Credibility

June 12, 2022

This blog post is for assignment 6 in the CALS501 course.

I remember lying in my bed as a child, listening to my parents sing bedtime songs:

“Five little ducks went out one day, over the hills and far away… Momma duck said ‘quack, quack, quack quack’, but only four little ducks came back.”

I was so concerned about what happened to the ducks as they disappeared, one by one. I would imagine the lives and adventures of the ducks: were they hiding, or lost? Were the missing ducks together or alone? At the end of the song when “all of the five little ducks came back”, I could finally relax and drop off to sleep.

During one of the interviews for our design challenge (in which we were tasked to inspire citizens to take climate adaptation actions), Mike Lickers emphasized how powerful songs and storytelling can be as communication tools (M. Lickers, personal communication, December 15, 2021). It reminded me of the duck song of my childhood, along with hundreds of other tunes I have listened to, sung, and relied on for emotional support through the years.

What has become clear to me as I reflect on the MACAL program is that in the climate action sector, stories and numbers have a dialectical relationship. Both stories and climate data can hold inherent truth and have power on their own, yet they function best as a partnership. Even the duck song is based on numbers. Listening to the number of ducks decline and then rebound was what brought the story to life.

The weaving together of emotions and data is the art of crafting a narrative, “which is significantly more effective in engaging a listener than data alone” (Dahlstrom, 2014, as cited in Bayer & Hettinger, 2019, p. 1). We observed this effectiveness of narrative-building when testing our design prototype. In front of a test audience, we shared photoshopped images of familiar landscapes that had been altered to show the projected future based on climate data (see example by the City of Edmonton, 2018, below). The numerical projections were also listed at the bottom of the image. One of the participants remarked: “The numbers don’t mean much to me… but they provide credibility to the image” (N. Schaper, personal communication, March 24, 2022). The image was powerful, but it became more powerful when it became clear that the image (a form of visual storytelling) was based on scientific data.

The mere presence of stories and numbers aren’t enough, however. It appears the worthiness of the information is scrutinized as well. When crafting a business case, Messner (2013) suggests that “anything far-fetched, exotic, complicated, or generally unknown does not make a good story” (p. 334). Both the financial argument and the story built around that argument need to be credible for the narrative that binds them to be effective.

Unfortunately, trust in the credibility of governments and other public leaders is at an all-time low in Canada (Proof Strategies, 2022). How can climate leaders fill this trust gap? In our society we tend to venerate leaders that are strong, smart, and visionary. Yet when I reflect on the types of leaders that I see making the most change in their communities, I see leaders that are trustworthy, reliable, steadfast, and sincere. In a word, leaders that are credible. Part of their credibility comes from their reliance on rigorous data and meaningful – yet not overblown – stories.

In what ways have you seen credibility (or lack thereof) impact a climate leader? How can leaders enhance their credibility?

References

Bayer, S., & Hettinger, A. (2019). Storytelling: A natural tool to weave the threads of science and community together. The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 100(2), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1002/bes2.1542

City of Edmonton. (2018). Climate resilient Edmonton: Adaptation strategy and action plan. https://www.edmonton.ca/sites/default/files/public-files/assets/Climate_Resilient_Edmonton.pdf?cb=1655095823

Dahlstrom, M.F. (2014). Storytelling in science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 111, 13614-13620.

Messner, W. (2013). Making the compelling business case: Decision-making techniques for successful business growth. Palgrave Macmillan.

Proof Strategies. (2022). 2022 results report CanTrust index. https://getproof.com/what-we-do/cantrust/