A climate activist network’s view on how to get people to do what you want
This article goes back to basics in understanding why people change, asking what the See Through Network – whose Goal is ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’ – has learned from ivory towers, boardrooms and the streets.
Does ‘Theory of Change’ Ring A Bell?
If the phrase ‘Theory of Change’ sounds familiar, you’ve likely:
- sat through a management course
- endured a briefing from an activist group/NGO on how they change people’s behaviour
You may dimly recall it being something about ‘the hows and whys an activity leads to outcomes and impacts’.
You’re less likely to have heard the phrase in a corporate context, where you may have jotted down ‘Management by Objectives requiring identifying higher-order Goals & lower-order Objectives’ in your notepad.
Bluntly, profit-driven companies no longer linger over asking what motivates people to change, as their answer usually involves money:
- Pay people more money, and they’ll work for you or invest in you.
- Charge people less money (sometimes more money!) and they’ll buy your product.
The phrase was coined for universal application to any organization’s mission, but businesses have generally concluded that ‘Theory of Change’ is a bit like a long tape measure or a particular size spanner.
Handy on occasions, but not essential.
By contrast,‘Theory of Change’ (‘ToC’ to academics and charity bosses obliged to discuss it a lot) has become an essential tool for activists, including climate activists, for a simple reason.
Theories don’t require money.
Tick ToC
Activists rely on ‘mend and make do’.
Without recourse to a sparkling workshop full of the best tools money can buy, activists have to duck and dive, scavenge, beg, steal or borrow, and be creative and effective in using what tools they can scrounge.
If you spend most of your energy begging for money, you know beggars can’t be choosers.
Theory of Change, being free, is appealing when the need for change is urgent but you lack cold hard cash.
It’s become a key tool in the activist’s toolkit because the clock is ticking. The better you use your available tools, the sooner you’ll change people’s behaviour in the short term, and the greater your long term impact.
Most of humanity’s most pressing problems are driven by the corporate pursuit of profit over planet.
This makes it ironic that ‘Theory of Change’, now mainly used by activists trying to wean us from our money obsession and bequeath our children less ravaged by big business, was invented by the godfather of ‘business thinking’.
How Theory of Change became mainstream
Peter Drucker coined the phrase ‘Theory of Change’ in his 1954 book The Practice of Management.
It became among the more influential of his dozens of ‘management guru’ tomes. Drucker soon found a huge and willing audience. Wearing academic, commercial and philanthropic hats, Drucker’s mission was to infer structure from, and impose it on the post-WW2 economic boom.
‘Change’, in this context, means convincing people to stop doing one thing and/or start doing another.
As leaders read Drucker, they started putting his Theory of Change into practice. It turned out to be very flexible, and could be applied to:
- Overthrow colonial occupiers
- Abandon capitalism and embrace communism
- Convert to a different religion
- Turn carnivores into vegetarians
- Campaign against nuclear weapons
Drucker’s business acolytes applied his secret sauce to their own mission of increasing shareholder value. For them, ‘change’ meant:
- Buy a washing machine
- Upgrade your car
- Buy new sanitary products
- Switch from Pepsi to Coke, or vice versa
In the end, Drucker’s Theory of Change turned out not to be so critical to making money, and is not mentioned much in boardrooms or MBA courses any more.
This is partly because it evolved into more practical forms, like ‘change management’, but mainly because other theories migrating from ivory towers to boardrooms turned out to be much more profitable.
Mad Men Take Over
Businesses, via the ‘Mad Men’ advertising agencies of Madison Avenue, were far more interested in applying the emerging field of ‘behavioural psychology’ to selling more stuff.
Pioneered by professors, developed by the Mad Men, behavioural-psychology-based advertising was amplified by news means of mass communication.
It was a more sophisticated mind-changing trick, perfect in the age of colour TV, Baby Boomers and the white heat of economic growth:
- Pre-WW2 product ads used to state the name of the product, its price and a description of its unique attributes (‘Buy a Smith’s Widget today, and fix your leaky basin/lingering cough/time-consuming chore for only $x!).
- Post-WW2 ads started hitching brands to apparently unrelated, but emotionally powerful, bait (‘Smoke Smith’s cigarettes, and attractive women will sleep with you/your friends will respect you/you’ll feel great’).
Theory of Change’s appeal to activists
Some Drucker-fan multinationals kept using Theory of Change to sell more stuff, but by the 1990s it had found its natural audience – organisations seeking social, environmental or political change.
They gratefully grasped it.
Like big business abandoning widget-facts for sex, status and well-being, Theory of Change gave activists a valuable tool to re-engineer their approach to inducing change.
