmental campaigners. It also fuels the idea that people in the environmental movement really have no idea on how to communicate with the public on these issues. We are throwing everything – and anything – at them in the hope that it will stick and gain behaviour change. We are failing to gain the change we need (if this were possible in the first place*) and in the meantime are alienating people with calls to action which are either too small and potentially counterproductive, tainted with green consumerism or, like this advert, simply lacking in any motivational power or call to action.

We need to get more sophisticated in the way we approach communications on climate change, and one of the key ingredients in doing this is to really understand the drivers of people’s attitudes and behaviours on this issue. These include our habitual and unconscious behaviours as well as how we respond to wider societal and cultural influences – one example of the latter is the role of advertising in driving people towards materialistic values, which can make us less responsive to calls for pro-environmental or pro-social behaviour. There is hope though – a number of places are doing this research, including the RESOLVE centre at Surrey University, and some forward-thinking NGOs are starting to think about these issues too – for example, check out the new report ‘Common Cause’ by Tom Crompton of WWF.

*Not only do we need to think about how to seek behaviour change - we also need to understand our goals better as a movement and give serious reflection to what we can really hope to achieve on the issue of climate change. But that’s a topic for another blog post...

Help for smaller charities

Many of the most vibrant and important organisations seeking change operate with very small budgets or staff numbers, and can find it difficult to access the help and support open to larger orgainsations. Also, smaller not-for-profit organisations can face quite specific challenges and issues that larger consultancy organisations do not cater for - such as a lack of people to actually implement the plans or recommendations that a consultancy exercise comes up with.

We're therefore launching a new imprint of ChangeStar - called ChangeStar Jnr - which provides a range of services and support to address the specific challenges and issues that really matter to smaller not-for-profit organisations, and at a price that is realistic for them.

For many smaller organisations, the decision to use this type of service, and even to develop a strategic plan in the first place, can be a difficult one to make. It is easy to find reasons not to do it – for example, the organisation may feel it cannot afford to spend money on planning when it has other priorities. This short outline shows how important good planning is, no matter how small your organisation is. Quite simply, if you don’t plan, you’re very unlikely to achieve your aims.

Clone towns revisited

Recently, the New Economics Foundation (nef) published a follow up to their influential 2005 'Clone Town Britain' report. The updated report has surveyed Britain again and found that 41 per cent of UK towns are clone towns and a further 23 per cent are on the verge of becoming clone towns.

The original report explored how our local towns and commuities had been affected by the growing dominance of major chains on the high street, and this follow-up continues the theme, whilst also exploring how the economic downturn has affected this situation. This is important stuff as it affects the quality of our lives and communities directly. The report provides a few ideas on how we can start to make things better. Also see the 'How to connect' section of the Life Squared resource base for other ideas.

Check out the new report here.

Freedom debunked

'Freedom' is often held up as an unequivocal good in our modern individualistic society, and many people (and politicians) justify their actions or views on the basis of this. The short paper available I wrote for ChangeStar here explores the idea of freedom and our desire for it. It reaches what I hope is a reasonably common sense conclusion:

"Each person’s claim to freedom brings competing claims from others and we should be sure to weigh these up carefully before we jump to defend anyone’s claim for ‘freedom’."

Big Society can’t happen in a Consumer Society

Whatever you may think of the coalition government’s ‘Big Society’ idea (and I have my reservations), it needs a certain type of population to make it happen – one that is politically engaged, community-minded and willing to give up time for the greater good. I hate to say it, but this doesn’t sound like modern society – where isolation, materialism and the pursuit of self interest seem to be greater priorities than compassionate collectivism for many people.

One of the reasons for this excessively self-oriented mindset is our dominant culture of consumerism, which can have a significant influence on us and affect the way we engage with the world around us. For example, studies (such as Greenberg and Brand, 1993; Shrum et al., 2005) show that increased exposure to commercial marketing is associated with increased levels of materialism in people. This can lead people to build their identities around extrinsic values (such as money, fame, and popularity) and stifle their concern for external issues such as poverty, suffering, discrimination and environmental challenges.

So, before we can realistically seek a truly progressive vision of society – whether that is indeed the Big Society or something else entirely – we will need to examine, and address, the social influences that militate against people’s participation, and this includes our culture of consumerism.

