I listened to a Noel Gallagher interview recently, and he has some great opinions, not that I agree with all of them. He was saying that if we were to be guided by what people wanted, we would never create anything. He talked of the importance of not being guided by the consumer – the consumer didn’t want Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, or The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s, or Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks – but these artists ignored the consumer and created brilliant things we all love.
This got me thinking about climate policy and politics in general. When I listen to politics podcasts like David Herle’s ‘Herle Burly’ (worth a listen if you haven’t already) – he and his guests, from all political stripes, often talk about what policies did or did not work well in focus group testing. Our governments use focus groups to test the potential success or backlash of policy ideas, to see how people react and if specific groups have unique concerns. Focus group testing can determine if a policy is advanced, refined, or abandoned.
Denmark was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage in 1989 through a government bill in parliament. If they focus group tested it, it would not have happened. It would be 26 years later, in 2015, before Ireland would become the first country to pass same-sex marriage by public referendum – aka massive focus group. The bottom line is that there are some things we need to ask of our voters, and there are other things forward-thinking governments need to decide for them. Our federal and provincial governments rely far too heavily on focus group test results to determine their actions.
We will never be creative when the consumer (voter) wags the tail of the government – voters get to decide what concert they want to go to – they don’t write the setlist. For many socioenvironmental issues, it is business as usual, and it is not working. If we tried something different, the worst-case scenario would be that it would fail, which is what many of our business-as-usual policies are doing anyway.
If in 1967 we asked Beatles fans ‘how about no more ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘Hard Day’s Night’ etc., and instead a psychedelic concept album, without a tour and live performances to follow? People would have given that a resounding no thanks. The Beatles didn’t listen, they did things their way, and they created magic along the way. I don’t have all the answers as to what the policy magic might be, but surely, we can be a little more imaginative and a little less fearful of failure.
By Kevin Behan, Operations Director