Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, is launching an initiative that partners DOE with the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) to teach the youth of America about the perils and promise of energy.  Past all the obvious lines of criticism (communists indoctrinating the young; Teach Your Children Well and the 1960s), I see a larger problem:  This won’t work.

I was a high school senior in spring of 1970 when the first Earth Day was held.  Along with a gang of my friends, the principal of the high school pulled us out of classes to develop Save the Earth skits for an all school assembly to be held at the close of the day.  We spent some time in the library doing scientific research on environment and energy threats and solutions, then worked up several overwrought sketches with clouds of smoke, gas masks, mutated animals, and other dramatized actions to illustrate the impending irreversible disasters we faced on Earth Day 1970 if we failed to act NOW!

Despite our best efforts, it appears that our work was in vain because a White House is once again feeling the need to Enlist the Young in our never-ending fight to save the world from ourselves.  Yeah, we’ll get a Nobel-prize winning physicist to teach the young and this time it will work!

I’ve got a thought problem to illustrate the failure.  Imagine you have an expert on physics and an expert on persuasion.  You want to change the way people think, feel, or act.  Who you gonna call?  Right, the physicist.  Secretary Chu is like so many bright, accomplished experts who think that because they are bright and accomplished in a difficult field like physics or economics or cardiology or even nutrition science, therefore they can easily handle an obvious thing like persuasion.  They cannot.

And, you see where it leads them.  As I’ve documented in this blog, these brights constantly propose interventions to Save the World that simply will not and do not work.  Chu, in this instance, would be better served to employ that most compelling influence tool:  The Push.  Just create a tax or regulation, widely communicate it, and ruthlessly enforce it.  That will produce the change to Save the World.  And, if indeed you are changing the world and saving us from ourselves, shouldn’t you be Pushing rather than Persuading?

Chu’s actions here create confusion and doubt.  If the problem is as vast, deep, and dangerous as he claims, why is he playing around with these goofy, ineffective, public relation spins like DOE-PTO-kids?  We face Certain Destruction and he wants yet another kid like me to get out of class for a day to prepare and deliver skits?

I know that DOE is doing more than this (and more than proposing the world whitewash rooftops globally – how’s that initiative going?) and that I am pulling one detail to criticize a much larger effort.  True.  And, if DOE efforts at the Big Picture are as inspired as this Little Detail, what do you think the Big Picture will be?

The Rules!

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.  (Yes, we know what Dr. Chu believes, so what?)

If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.  (You missed my skit in 1970, I guess.)

It’s About the Other Guy.  (You’re preaching to the choir.)

Persuaders Can Be Famous or Effective, but Not Both.  (They don’t give Nobels for persuasion, you know.)