Once upon a time … How to tell a good energy efficiency story that ‘sticks’

摘要

The International Energy Agency’s Demand Side ManagementProgramme Task 241, called ‘Closing the Loop: BehaviourChange in DSM – From Theory to Practice’ has been workingwith 100s of experts in over 20 countries for the last 3 years tocrack the toughest of nuts – how to turn behaviour change theoryinto actionable practice.We have encountered a variety of obstacles on our almost3-year journey so far, but the biggest one was undoubtedlythe silo nature and in-built areas of conflict between differentplayers in the energy system, including the different researchdisciplines studying behaviour. Our largest workshop to date,kindly sponsored by the UKERC Meeting Place, was held inOxford in September 2012. We now fondly remember it as our‘baptism by fire’ – where the issues mentioned above becameglaringly obvious and our proposed method of attack was theone being attacked (rightly so, and it gave us the impetus tomodify and improve it). However, we also stumbled across thesolution when dealing with so many experts from different disciplinesand sectors, thanks to a collective desire for a moreconstructive way to discuss behaviour change after 1.5 days ofcriticism and debate. This golden circuit breaker is: the powerof storytelling.On our long journey since this workshop, we have delveddeeper and deeper into how to use different ways of storytellingas a powerful tool to cut through jargon, conflict points andthe different mandates of our ‘Behaviour Changers’ in differentsectors (government, industry, research, the third sector andintermediaries). We would like to tell some of these differenttypes of stories and how they can be used successfully to impartthe important message that the energy system is after all, allabout human beings.