For more thoughts on consumerism, download ‘The problem with consumerism’ from Life².

Not the end of consumerism

This article in the Business section of the New York Times is interesting, as it illustrates the difficulty that the mainstream media still have in coming to terms with the idea that living simply and buying less can make one happy.

There are glimmers of clarity in the article - for example, the opening paragraphs discuss a couple's journey of downsizing their income, consumption and debts, in order to get the life and jobs they want. It ends with the wise observation from one partner "I really believe that the acquisition of material goods doesn’t bring about happiness".

This is good stuff. At this point, there is a great opportunity to show how many people are realising that the rat race (including the search for ever greater income), is not for them, and that building a life around your priorities and the things that really matter to us rather than the pursuit of money can bring us greater happiness and fulfilment.

The article doesn't do this however. Far from being a timely challenge to consumerism and the rat race, it jumps from a call to 'buy fewer material goods' to a suggestion to 'buy more services and experiences'. This is not about downsizing at all - it is just shifting your spending.

Perhaps it is asking too much of the business section of a mainstream publication to question the pursuit of wealth and consumption, but it is a shame to see an article start so promisingly and then miss the point so spectacularly. It will also lead many readers to miss the point, at a time when we could all benefit from living off less.

A new focus for education

Geoff Mulgan of The Young Foundation puts it well:

"Over the last two decades a gulf has opened up between what education systems provide and what children need. Education systems rightly provide children with skills in numeracy and literacy and academic qualifications. But the emphasis on a set of core academic skills, and a culture of intensive testing, has too often squeezed out another set of skills – how to think creatively, how to collaborate, how to empathise – at the very time when they are needed more than ever"

The need to educate people - adults and children alike - in various aspects of 'the art of living' is a theme running through much of my work, and this report (called 'Grit: The skills for success and how they are grown') by The Young Foundation explores some of these skills in greater detail and makes a case for why they matter in our lives.

Although it perhaps focuses more on the benefits of these skills in people's careers than in life generally (understandable as it needs to be 'sold' to policy makers), it contains an interesting overview of topics such as the need for people to be taught to be reslient in facing the adversity and challenges of life.

Automatic behaviour change

Interesting report from the Institute for Govenment, pulling together some of the evidence for ‘automatic’ behaviour change techniques. Many behaviour change initiatives to date have involved a ‘reflective’ approach (the standard model used by economics), which assumes that people make decisions rationally and will analyse the various pieces of information from politicians, governments and markets, and then act in ways that reflect their best interests.

Evidence (and common sense) however suggests that this is not the whole story, and in fact people are sometimes seemingly irrational and inconsistent in their choices, often because they are influenced by surrounding factors. This alternative model of behaviour change therefore focuses on “changing behaviour without changing minds‟ - for example, trying to shift the context in which people act, in order to ‘nudge’ them into behaviour change. This theme has been the topic of several bestselling books in recent years (from ‘Nudge’ to ‘Blink’) and it seems that an effective and balanced behaviour change strategy should incorporate learning and tactics from both the ‘rational’ and ‘automatic’ sides of our behaviour.

This is useful stuff for people interested in changing behaviour – whether as politicians or campaigning groups.

Our hidden impacts

One of the important features of modern life that Life² helps people to deal with is the increased level of complexity within which people live. One example of this complexity is the chain of processes, people and impacts that sit behind even the most simple products or services we consume. As I noted in 'Modern life' - the ingredients of a typical BLT sandwich could have travelled 31,000 miles before the final product reaches the supermarket shelf.

So, our actions and purchasing decisions have a much more complex and wide range of impacts than we might think, and we all need to become much more aware of what these impacts are. Life² helps people to do this through its resources such as the knowledge base, and there are now other people and initiatives helping people to develop this area of knowledge. Bestselling author Daniel Goleman looks at this topic in his new book 'Ecological Intelligience', which although flawed in its loyalty towards free markets and economic growth, gives some interesting ideas on how 'eco labelling' schemes might be set up to help people understand the impacts behind their products and services.

Perhaps the most successful initiative to show these hidden impacts has been 'The Story of Stuff' - a free web-based video that has now been downloaded 10 million times. Although it has its own inherent biases that one should be aware of, the film provides some useful, accessible information. A book of the same name has now just been published by Annie Leonard.

