In their book Made to Stick [1], the Heath brothers introduce a practical tool to evaluate the power of 'sticky' communication messages along 6 criteria:
- Simple
- Unexpected
- Concrete
- Credible
- Emotional
- Stories
A textbook case of a sticky message is J.F. Kennedy's 'man on the moon within a decade' message, which meets at least 4 if not 5 of above criteria.
With last spring's auction of promises [2]on energy by the European institutions, how sticky is a 20% by 2020 target?
- simple? on the surface, 20% by 2020 appears simple, but when looking at the numbers, it appears difficult to get a handle on the hard quantitative number it represents (how many tonnes of oil, how many tonnes of CO2, and relative to what?). This relates to energy consumption being a grand aggregate of many minute uses.
- unexpected? Hardly. And a 20% target without underlying plan is a mere wish. So if there is anything surprising, it's the discussion and decision to make the wish binding before understanding it.
- concrete? Even if we could get a number - say 800 million tonne of annual greenhouse gas emissions, citizens and even experts would find it hard to understand what it means.
- credible? the math of the energy package does not add up [3]. Even if it did, it represents a very large acceleration of a sector already growing fast.
- emotional? targets do have a tendency to raise blood pressures, but also polarise stakeholders, whereas the whole idea is to create consensus for a 'man on the moon' momentum
- stories? some success stories start to emerge - do they capture our imagination sufficiently? Can they be replicated on a large scale?
So a score of 1 or 2 at best - we're very far from putting a man on the moon within a decade.
But, what would be the concrete messages that challenge us while remaining within reach, and could possibly count on a broad agreement? For example:
- No new house shall consume more than 100 MJ/m2/yr by 2010
- 100% solar cooling by 2015
- Zero-energy new housing developments by 2020
- 25% PHEV by 2025
- No new power plant will add to carbon emissions by 2030
At least some of above messages are simple, concrete and credible. Who can do better than 3 out of 6?