Hitting the Target – But Missing the Point – It’s How and What we Communicate

 

In order to reach Community Safety Targets we are obliged to communicate with the public the number of Anti Social Behaviour Orders issued. This is intended to reassure the public that public agencies are doing their best to reign in bad behaviour but does it really? How safe does a member of the public feel when told that you have issued 100 ASBO’s in a year? Really safe or even more afraid that where they live is overrun with feral teenagers? We need to be clear about the normative messages that we are sending out and change the way we communicate accordingly.

Normative messages

Researchers at Arizona State University documented the power of social norms in influencing behavior in a series of experiments that urged hotel guests to reuse their towels. Cialdini, the Regents’ Professor of Psychology, and psychology graduate students Noah Goldstein and Vladas Griskevicius examined whether guests would more often comply with signs that promoted descriptive norms rather than conventional signs that merely encourage guests to help save the environment.

In one study, they randomly assigned one of five cards in 260 guests’ rooms that explained how reusing towels would conserve energy and save the environment:

• “Help the hotel save energy,” focusing on the benefit to the hotel.
• “Help save the environment,” emphasizing environmental protection.
• “Partner with us to help save the environment,” centering on environmental cooperation.
• “Help save resources for future generations,” highlighting the benefit to future generations.
• “Most people who use this room re-use their towels,” focusing on the descriptive norm.

The most successful message was the descriptive norm message, which stated that reusing towels was the norm for hotel guests. Forty-one percent of these guests reused their towels. Researchers found the least effective message was the one that emphasized the benefit to the hotel–leading to only 20 percent of guests reusing their towels–followed by signs that urged environmental protection and the benefit to future generations, which both led to about 31 percent reusing towels.

Norms and Values? New behaviours and Habits?

When governments (local or central) think about communicating with people it’s usually about adopting a broadcast model. One-way systems of telling people what to do and what not to do. Don’t do this, don’t do that, eat less, exercise more, eat five fruits a day the list is endless. But people don’t always do what is best for them – for many reasons. Lots of it has to do with habits and choices and norms and values. The recently published Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sustein (Sustein is one of Barack Obama’s advisors) describes the problem as being the difference between acting like Mr. Spock or Homer Simpson.

Mr. Spock attributed such knowledge and humanity to us mortals he believed that we would act rationally like economic man (or woman) but in fact we are all a bit more like Homer Simpson than we care to admit. Sometimes although we plan to do something, in fact we don’t sometimes we have problems with self-control, sometimes we are impulsive and their point is that in these circumstances both private and public institutions can do something, without forcing things, to make peoples lives a lot better.

Take pensions, for example. According to Thaler and Sunstein people should have an opt out rather than an opt in opportunity to take out a pension. Most people don’t think about taking out a pension until they are older. Applying the Nudge principle everyone would automatically be included in the pension scheme with the option to opt out if you wanted. Most people stick with the default setting and stay in – the same princple applies in other countries for organ donation. Last year, a study of 22 countries found that donation rates were 25 to 30 per cent higher in countries with presumed consent, such as Spain, Austria and Belgium (Journal of Health Economics)

So, public policy makers could think of ways of designing policies where the default setting will be for the greater good – but where individuals always have the choice to do what they want to do as individuals. What we should not design are policies that are based on the assumption that human beings undertake rational chocies all the time. Understanding the psychology of choice and persuasion is therefore critically important in the public realm.

The System and the Lifeworld in Local Government 2

Driving delivery, measuring performance, reward grants are all phrases that describe strategic action. But the behaviour that is required by Michael Lyons in his influential report will need a lot more communicative action.  Consider how bizarre it would be to set an obese person government targets for being less overweight and using hierarchichal methods to impose them?

In the first place people who are obese must agree that they are overweight, that this is not a good thing for them (or society) and that collectively something can be done about thier situation. This is the adaptive challenge identified by Ron Heifetz as the “gap between a desired state and reality that cannot be closed using existing approaches alone. To make these changes the patient will have to take responsiblity for his health and learn his way to a new set of priorities and habits“.

Jürgen Habermas – The System and the Lifeworld

Jürgen Habermas, 78, is one of the most influential philosophers and social theorists of the last century and he shows no sign of letting up. Here’s is a recent article where he is theorising on why the Irish voted no for Lisbon.

Much of Habermas’ writing concentrated on the nature of Germany in the 1930’s exploring why the Holocaust happened and asking questions as to what might be learned about the role of governments. Fundamental to his theory is the difference between what he calls “strategic action” and “communicative action” or to put it another way between the “system” and the “lifeworld”.

Strategic action is all about getting people to do what you want them do and its aimed at getting your way whether or not the person you are interacting with agrees with you or not. A lot of government action could be described in this way. Take the Irish No vote on Lisbon – a lot of the difficulty was the expectation by the Irish Government that people would vote Yes because they told them to.

Communicative action on the other hand, is about coming to a common understanding so that you can progress an idea, or solve a problem with mutual understanding.

So the System is guided by economic or administrative power: the markets, the state whereas the Lifeworld reflects our experience of everyday life: friends, family, cultural pastimes. Systems are the home of strategic action and the lifeworld that of communicative action. So what does this have to offer public policy makers in local government?

The Future Backwards – How did we get here?

Over the past 12 months (and some) there has been a lot of research going on in the council about how we might tackle the wicked issues that continue to evade most public policy solutions. Social decline, climate change, obesity to name just a few. The Future Shape of the Council video gives a quick overview of where we are and why we need to look at how the organisation is structured. But how did we get to here? What are the key texts and ideas that have influenced us as an organisation? Are these shared by others and who are we learning from?

For that reason I thought it might be useful to offer pottedpolicy to trace the key ideas and thinkers that have been influencing thought processes around the council and to link to sites where further information can be found for those interested. I will keep adding as the lexicon expands.