Listen: the world is full of numbers. They’re like snowflakes in a blizzard, falling endlessly, each one unique, each one a testament to something. We used to just shiver and pull our coats tighter. Now, we’re supposed to build igloos out of them. We’re told these numbers, these cold, hard facts, are the bedrock of all good decisions. And they are, probably. But a pile of bricks isn’t a house until someone lays them right. So it goes.
We’ve got “stakeholders,” you see. Important people. Busy people. People who need to make “efficient decisions” in a “limited-resource world.” Which is just a fancy way of saying: don’t screw up, and don’t waste anything, especially their time.
They’re drowning in dashboards, suffocated by spreadsheets, hypnotized by PowerPoint slides that look like a cat walked across the keyboard. Their brains, poor things, are already full of static. They look at a graph showing, say, that the “global average temperature has increased by 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times,” and their eyes just glaze over. It’s a number. A fact. A thing. So what? It doesn’t feel like anything. It doesn’t crawl into their heads and scream.
This is our problem, friends. We’re speaking in Martian, and our stakeholders are still stuck on Earth. We’ve got the cure for the common cold, but we’re delivering it as an algebra textbook. Nobody wants that.
What we need, bless our cotton socks, are memes. Not cat videos, though those have their place. No, I’m talking about ideas that spread like a really catchy jingle, or a rumour about the boss’s new haircut. Ideas that stick. Ideas that, once heard, can’t be unheard. Like a bit of sonic flypaper in the echo chamber of their minds.
Imagine if that 1.2 degrees Celsius wasn’t just a tick mark on a chart. What if it was the temperature of the bathwater in a world slowly boiling? What if it was the fever of a planet, sweating and shivering?