Activists also clocked what the Mad Men were on to. People donated more to NGOs and charities if their ads replaced famine statistics with a picture of a hollow-eyed mother holding her emaciated baby.
More donations meant – in theory – more activism, though it depended on the metric used to determine success or failure.
When the Internet opened up new applications, activists adapted their Theories of Change to this new threat/opportunity.
TikToks means tick ToCs
Once Silicon Valley Overlords started bartering ‘free’ social media platforms in exchange for our eyeballs, quick-thinking NGO leaders’ eyes lit up just as brightly as those of forward-thinking business bosses.
Smart operators, even with limited funds, now had a new bullhorn. Activists, like global brands, online influencers, ‘YouTubers’ and demagogues, saw opportunities in bypassing the Old Media gatekeepers, and their costly tolls.
Now they could talk to potential recruits/customers/activists directly, in their own words and on their own terms.
Climate activist ToCs
Some climate activists blended old-school, pre-WW2 fact-based advertising with the latest social media platforms.
Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, Plane Stupid, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil et al leveraged YouTube and social media to educate ‘public opinion’ using hard facts and ‘trust the scientists’ messaging. Quoting IPCC reports, and climate science papers, they directed their messaging directly at our heads, warning against being mislead by our hearts.
Combined with their flair for eye-catching stunts, ideally suited for sharing via YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, these activists became household names.
Measured by video views, social media engagement, fundraising, petition signatures, protest crowds, they could claim remarkable success in ‘raising awareness’ and ‘shifting the Overton Window’ of public debate.
So what?
The problem with metrics like clicks, signatures and protesters is that they’re:
- at best, proxies for their actual goal of emissions reduction
- at worst, performative, virtue-signalling complacency
Donations, engagement, clicks, signatures and placards don’t reduce any carbon themselves. They can only be effective if they’re means, not ends in themselves.
When a celebrity flies by private jet to be photographed at a climate protest, billionaire-owned media gleefully flight-shames their attention-seeking hypocrisy. But they have a point – if nothing happens as a result.
This theory of change lets the forces of inaction win both ways. The broader the activists’ stated goal, the harder it is for them to claim their actions have actually made any difference:
- Campaign to pass a specific law to remove fossil fuel subsidies and you can claim some sort of victory when that law is passed.
- Campaign to ‘save the planet’, and you can never claim you’ve ‘won’.
The vaguer the activist goal, the easier it is for the people who influence large emissions reduction to do nothing. Seeking only to ‘raise awareness’ leaves the door wide open for:
- Politicians to dodge (‘thank you for making me aware of this very important issue’)
- Companies to greenwash (‘our net zero rating confirms our commitment to a better future’)
- Individuals to be ineffective (‘our litter-picking shows we’re “doing our bit” to save the planet’)
Yet this isn’t even the biggest problem with lacking a clear objective for your ‘Theory of Change’.
Losing steam, losing recruits, losing sight
Ineffective activism carries three more insidious risks. These ‘Three Losses’ account for most ineffective activism.
Losing steam
Despite social media herding us into binary, extreme positions, most of us have a limited capacity to be angry/outraged/engaged enough to stop doomscrolling and do something.
Without specific goals, or measurable achievements, enthusiasm wanes, numbers decline, and motivation evaporates.
You can only take a coach to so many protests, singing ‘What do we want? Change! When do we want it? – Now!’ before losing steam, giving the next one a miss, and then giving up.
Losing potential recruits
Greta-style stat-bashing, aimed at our reason, might move a minority of reason-driven people into taking specific actions. (Some may actually be driven by her subliminal emotional appeal, but that too is unprovable.)
Dramatic public stunts generate social media engagement, but it’s a strategy of diminishing returns. Ratcheting up eye-catching civil disobedience is guaranteed to further enrich our Silicon Valley Overlords, but also demonstrably turns off large numbers of potential converts.
Fence-sitting potential recruits, who might have been tempted into jumping into emissions-reducing action, can also be pushed the other way.
Many are deterred by the sight of cans of soup thrown at famous paintings, politicians being covered in purple powder, or missing hospital appointments when demonstrators superglue themselves to motorways.
If your goal is to move people to change, each fence-sitter deterred is a failure.
Losing sight
Extinction Rebellion (XR) provides a cautionary tale for mission creep leading to a dead end.
At first, XR succeeded in organising large numbers of people to participate in large-scale protests. XR could claim their peaceful mass civil disobedience moved the Overton Window, as media coverage became more sympathetic to pensioners being arrested.
