When information is true but useless

Another part of my job is to collect true but useless information, abbreviated as TBU.

Both the collection of such information and the use of an acronym are characteristics of so-called policy work. Policy work itself is based on the presumption that the development of policy, that is, change at some kind of official level, is based on information. It is based on the assumption that you have to have a lot of information to make it happen, and once you have the information, it will happen.

I have to ask, Is this really true? While the process of collecting and disseminating information leads to the proliferation of acronyms in the world, does it truly lead to change?

If the above paragraphs sound convoluted and cynical, they are. I am feeling convoluted and cynical this morning.

I get the TBU acronym from the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, who wrote the clever and compelling book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Really Hard. They say simply, no. Information is not why things change. Change is propelled by emotion. This is true, they say, of all kinds of change, from the personal level to the level of society, including “policy.” Therefore you can spend all the time you want collecting TBU and nothing will change. You will understand the problems really, really well but you won’t solve them.

Deep in my heart I know this is right and yet all around me my colleagues continue to collect information and I help them do it. I have created a whole website full of fascinating TBU, and I feed another page of such information on another website. Traffic on these sites is not high but I am often told that I am providing an essential service to the environmental movement by gathering this TBU.

Actually I don’t think true information is totally useless. But it is true that information alone does not create change when change is really hard. Information is essential to clarify the problem. Information tells you what you need to change, and which direction the change needs to take. Information is essential background to change. Information can be shaped to provide the path to change. But it is emotion that pushes you along that path and makes the change stick.

In short, information can provide both the why and the how for change.

The Heath brothers outline a path to change that has worked in many cases. They base their methods on solid sociological and psychological research—that is, on information that provides the how. Much of the information I seem to be collecting, however, provides the why—that is, defining the problem. Many of my colleagues are stuck in the why. Too much why and not enough how makes information TBU.

Meanwhile, the evidence on climate change is piling up. New discoveries are being made about how harmful pollution is to our health. Yet another instance is uncovered of corporate pillaging.

All of this is TBU unless we use it to shape the path to change.