Creating Social Impact

The 99 per cent. The 47 per cent. The right. The left. The centerists. The deniers. The environmentalists. The corporate elite … and so it continues. Labels. Social stratification. Dividing points. Intractable positions. For me to win, the other side must lose.

While we face the greatest challenge of our generation, providing clean, affordable, and sustainable energy for the soon to be nine billion people on the planet, our ability to tackle this problem is hampered by a perception of increasingly polarized opinions. The media’s role in amplifying divisions to make more compelling television or media experiences cannot be understated, but media can also be used to tell a trustworthy and hopeful story.

How do we create a meaningful social impact around the interconnected issues of energy, climate change, food, and water? How do we create greater consensus so that there is social license to build new energy projects and infrastructure? Without social license, companies will be challenged to build long-term supportive regulatory structures for energy projects including oil, wind, solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, or natural gas, face more divestment campaigns impacting capitalization, and the ability to operate effectively.

The solution to creating social impact, and greater social license is through better storytelling that increases energy literacy, not just with the general public, but also within energy companies, environmental NGO’s, and policy makers. Energy literacy grounded in the principal of systems thinking inoculates people against spin.

How do we do this? One of the companies specializing in storytelling-for-good, is Frameworks Institute. Framework specializes in helping NGO’s and non-profits reframe their narratives.

Using social and cognitive sciences, Frameworks has developed some key guidelines for reframing narratives. The first principal reveals, not unexpectedly, that people make decisions based on values not economics. Other elements in Frameworks approach include ways to employ tone, solutions, metaphors, visuals, messengers, context, and lastly numbers.

In Canada, the debate around oil and pipelines, on one side, is being waged using economics; while on the other side environmental groups play to our innate connection to nature, a value. People’s desire to not see industrial development impact the Great Bear Rainforest in any way is difficult to combat with economics. The recent vote against Northern Gateway in Kitimat may be proof of this.

In her Guardian article “The Art of Systems Thinking in Driving Sustainable Transformation” from October 2012, Jo Carfino states:

The idea is catching on fast that no single company, NGO, or government can bring about the scale of environmental, social, and economic change that is essential if we are to deal with the many challenges the world is facing.

We use storytelling everyday, yet understanding what creates compelling action inducing narratives is often not understood. Fear is used as a major tool in our energy debate – fear of economic collapse or fear of irreversible climate change. This fear is immobilizing needed collective action. How do we not only find a balance point between these two, and create messaging that instills pragmatic and realistic hope based on the notion that we live in a time of tremendous ingenuity and innovation?

The current energy story looks at energy as silos, but systems thinking allows us to see that everything is interconnected. Carbon connects us all because we are carbon-based life forms, and carbon is the most essential process fuel we use. This holistic view empowers our cognitive empathy, widens our perspective, and invites vulnerability, which leads to the understanding of our shared values and how we create viable solutions, and let go of narratives rooted in fear.

Reframing the energy narrative as a human story provides essential context about why we use energy. What value does energy add to our lives? How does energy support our needs and values for how we see the world, and how we wish to exist with it? Systems thinking redeems energy and allows us to see how we bring man, energy, environment, and the economy into harmony.