Older people's well-being

At Life², we're researching the topic of older people's well-being, in preparation for a future project.

Although we’re living longer and in better physical health than ever, many people are still suffering in their later years from preventable causes like depression, loneliness and isolation. The well-being of the over-65's has been neglected to date, and we could do a great deal more, both as a state and in society generally, to understand the factors that prevent or promote flourishing in older people, and to take action to improve the quality of later life.

IPPR have done some interesting research on the well-being of older people as part of an ongoing programme. The findings are interesting and sometimes unexpected. For example, studies show that litter and traffic are more important concerns to older people than fear of crime and young people in public spaces. Click here and here to read a couple of their reports.

Stay tuned in the coming months to find about our project on flourishing for older peoople...

Why equality matters

We've just added The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkiinson and Kate Pickett to our bookshop at Life², and I can't believe it's taken us so long to get round to doing so.

I remember being impressed by this book when it first came out in hardback, and since then it has become well-known and exhaustively referenced by people and organisations seeking a range of types of social change. Its success is hardly surprising, as it has provided progressives with an important resource - namely, hard evidence as to how almost everything - from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy - is affected not only by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is. Its stark conclusion is that societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them - including the well-off.

If you haven't checked it out yet, buy it now - and have a look at The Equality Trust - an organisation set up by the authors of the book to campaign on the same topic.

Making mental health accessible

The Mental Health Foundation do some good work in breaking down the big (and, for many people, scary) topic of mental health and showing how it relates to some more specific topics that can feature in many of our daily lives and experiences of life - including loneliness, happiness and fear. Their most recent report asks whether modern life is leading to greater loneliness.

This is important work, as it encourages people to see mental health not as a taboo subject, but as something we all need to look at and work on in life - just like our physical health. One of the most fundamental ways we can improve our experience of life is by improving the way we deal with this experience and how we see the world. Improving people's mental health is therefore an important component of Life²'s work - part of helping them to live happier, wiser and more meaningful lives.

Here are some links to a few of the MHF's recent campaigns and reports - Fear, Be Mindful and 10 ways to look after your mental health.

More genius from The Onion

I couldn't resist this from The Onion - 'Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once'

The lost art of living well

I have written a brief article to provide more details on the rationale for our not-for-profit organisation Life².

Its basic argument is that we face a range of challenges and pressures as individuals living in the modern world, and if we are to flourish in this environment we each need to be given access to a particular range of life skills and information in our lives. Currently, these are not being adequately provided by institutions in modern society, so Life² has been set up to begin providing them to the general public, and to raise awareness of the need for them in society.

Click here to read the article. Click here for an outline of the organisation and some of its activities to date.

Change for the better

There seems to be change in the air: not the vacuous, meaningless version of it pedalled by David Cameron and other election hopefuls, but a sense that we need to address some more subtle issues relating to how people see and deal with the world if we are to secure a better future.

We have been speaking to a couple of these initiatives recently with the possibility in mind of collaboration in the future - one is the Movement for Happiness set up by Professor Lord Richard Layard, Geoff Mulgan and Anthony Seldon, which is due to launch in September this year. Another is Citizen Ethics, set up by Madeleine Bunting and Mark Vernon. Check them out - each has its strong merits and areas of crossover with Life², but each is different from Life²'s work of equipping people with the tools, ideas and information to live more self-determined, wise, happy and meaningful lives.

I see Life² sitting in the middle of all this work, pulling together linked issues such as ethics, happiness and well-being - and I hope this puts us in a good place to move various strands of this agenda forward in the coming months and years.

Why should we use an agency?

A short while ago, I was asked by a fundraiser at a small-to-medium sized charity to draft them some notes about the benefits of using a fundraising agency, in order to help them convince their board to test it out.

When working with small-to-medium sized charities, we've often had to go through this process of 'building the case for using an agency' to non-fundraisers in the organisation before we can work with them (and are happy to do so, as it's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask). I therefore thought it would be useful to post the notes on here - so whether you are a fundraiser looking to convince your board or a non-fundraiser seeking to understand the benefits of using an agency - I hope these notes are useful. Check them, and other papers, out at the 'papers' section of the ChangeStar site here, or via this direct link.