But without specific goals, or measurable achievements, enthusiasm waned and numbers declined. You can only take a coach to so many protests, singing ‘What do we want? Change! When do we want it? – Now!’ before you lose steam, and give the next one a miss. Escalating civil disobedience, needed to ‘maintain momentum’, began to backfire.
XR’s emails, once full of calls to action for passive resistance training, induction sessions and civil disobedience, are now fundraising appeals. XR has become indistinguishable from any climate charity needing to spend most of its energy on sustaining itself, rather than human civilization.
Losing steam, recruits and sight, are all wins for the forces of inaction.
An effective Theory of Change must be based on understanding what you’re trying to change.
Theory of Stasis
Let’s call it the Theory of Stasis.
Big Oil’s army of PR mercenaries are expert Stasis Theoreticians. They understand that while the status quo is rising emissions, all they have to do is undermine, retard, frustrate, dilute, diminish or destroy any call for change.
Like all activists, Big Oil knows it’s just physics. It takes much more energy to accelerate a stationary object than it does to keep a moving object in motion. Stamping on the accelerator (or brake) involves more energy than engaging cruise control.
Humans are neophobic mammals, fearing the new. We’ve evolved to avoid eating that unfamiliar mushroom, skirt that new thing, be wary of crossing the river. Our default setting is Inaction.
This gives a huge advantage to the incumbent, favouring the emissions-belching, planet-heating status quo.
Unlike ineffective activists, however, Big Oil’s cunning spin doctors understand that the reasons for inaction don’t matter.
If nothing changes, they can drill, baby, drill.
Motivation vs Outcomes
Big Oil’s PR mercenaries trained under Mad Men masters of behavioural psychology.
They don’t bother with ‘Theory of Change’, but are black belts in the ‘Reality of Inertia’.
The key lesson for climate activists is to focus on outcomes, not motivation.
They’re happy to let placard-wielding activists bleat stat-bashing, because they know most of us are moved by emotion, not reason.
They’re unconcerned that they’re running out of ‘climate-sceptic’ stooges, because they know that we squidgy, sweaty, imperfect humans are suckers for a good story.
They understand that deep down, all we want is to be the heroes of our own narratives.
- To maintain the status quo, just tell me that story again. You know, the one where not changing affirms my hero status.
- To change me, please tell me a new, better, story. You know, the one where I heroically do something while others stand idle.
So climate activists should learn from the best. Don’t get too bogged down in Theories of Change.
Keep your eyes on the prize, focus on outcomes, and not motivation, and make sure the heroes of the stories you tell take action resulting in measurable emissions reduction.
Fight smart
The 90’s, when activists were embracing Drucker’s Theory of Change, happened to coincide with scientists noticing human-induced climate change was no longer a theory, but a reality.
It’s instructive to look at what happened when climate experts raised the alarm:
- Some people listened, and wanted to do something to arrest and reverse global heating
- Some governments responded, meeting at COPs to discuss how to stabilise our climate
- Some companies pretended to respond, investing ‘offsetting’ schemes to guarantee business as usual at minimal cost
- Most people didn’t hear, ignored or opposed meaningful change, preferring the status quo, abetted by Big Oil
Three decades on, little has changed, apart from greenhouse gas emissions shooting further up the hockey stick shaft.
Those fighting the Three-Headed Beasts of Government, Business and Media need every weapon available.
The Three-Headed Beasts, wallowing in Big Oil’s money mire, hold tenaciously to the levers of power. They yank them hard, and don’t care who gets hurt.
They spread stories that favour climate inaction, by defining our hero status as ‘Buyer of More Stuff’.
To combat them, climate activists must spread stories that re-cast us as heroic ‘Defenders of Our Children’.
They might have bigger bullhorns, but we have a better story.
However much funding they can cobble together, scavenge, or beg, climate activists will never outspend the Three-Headed Beasts. Effective climate activists need to learn from the most effective mind-changers, from Sunzi’s Art of War, to Madison Avenue and Big Oils PR shills:
- It’s foolish to fight on an uneven battlefield, like outspending the wealthy
- It’s futile to fight with ineffective weapons, like appealing to corporate virtue
- It’s wasteful to deploy weapons on their own, like facts, when they’re more effective when linked with others, like stories
Theories of change, and systematic thinking can augment climate activism. They’re essential to any strategy, but many battles have been lost by sticking to elegant battle plans, uninformed by the reality on the ground.
If you can never win a gunfight, seek wrestling matches. When you wrestle, apply ju-jitsu principles to use your opponent’s strength against them.
Like the revolutionaries who embraced Theory of Change in the 60s, climate activists should target ‘hearts and minds’ with powerful ideas and more appealing stories.
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To join the Good Guys telling better climate stories, email: volunteer@seethroughnews.org