Explanations -
Provide pathways
to understanding
Explaining how a problem happens, who is responsible, the effects and what to do, is different from just describing a problem. To surface better understandings for people about decent homes, we also need to provide better explanations.
In strategic communication a good explanation:
- provides an entire new story about home health and why it matters
- avoids repackaging unhelpful thinking and narratives
- includes an intentional and helpful way of framing the issue
- is solutions driven
- uses facts as a character in a complete story about causes, effects and solutions.
Under this Building Block we will talk about five elements to consider in building better explanations: frames, metaphors, using facts, explain in a chain, name the agent.
Frames
- Frames are pre-packaged explanations about how the world works.
- Frames surface particular ways of thinking about an issue. For example, health is often ‘framed’ as an individual responsibility, through the language, metaphors, and images we see.
- Frames are one of many cognitive shortcuts we take to make the mental effort of information processing easier.
- Frames are employed unconsciously and are often shared across a culture.
- We cannot avoid frames or negate or myth bust unhelpful ones, but we can replace them with better ones.
Avoid
Embrace
Avoid
Framing home health problems and solutions as an issue of individual choice. This frames the solution as an individual one not a structural one.
“People not turning on the heater is causing health issues.”
Embrace
Framing our collective capability to do something about home health. This encourages helpful thinking that we can work together to solve the problem as we have done with other problems before.
“We have the knowledge and capabilities to ensure every New Zealander can feel at home in their home. The Warmer Kiwi Homes programme has shown how when researchers, government policy-makers, local council advisors and community organisations work together we can improve children and family health by improving homes.”
Avoid
Talking about individual responsibility for managing exposure to unhealthy homes.
“Mothers are responsible for making sure their children are not exposed to mould.”
Embrace
Framing the specific systems and structures that need to be improved.
“People in government can legislate and resource to ensure all homes are affordable to heat and ventilate.”
Avoid
Framing unhealthy homes as normal and living in them as a choice/ rite of passage. It taps into unhelpful thinking that the problem is too challenging to solve. It also surfaces individualistic thinking (I will lose something).
“I lived in a cold, damp flat when I was a student and I survived – we’ve all done it.”
Embrace
Using health and wellbeing frames, and talking about public health as a common good.
“People in government can ensure that we all live in homes that do their job, and deliver health and wellbeing for us all.”
Metaphors
Metaphors take something familiar, that we understand on a practical everyday level, and connect it to something more abstract or complex as a way to help simplify and explain it. Using tested metaphors in your messages can help short-cut people to understanding.
These metaphors all help explain key concepts of decent homes and redirect unhelpful thinking to more productive ground.
Healthy housing as infrastructure
It works to highlight the systemic nature of housing and its function as a fundamental determinant of wellbeing.
What does this sound like?
“Decent housing provides the infrastructure of care, connection, and contribution. Decent homes allow people to contribute to and participate in our communities. They allow people to get work and get to work and to keep kids in school. Decent homes keep people healthy.”
Homes have a job to do
Homes have a job to do – to keep us all warm, dry, safe, healthy – enable us all to care, connect and contribute. This metaphor helps focus attention on the active role of homes in providing basic human needs and rights – shelter, warmth, security etc.
What does this sound like?
“With at least a third of New Zealand homes still not performing well enough to do their job of keeping people warm and dry, and with housing costs increasingly unaffordable, many New Zealanders have no option but to live in unhealthy homes.”
Upstream environments, downstream health
This metaphor works to get people to think more helpfully about the connections between environmental factors and human health and wellbeing and the need for intervention and prevention.
What does this sound like?
“The way in which we resource and regulate housing creates the conditions for human health and wellbeing. The cold, damp homes we experience ‘downstream’ is a consequence of poor upstream regulation. We need to work together upstream to create positive housing conditions for human health. This will make sure that what flows downstream offers a healthy and safe environment for all of us.”
Avoid
Embrace
Avoid
Housing market
Embrace
Decent homes as infrastructure for care, connection and contribution
Avoid
House as an asset
Embrace
Homes have a job to do – keep us all warm or cool, dry, safe, healthy – enable us all to care, connect and contribute
Avoid
Decent homes as a trade-off or a financial/ social preference (or ‘high standard’)
Embrace
Decent homes lead to downstream improvements in health, education, employment, community engagement
Special Topic: Making home health tangible
The issue of home health does, by its nature, mean we are communicating about something that is often invisible/ intangible to people. The challenge is to make the issue more visible and physical. One way to do this is to describe the physical aspects of healthy home performance such as smell, taste, feel and how it can be seen. This can be done by talking about the discomfort of unhealthy homes – cold and damp, overheating etc – and about what we see/ experience – mould, condensation, high power use, noise, kids with runny noses all the time, worry.
Replace
- ‘healthy homes’ with ‘warm, dry homes’, or ‘comfortable, dry homes’ (taking account of the increasing prevalence of overheating as an issue in summer).
- ‘energy efficient homes’ with ‘homes that use less power to heat and cool.
Using facts
Facts are a character in your story, they need to be presented as part of a fuller explanation in order to deepen understanding. Facts presented on their own don’t shift thinking.
To help tell your story, choose a few limited facts and talk about them in a way that makes them easier to understand and recall.
- Present the facts so people have an everyday context for them, e.g., “This is equivalent to 1 in 80 children in our region being hospitalised for preventable housing-related illness every year.”
- Show facts visually as a preference, e.g., show how many hours children’s bedroom temperatures are below the WHO healthy minimum, what area is covered by mould, proportion of Māori vs non-Māori children who are hospitalised.
- Use strategies such as guess and reveal. e.g., ask people to make a guess at the fact and then reveal the answer.
Explain in a chain
Presenting our information in this order works with our fast-thinking brains to help us understand.
- Start by introducing the issue positively using intrinsic values (why it matters) and/or your vision of what better looks like
- Identify the cause or origin of the problem
- Explain the impact of that problem using facts
- Offer a solution (related to the cause identified initially)
- End by reminding people of why this matters, using a vision and intrinsic values.
Vision and/or values
We have the knowledge and capabilities to ensure every New Zealander can feel at home in their home. But currently those most vulnerable in our communities are those most likely to be locked out of the option to live in a healthy home
Cause
New Zealand is cold and damp for over half the year, but inadequate building standards and lack of knowledge in the past have resulted in many homes today that are not fit-for-purpose.
Impact
Close to half of the population currently live in homes that are expensive or impossible to keep warm and dry. Breathing cold, damp air causes respiratory illness, impacts on school and work participation, and affects mental health. Excessive energy costs contribute to poverty and energy hardship.
Solution
By working together we can build on good work already being done to retrofit and build homes that are cost-effective and easy to heat, cool and ventilate. People in government can ensure energy performance measures are required for all homes at point of sale and rent, and resource retrofits to bring old homes up to standard.
Values
A healthy thriving community depends on healthy homes for all of us. When we work together, using the tools at our disposal, we can make this a reality.
Name the agent
We want people to understand that there are things they can do to change systems to fix issues. Headlines such as “we’re making progress toward warmer homes” fail to name a person or agent involved in the problem. This makes it hard for people to see who needs to act and what needs to be done.
One way to help people lift their gaze and see what needs to happen is to name the specific agents of change within the system. For example, we can talk about members of a ‘healthy housing team’ that includes public health experts, as well as people in government who can make decisions that have a positive effect on systems and structures.
What does this sound like?
- I can access a healthier home if people in government make changes to building and rental standards.
This helps to draw people’s focus to aspects of home health that people do have control over and gives them a sense of competence.