The science of happiness

Most of us seek it in our lives, yet it has proved to be something that politicians are unable or unwilling to put at the centre of policy making – until now. In recent years, the science of happiness has been a growing area, and we are now able to identify and measure (with scientific backing) a number of the factors that are proven to make us happy and, conversely, unhappy.

Although policy makers are just starting to get to grips with the implications of this work for policy making, this report by the Young Foundation gives a useful overview of the impact that this thinking on happiness and well-being could have on policy developments in different areas of life – from the elderly to the workplace.

Anyone working for social or environmental change will be interested to read about the possible ways a focus on happiness and well-being could increase their effectiveness in seeking behaviour change from the public. Contact me if you want to discuss ways of applying this thinking to your organisation’s work.

Is 'doing your bit' enough?

Some time ago I produced a paper for ChangeStar questioning whether the strategy of seeking small changes in behaviour from the public on issues such as climate change was the most effective way for environmental and social justice organisations to achieve their (very urgent) goals. You can read it here.

This article is worth dusting off and putting out again, as our goals as a movement have become ever more urgent and our methods of public engagement are in need of a serious rethink. My thinking in this area shares some similarities with Tom Crompton's work at WWF in his capacity as climate change strategist. Check out his home page and, in particular, his report 'Weathercocks and Signposts'.

A new approach to supporter engagement

Environmental and other charities are not gaining the change in behaviour from the public that they need, and the time has come for a change in our approach to how we communicate with the public.

The ChangeStar article in this link argues that we need to take a ‘whole person’ approach to seeking change and influencing the public on these issues. We need to recognise that caring about the environment is just one aspect of an individual’s worldviews and motivations – both within their ethical values and more broadly within their lives. To motivate people on issues such as climate change and protecting the environment we therefore not only need to tackle these issues themselves, but also offer a vision of a more just and sustainable world generally, including one in which everyone has better lives and greater well-being. We also need to empower people to understand the world better, become more effective at identifying and living their values and enable people to live happier and more self-determined lives.

In summary - we need a radical re-think in our supporter communication strategies to achieve this, and the article provides some initial ideas as to how charities could do this.

Britain's unmet needs

The Young Foundation has recently published an interesting report called ‘Sinking not swimming: Understanding Britain’s Unmet Needs’. Its findings are summed up by their Director, Geoff Mulgan, as follows:

"Our survey shows that Britain is a rich country but with many poor people; a generally happy country but with many unhappy people. It’s not broken. But it is brittle, anxious and stressed. To the public it is obvious that psychological needs are as important as material ones, that love, care, peace of mind are as vital to a good life as having enough heating or enough clothes to wear. Yet there is an odd gulf between this common knowledge and public policy. Whoever can bridge that gap may win the battle to convince the public that they understand poverty and what to do about it."

This pulls together some of the themes I have been working on - the need to not only move towards a more just, equal and sustainable society with stronger communities, but at the same time the need to build the capacities of individuals to flourish in their lives. See my book 'Modern life - as good as it gets' for more thoughts on this, and Life² for an organisation that aims to begin this process of building people's capacities to flourish.

Why is it so hard to change people's behaviour?

At certain points on this blog, I'll be telling you about output and ideas that have been produced some time ago, as they contain important advice that is not yet being followed by people and organisations seeking change.

One such piece of output is the ChangeStar report 'Why is it so hard to change people's behaviour?', which identifies a number of factors that make it difficult for many people in the western world to change their attitudes and behaviour on global issues such as sustainability and social justice. It provides some far-reaching recommendations for organisations seeking to engage people in behaviour change, including the need to empower the public with the intellectual tools they need to become ethical global citizens and the need to establish a new movement for global change. Download it from here.

Prosperity without growth?

As a first post for this blog, and to give you an idea of some of the themes I work on, here is a link to a report from Tim Jackson at the Sustainable Development Commission which is well worth reading. It provides some commentary on the current economic crisis, but its main aim is to consider whether economic growth is essential to achieve a society in which we all flourish. The report has been updated and expanded and turned into a book - 'Prosperity without growth' - click here for more details. This idea of 'human flourishing' is a theme running through a lot of my work and no doubt I'll return to it in later posts! Check out my own book for some more ideas on this theme.