Heart and Head

One of my standard slides in presentations to groups on how to talk about climate change is a picture of a brain and a picture of a heart. Another favorite, is a picture of the Wicked Witch of the West, with the caption, Cursed with the Curse of Knowledge – borrowed from the Heath brothers who first coined the term, Curse of Knowledge in their book, Made to Stick.

My point to groups of policy wonks trying to get the public engaged in climate change is that the data can only take you so far. For example, skip the “by 2100” and go straight to “in the lifetime of a child born today.” Give me something I can see and feel.

Thankfully the Heath brothers are back with a new book that delves even further into this integral balance between the rational and the emotional. It’s called Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard.

Kevin Huffman, the enviable winner of the Washington Post’s Next Great Pundit contest nailed it today when he wrote about how the lessons of Switch can be applied to the current health care debate.

Change comes, as Huffman aptly notes, “only when we appeal to both logic and emotion.” Getting that balance right is an art. And we haven’t found it … not with health care. And it’s going to be an even tougher challenge with climate and energy legislation (see my previous post, Climate Change and Change Management).

Opponents of action on climate change have done a masterful job at using emotion and logic to scare people. Scared about the economy? Scared about keeping your job? Well then you better be scared of this monster thing called cap and trade. Environmentalists have tried to scare people with the unfortunate facts of what global warming will do – in the future. Logic takes over and the here and now of the economy makes more sense than future predictions of doom “at the end of the century” or melting glaciers in a place they can't even find on a map.

While climate change realists have gotten better about moving away from the policy wonk trap of “cap and trade” and toward emphasizing what action on climate change can do for American leadership in the clean energy economy and job creation, we’re not balancing that logical message about leadership with the emotional message about what what kind of planet we’ll leave our kids. We’re not in alignment on both the logic and the emotion.

It’s that alignment, the Heath brothers advise us that will be essential to changing things when change is hard. And there’s nothing going to be harder than getting strong climate and energy legislation passed.