Simplicity

Our column “Polarize Me,” from the April issue of Fast Company, is now available online.

There are two bloggers who have done multi-post series on Made to Stick recently — they are nice introductions to the book and its concepts for people who haven’t read it. I am learning a lot from the insights that they are bringing to the book.

First, there’s Cam Beck at ChaosScenario. Here are the MTS-related posts: Boil it down to just one thing. Get their attention and keep it. Hit your audience with a ton of bricks. Earning the trust of strangers. [Stay tuned to Cam’s blog for posts on Emotion and Stories.]

Then, there’s Katya Andresen from Network for Good, whose blog is a must-read for non-profit marketers. She shows how the principles in MTS can be applied to social enterprise marketing, which is something that Chip and I are passionate about. Here are the posts: Finding your core aka sweet spot. Go for the unexpected. Hang your message on hooks. Emotion and calculation.

It’s a surprising fact, a fact that warns of overpopulation and a world teetering on the edge of exhaustion: The number of people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived.

And it’s dead wrong. Ciara Curtin in the Scientific American does a nice dismantling of this urban legend.

Why did this falsehood spread? It has the snap of unexpectedness that you find in a lot of scientific-ish urban legends. (You only use 10% of your brain!) It balances that surprise factor by tapping into our sense of concern and anxiety for the world. (Have we pushed the planet too far?)

The surprise value and emotional resonance are garden-variety strengths of urban legends. This legend has another tricky feature, though. It appeals to our intuition about exponential numbers — for instance, if you take a sequence like 3^2, 3^3, 3^4, …, each successive number is greater than the sum of all the numbers before it in the sequence. If we have the (mistaken) sense that the earth’s population works like this sequence, the urban legend would seem quite reasonable. (It might even, perversely, make us feel smarter to believe it than not to believe it, since in tracing the exponential logic in our heads, we might flatter ourselves to believe we had solved the logic puzzle that explained a surprising “finding.”)

What, exactly, is William J. Broad trying to say in this NYT piece? The gist seems to be: Scientists are disputing the alarmist claims of Al Gore’s global-warming movie An Inconvenient Truth! Except for the many world-class scientists who, er, strongly support it. And except for the many others who might quibble at the edges but basically think he got it right. (Let’s remember, folks, we’re talking about a movie, not a Ph.D program.) Follow that?

There is a kind of willful blindness displayed in this piece. The core message of Gore’s movie is: Global warming is real, and it’s time to take it seriously. Which is something Gore has been saying for years, and which the overwhelming majority of scientists now agree with. That’s an important message — it could well turn out to be THE critical message of the 21st century — and it was well communicated in the movie by Gore. (To be fair, in support of the skeptical view, Broad points out that there were only FIVE hurricanes in the Atlantic season this year — not the NINE predicted! Take that, Science!)

Unfortunately, repeating what might be the critical message of the 21st century is not “news.” “News” is finding a couple of random people, such as the article’s guest star Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, who argues with some of the movie’s points. And “newsiness” further requires Broad to bolster up these stray arguments into the illusion of a backlash against Gore.

(Side note: No doubt it will come as a Genuine Shocker to anyone who has followed the global-warming debate that one of the critics quoted is none other than Bjorn Lomborg, who has made a career out of being The Scientist that you quote when you want a global warming skeptic who can put a few statistical-sounding sentences together. Quoting Lomborg as a scientist on global warming is kind of like quoting Joe Lieberman as a Democrat on Iraq.)

The ugliest line in the article is this: “Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.”

Implying … that inundation is imminent. (At least visually!) No one who has seen the movie will find this line credible. But the exaggeration (and others like it in the article) makes you wonder whether Broad’s piece isn’t simply an op/ed in news clothing.

The fifth and final post over at Powell’s — if you can only read one post from the week, read this one. I’d love to get some communal thinking going on this issue. If you have thoughts, please email me or post a comment.