Urgent! You need to learn how to set aside urgency
Leading with panic makes for bad storytelling, in both business and climate
“Urgency is essential,” J——’s notes said. We had to “Start with case for action… why we should act now.” N—— quickly agreed, adding her own thoughts on why this obscure business operational issue was unbelievably urgent.
Back when I was a business writer, these were among my most aggravating clients. They believed in leading with crisis rhetoric.
In a sense I admired them. Deep in the weeds of their topic, they not only understood it but cared about it. And their solutions were usually spot-on: as they were fond of having me say, in dynamic and fast-moving industries, businesses needed to place big bets on transformative operational changes to meet the ever-more-sophisticated demands of their ever-more-informed customers.
But I was aggravated by their insistence that talking about urgency would shake these companies out of their self-satisfied doldrums. It was the classic telling rather than showing—“I’m telling you, this is important!” CEOs hear this sort of thing all the time. Indeed, we were often making these arguments in industry-specific magazines (think: Widget Industry Today) where every article led with the urgency of obscure operational problems.
Maybe you’re right, I would try delicately to respond. But couldn’t we find an angle other than urgency? An example, a story we could tell? A comparison that might give a glimmer of hope? Real numbers, actual data on return-on-investment? Maybe even a funny and relevant widget-operations joke?
My favorite clients would engage me in this sort of brainstorming about storytelling. (Though they rarely told good jokes.) My most aggravating clients saw no diminishing returns to alarm. They believed urgency would persuade readers, so that’s where they insisted I start.
American history works the same way, as James Fallows has argued. The theme is always crisis. Democracy in crisis. Race, the environment, feminism, natural disasters, foreign wars—continual crises. We may think that today is the worst crisis, but we’ve probably forgotten how bad 1968 was.
Which brings us to the climate crisis. If a scientist tells me that climate change is incredibly urgent, I’ll respond Maybe you’re right. Or even Probably you’re right. I understand the arguments. I’ve made quite a few of them myself.
But if the expert leads with the urgency, I get nervous. For my entire lifetime, there has always been some form of environmental crisis. Population, food, air pollution, toxic waste, acid rain, CFCs, PCBs… an alphabet soup of unnatural substances and processes disrupting our natural way of life.
These crises have always been described as urgent. Maybe that was wise, because in some cases we identified and addressed the root causes. (For example, many places are less polluted now than in 1968.) Maybe it was unwise, because we misunderstood the urgency. Maybe it shouldn’t matter, because regardless of what was said 20 years ago, today’s crisis really is more urgent.
But how are we going to convince our audience? I keep thinking about the storytelling.
Today, we’re thankfully experiencing a backlash. This National Geographic article defines urgency culture with the example of responding immediately to text messages—your hypervigilance leads to stress and anxiety. But rather than putting all of the burden on you as an individual to recognize incoming urgency and respond appropriately—to avoid multitasking, overcommitting, and forgetting to breathe—maybe we should put some burden on the ways that people tell stories about crises.
That’s why I was so encouraged by a speech Bill McKibben gave in Billings, Montana, in September. McKibben has a reputation as one of the world’s great urgency-mongers. “My career for the past 35 years has been as a professional bummer-outer of people,” he joked. He first tried to start a hue and cry about climate change in his 1989 book The End of Nature. 1989! And of course he was largely right, too regularly ignored. If the world had tried to address climate change back then, we might have avoided a lot of suffering.
But I’ll admit, I was one of the people who eventually came to ignore him. I didn’t read his 1994 The Comforting Whirlwind, or his 2003 Enough, or his 2007 Fight Global Warming Now, because in each case, I was pretty sure I knew how he was going to nag me. The crisis is urgent! Not enough is being done.
In September, McKibben led by saying that he was certainly not “hopeful.” But he admitted to a glimmer of hope, to being marginally more hopeful than he had been in decades. The cost of wind and especially solar power has come down so drastically, so unexpectedly, that there is now a path forward to a less catastrophic climate future. He’s not sure humanity is smart enough to choose that path, so there’s much work to be done, and he believes it’s incredibly important to start on that work now.
In a substantive sense, as I’ve written before, I believe McKibben is onto something, although I know I could be wrong about that. But in a storytelling sense, I was delighted to watch him bury the urgency.
Discussion:
McKibben has a Substack newsletter that’s full of climate-related news. James Fallows also has a great Substack, and part 2 of his post here expands on the link above.
Welcome new readers! I’m grateful for the recent steady subscriber growth. I like to think of this as a fairly typical of what we do here: I’m talking about stories and nature, and sometimes illustrating points by telling my own stories. I’ve included plenty of in-text links to learn more. I’m also interested in your points and stories, so please feel free to comment.