Chill out – just don't freeze

Tony Wanless | Image: Jupiter | Published: March 06, 2008

The classic change management method is to “unfreeze” your thinking by climbing out of your comfort zone, “stretch” as you look for new options, and then “freeze” again into a new way of doing things. Consultants teach versions of this methodology to businesses every day.

I was thinking about this when Finance Minister Carole Taylor introduced her relatively modest carbon tax recently. It immediately had everyone but the environmentalists howling – pretty clear examples, I think, of frozen thinking.

Now, I understand some of the problems with the tax: The infrastructure to easily replace driving isn't there yet. If you live in a suburb and your job isn't downtown where transit goes, your options appear limited. Busing takes forever, there's no place to park at the transit station, and it's so crowded you often can't get on.

Meanwhile, driving is faster, and you can park near your work. So you drive, and all a carbon tax does is make that more expensive. In rural areas, you're stuck with driving, and usually in bigger vehicles.

But these are just familiar mental models, and they don’t necessarily mean you can't do anything differently. Maybe you're driving a gas-guzzling SUV because it's “safer,” or you “need it” to carry your kids on weekends, or you drive through snow a couple of times a year, or simply because you believe your hard work has earned you the right to it.

This is really just self-talk, a way of thinking that continues because it’s comfortable.

When I was a financial writer, I used to rail incessantly against this kind of train-track thinking and its commensurate waste. Why blow your retirement fund on a $40,000 truck that sucks gas (and depreciates by 15 to 20 per cent a year) when a $12,000 car that burned half as much would do just as well? I just didn't get car culture thinking. People had many excuses and reasons to make it sound logical, but it never did.

Now, because of the tax, some might start to listen. What we're really talking about is self-pampering habit, and the base justification that enables that pampering.

And, frankly, it's all crap.

You have options. Buy a better-suited vehicle, park farther away, walk more, combine trips, team up, take a bus once a week, drive only

out of necessity. There are dozens of changes that can easily knock 20 per cent off your driving.

One of the most interesting things Minister Taylor said when introducing the tax was that she decided she could no longer “wait for a consensus,” probably because she recognized she'd never get one. The first thing you learn in change management is that consensus usually entrenches the status quo.

Change needs a stimulus, and that's what Ms. Unfreeze's tax is. It's harmless right now in but in a few years it’ll start to bite. You have time to change your habits.

Instead of bitching, start unfreezing.

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