Sustainability by Stealth - 4 Ways to Make Sustainability More Attractive

Here at McGill, students certainly seem to believe climate change is a major issue for their generation's future. Meanwhile, the vast majority of C-suite execs want to do something but sustainability is a hard sell. Existing approaches for encouraging pro-environmental behavior among consumers too often fall woefully short.  In this week's column, my colleague Dror Etzion, Assistant Professor here at McGill, explains why oblique strategies that promote sustainability indirectly may work better than those that put it front and center.

Sustainability by stealth, if you will.

So many strategies for addressing the sustainability challenge hinge on a simple, appealing premise: Explain the facts about our unsustainable lifestyles and assume that if people understand those facts, they'll alter their behavior accordingly. It's an approach based on two assumptions: that individuals listen to reason, and that individuals then act reasonably. Arm them with knowledge - so goes the logic - and consumers will start making responsible choices, ranging from how long they spend in the shower to which car they choose to buy. In a nutshell, "Belief guides action."

Clearly, this approach hasn't been working very well. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

First of all, people don't like being harangued. By repeatedly trumpeting the need for individuals to adopt more sustainable lifestyles, we may be alienating, rather than mobilizing, individuals. Secondly, psychological research highlights how hard it is for people to stick to long‐term goals that require ongoing commitment, such as dieting. Third, even if people are willing to believe the science and act on it, they still have to overcome the hurdle of making the right choices, based on accurate information. The presence of information and choice, however, does not necessarily drive appropriate behavior. Much as caloric labels on food products do little to reduce obesity, the simple act of providing more environmental metrics on products and services doesn't necessarily lead people to make better choices.

Rather than doing more of the same - appealing to reason, generating more information and providing more choice ‐ a paradigm that hasn't worked well and that may have even provoked some backlash, progress might be best pursued by making sustainability invisible.

Karl's old boss at Oxford, John Kay, has written a great book called Obliquity. One of its key takeaways is that goals are often easier to attain when pursued indirectly. Sustainability appears to be a case in point.

In fact, businesses can guide consumers to sustainability by stealth, rather than by doctrine. Specifically, four oblique paths appear to show promise:

1. Making sustainability personal: Rather than emphasizing abstract and distant ideals, greater leverage is generated when benefits are personal and tangible. Organic products do not sell because they maintain biodiversity, keep water sources unpolluted and enrich topsoil - all of which they do. They sell because people are worried about the potential health consequences of consuming "conventional" agricultural products. The far-off goal of saving the planet is not as effective a sales pitch as the more immediate goal of staying healthy.

Read full article: Forbes, November 17, 2011