There are causes that you care about.
Maybe you’re lucky enough to work somewhere with a mission to improve lives or solve a specific problem in the world. Or perhaps you’re inspired to take on a challenge in your community or industry.
You have the motivation and drive to do the work. However, you’re also dealing with time constraints, limited resources, and pressure from stakeholders (or yourself) to deliver results quickly.
How can we ensure that our actions and investments actually change the world? What if there was a design process you and your team could consistently follow to achieve better outcomes?
How to save the world
In her book, “How to Save the World,” Katie Patrick, an environmental engineer and designer, outlines a method for tackling environmental problems, a space where solutions are extremely urgent and important, but not all activity is leading to desirable results.
Katie outlines ten steps to follow to develop solutions that actually make a difference. Even if you’re not tackling environmental problems, I think that these steps are applicable to a variety of goals.
Similar to the multidisciplinary approach here at Recharted Territory, Patrick was inspired by a variety of fields, including data science, behavior psychology, game design, and sustainability. You might notice some familiar references to data-driven decision making, systems thinking, and change management in the approach.
In the rest of this post, I’ll be highlighting some of my favorite suggestions from the book along with some ways you can apply them to your current work. A lot of these themes and activities will be familiar to those who have read other articles on this site. But I love how clearly and passionately Patrick expresses how these techniques can be used to help companies and individuals solve the critical environmental problems that we hear about in the news and increasing experience the effects of in our daily lives.
Let’s start with some advice that might be surprising.
You don’t need to change people’s minds
My big takeaways from the book were to:
- Define and measure what you want to change in the world.
- Then identify the action you want people to take to influence that metric.
- Design solutions that enable that behavior change.
- Finally, track if your desired metric improved and make adjustments.
Early on in the book, Patrick brings up the topic of education, which is often a component of change initiatives. This might look like classroom training, presentations, conferences, or pamphlets. Educating people about the big issues might make them care too, but behavior scientists have observed that knowing about an issue or feeling a certain way doesn’t necessarily lead to action.
So what does work?
People need to feel like their actions make a difference. More effective content would focus on a specific action or habit to change, rather than simply provide information about the problem.
Or better yet, change the environment so people automatically perform the desired behavior without requiring conscious thought. Changing behavior will result in the real world change you need, regardless of what people think and feel about the broader issue.
The rest of this post is a brief summary of the structured design process Patrick shares for influencing behavior in a way that creates measurable social or environmental change in the real world.
1. Measure what you want to change in the real world
It can be easy to focus on our daily activities and start associating our effort with progress. But Patrick urges us to center our work around the ultimate measurements we want to change in the real world.
Why? Because tracking that number will help the team focus and filter out bad ideas. You’ll be able to see if what you’re doing is making a difference. And sometimes just making the measurement visible could be enough to change the behavior of the people around you.
Patrick stresses that real-world metrics are different than business or IT metrics. Real-world metrics are physical or social changes outside of your company like carbon dioxide emissions, pounds of plastic, crime rates, or gender ratios. While business metrics capture the activities that occur within your company or between your organization and external stakeholders, like new users, revenue, features deployed, or policies changed.
Interactions with your company or applications could give clues about final outcomes, but they don’t necessarily correlate to better social and environmental outcomes. Does someone logging onto your website mean that their life improved? You’ll likely also track some business metrics, but don’t confuse the two and declare premature victory. Patrick urges us to base our definition of success and solution brainstorming off of real-world metrics.
2. Set a measurable goal
Once you have an idea of what measurement you want to change, it’s time to set an inspiring goal. What would the ideal world look like if this problem were solved? What would the new measurement be?
Include this metric in the mission statement of your project or organization. I liked Patrick’s proposed mission statement template from the book.
“Our mission is to reduce/increase (the issue) from (units) to (units) for (location/organization.)”
3. Visualize the future
According to Patrick, focusing on the problem can actually backfire. Messaging about how many people are doing an undesirable behavior can make it seem normal and encourage others to behave similarly.
And a problem focus doesn’t just impact the people you’re trying to influence. It can hinder our own abilities by increasing stress and shutting down our capacity for creative thinking.
However, focusing on the ideal future can help us nurture creative and optimistic thoughts, and provide the nuggets of ideas that could turn into solutions that we enact today.
