Let’s say you're an expert in Chinese and your boss comes to you one day and asks you to teach a doctor and a lawyer Chinese so they can write a book about the legal aspects of medicine in China. And by the way, they want you to help them understand how the medical and legal fields are different in China!
Imagine yourself in my shoes. You’re the only person in your company with professional background in climate change and you’re asked to help seven senior folks, each a specialist in their own field, each with little background in yours. You need to make sure they grasp the key issues and use them correctly. The success of the project depends on it. You have just a few months to succeed.
Suddenly you need to bring your colleagues up to speed, give the project a clear focus, help structure the result, and provide ideas for each. In some cases you must convince them it’s even possible.
What do you do?
These are hard-nosed professionals who really know their fields through long, distinguished careers. And they all really care about what they are doing. They have their own ideas about how this should be done.
By the way, this effort is on top of their regular duties and takes them away from their comfort zones.
And, this effort is intended to create something that helps all professionals like these. The results will be broadly published and freely available to similar experts who have not had the chance to think about how climate change affects their work.
What do you do?
To make it more complicated, imagine that you’re in a field where the consensus of about 99% of experts is that the problem is so big that everyone, in all these specialties, must change the way they operate and must do so soon.
To give you a better idea of what a challenge this is, think of it this way. What are some other big crises that we've faced that folks knew were global game changers: WWII, nuclear war, and racial discrimination?
What do you do?
In my case I had a little to go on. I’d already helped create a book on climate change which also involved working with many authors with limited background in the subject. It also helped that all the authors really wanted to do this, believed in the importance of the work, knew it would be a big step, and were willing to work together to get it right.
So here’s what I thought would be needed: (1) a clear idea of the audience, (2) a well-defined structure, (3) a common approach to each chapter, (4) agreement on the key climate challenges to discuss, (5) balanced coverage of how to prevent (mitigate) climate change and how to deal with it (adapt) as it happens, (6) reliance on the best available information, (7) an iterative approach to writing, and (8) outside review by highly knowledgeable people.
Next time I’ll talk a little about these seven goals. It wasn't easy!
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