What 3Sixty Knows…

Reading “Eating the Big Fish“, a book on planning and how small brands can compete with market leaders, I came across a great story about changing the world through reframing the problem.

Road safety campaigning in Britain in the ’80s wasn’t high on anyone’s radar. Most people were complacent about it and politicians felt they were doing enough. Road deaths were at around 6,000 a year, a figure in line with other countries.

When a group of BBC journalists were brainstorming possible television programmes, they challenged Nick Ross to make a boring subject interesting. You guessed it: road safety.

How did he do this?

Firstly, he reframed the concept of road safety from a statistic to an epidemic (the programme was called “The biggest epidemic of our times”). You can’t do much about a statistic, but an epidemic is a threat to the community that we can all face up to and fight.

Second, he realised he needed to bring the numbers to life. What does 6,000 people a year really mean? So, for the opening of the documentary, he asked the population of a typical British town with a population of 6,000 people to lie down, as if dead. “Every year”, he began, “a town the size of Wallingford dies on British roads”. He went from talking about an abstract number to talking about something that was completely unacceptable.

Thirdly, he changed the language. He shocked the authorities by no longer talking about “saving lives” but instead about “killing”: instead of 6,000, they should aim to only kill 4,000 a year.

He became Chairman of the National Road Safety Committee and in that position eventually managed to get his revised targets accepted. Tighter legislation and greater investment led to the number of deaths to come down to 3,500 at the turn of the milennnium. The momentum has been maintained with deaths down to 2,500.

The UK is now among the leaders in the world for road safety and as a direct consequence British mortality rates to the age of 50 are among the lowest in the world.

I think this demonstrates that understanding human behaviour is a great asset for communicators.