This step of the process involves a familiar activity of creative brainstorming, but I love how Patrick suggests thinking about the future from different angles, including how the world would work, what it means for the five senses, the emotions that would be triggered, and your new role in this future world. These prompts help to make the vision more tangible and motivating.
4. Brainstorm ideas
Keep creativity flowing, coming up with at least 100 ideas for how you could change the core metric or build the functions that are required in your desired world. Consider what different industries or players could do to support the end goal.
5. Evaluate ideas
You can’t work on everything at once so the next step is to evaluate your ideas to identify the ones with the highest impact for the lowest cost. Plot out the ideas and identify the ones that will move you closest to your core metric with the least investment.
6. Determine the behavior you want to change
The next step is to consider the behavior you want to change to move the desired measurement toward your target. That means identifying the people who need to make the change, the actions they would need to take, and the impact on the metric you’re trying to change. User story mapping is a technique for modeling out the behavior you want to influence.
But how can we influence behavior? Patrick shares some simple ways, such as changing the environment, asking for small commitments, and leveraging social norms (what your neighbors are doing) in your messaging to motivate action.
7. Consider the system
When we’re solving problems that involve people’s behavior, we might consider the individual motivations and knowledge that drive their actions.
But what if the broader system is designed to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others, regardless of the motivation of individuals inside the system?
Consider how the system impacts individual actions, and in return, how individual actions might be changing the system. The system that people operate in includes the physical environment, product and business designs, the cultural norms, and the economic or legal structures in place that could motivate certain actions.
By changing the environment people are in, we can not only circumvent willpower and education but also influence a larger number of people. Some ways to accomplish that are to adjust the cost or benefit of taking certain actions, to change laws or policies, and to adjust the physical or digital environment or default options.
8. Influence behavior change through game design and storytelling
Patrick mentions that many of the actions we need to take to “save the world” are small, mundane, and sometimes inconvenient or expensive. But we’re excited to play games, so by adding game design elements, you can make the entire experience more fun and engaging.
Some ways to do that are to make the desired actor the hero, giving them real-time feedback on how their actions are influencing the desired real-world metric. By incorporating game design elements like progress bars, badges, and leaderboards, colors and star ratings, you can help them see how their performance compares to the ideal, their past performance, or to their neighbors and encourage more actions.
Beyond giving your desired actor agency, embedding them in a story as the hero can be motivating. That means recasting yourself as the mentor and your audience as the hero. You can use the hero’s journey as a way to frame their progress in a way that will resonate with and engage your stakeholders.
9. Foster tribes and watch for tipping points
Human beings tend to imitate each other subconsciously but don’t expect everyone to change their behaviors overnight. Start by looking at your own actions. You’ll likely influence people around you without ever needing to talk about what you’re doing.
Then focus on building a core tribe of fans who are changing their own behaviors and modeling it for others. Include images and copy about people doing the desired behavior in your marketing materials. Encourage fans to share with their network. If you have raving fans, eventually, early adopters will expand to late adopters and you’ll hit a tipping point for your movement.
10. Leverage technology to further your goal
Finally, use technology to further your influence. Patrick encourages us to think of technology as a wrapper for the previous steps. You want to change the core data by changing human behaviors. Game design is a way to do that. And either low or high tech solutions could help enable those changes and reach a larger number of people.
But don’t make the mistake of jumping to technology before identifying the core metric and behaviors you want to change. You could end up investing a lot of money and energy in solutions that don’t create the desired results.
We would all love to wake up every morning and use our skills and resources to change the world. Patrick provides a simple framework for thinking about designing solutions that make a difference in our homes, companies, and communities. I encourage you to pick up the book if you haven’t already for more case studies and tips in the environmental space.
In the meantime, pick a transformation project that you’re working on, large or small. It could be a multi-year change project or a new year’s resolution.
Starting with step one in Patrick’s process,
- Are you clear on the change you want to create in the real world?
- Can you measure the current state and do you know what the number would have to change to in order to declare success?
- If so, what behaviors need to change to improve those metrics?
- What simple shift could you make this week to encourage that behavior?
If you read the book as well, what other takeaways did you have? How will you apply the lessons from this book?
