In the Shift

When you search on the name of your company and the first images that come up are ones with skulls, gas masks, protests, and aggressive cartoons, you know you have a communication problem.

Welcome to the world of Monsanto: huge, successful, innovative, despised and distrusted.

I’m not going to delve into whether Monsanto’s image is justified or not.  And I’m certainly not going to go down the blackhole that is the genetically modified organism debate, important though it is.

No, all I really want to flag up is that at some stage in the 1980s, after once having been on the side of the ‘food for everyone and better deal for farmers’ angels, Monsanto became corporate monster Number One, and ever since has battled it out for the top spot with Nestle, Coke and the Hummer.  And it won this position because it was so convinced it was right that it stopped trying to explain; it stopped listening to doubts; and it treated as idiots those who said it was wrong.

The Monsanto story came to mind the other week listening to an esteemed group of economists, scientists and policy advisors trying to make sense of the fight against climate change following the non-result of the Copenhagen Summit. There is a tangible sense of exasperation which is starting to smack of when agribusiness and plant scientists began getting frustrated that Jo Public couldn’t understand the benefits of GMs.  There is exasperation too with politicians listening too little to economic reasoning, scientific evidence, and the proposals of technology innovators.  One expert said it was time to hand over climate change policy from the International Panel on Climate Change to the World Trade Organisation.  An economist hinted that laws that contradicted economic rationality bordered on the illegitimate.

These may or may not be sensible ideas looked at from the confines of isolated disciplines.  But they are unworkable.  They show no cognisance of the challenge of communicating and winning support for tackling climate change.  Like Monsanto, they echo of experts saying ‘We are right. Trust us and don’t ask dumb questions.’

After the Copenhagen Summit, Ed Miliband, the British government’s climate change secretary of state for energy and climate change, said that climate change was now a communications challenge.  Perhaps more accurately he should have used the words of his government’s Central Office of Information which had said a few weeks earlier that

climate change was a behavioural change issue. Communications

smacks of PR,

marketing and the descent of the Mad Men.
Behavioural change, for all its Orwellian overtones, is something altogether more serious and challenging.

I am more and more convinced that behaviour change is central to tackling climate change:

an element perhaps more essential than economic interventions, new technologies, and government regulation.  At least we have a fair idea of what is economically, technologically, and regulatorily possible. But as soon as we think beyond the boxes of economic incentives, technology uptake, and regulatory restrictions, we don’t seem to know much of anything about behaviour change .  And as Monsanto can tell you, behaviour change often defies those neat but simplistic change models.