Category: Perspectives

In praise of the unpeeled onion

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An oft cited aspect, by people working in retrofit, that they think mitigates against people taking up insulation measures is that insulation measures invisible, and I’ve been reflecting on that for a while. I am going to briefly unpick some aspects of whether the fact insulation is invisible is really a negative.

There are lots of other materials or systems within the home which are also invisible, but the effects are visible, and they are valued by people such as electricity, gas or water and sewage services. Indeed, the fact those measures are invisible but the effects are tangible is part of their appeal. Homes with exposed wires or gas pipes, let alone waste water or sewage pipes wouldn’t be considered to be safe or desirable. It’s true that with these measures there are still some aspects that are visible and have design considerations beyond the effect they have – light switches and plugs, hobs and taps. For the most part though, the other aspects are hidden away.

Then there are parts of homes that really are invisible or should be. Foundations, the materials used to construct lots of parts of floors, walls and ceilings. Generally if we can see the foundations it’s either because something intentional has happened – like getting an extension done, or a bad thing has happened and we’re trying to sort it out – like subsidence. Again, what’s happening between the internal walls, floors and ceilings is really invisible. There’s a layer we can see but being able to see those exposed parts of the building would be bad.

As it is with other aspects of the building that are invisible, having visible insulation wouldn’t be a positive. Insulation materials should be safely tucked away and if we can see them that’s a bad thing. Yet people seem to think differently about insulation in part because there’s a paradox whereby they seem to think it’s necessary for homes, while thinking it’s not needed and therefore occupies a different space to those aspects of the building structure that seem more fundamental.

There are other ways that the insulation can be made visible to people, through inclusion in condition surveys, references in letting or sales information, questions for mortgages or insurance. Whatever touchpoints already exist and any that might be developed over time are places where those details can be made clear to people.

So it doesn’t seem like the invisibility of insulation needs to be a bad thing, or it can’t be demonstrated in other ways. Really though, I think that view keeps niggling at me because it goes to a negative attitude that is not really in the can-do camp about the virtues of retrofit. If the people who are trying to convince others of the merits of getting works done are unable to articulate why something might be useful, and feel more comfortable talking about why the things that are being offered are a bit rubbish or hard to sell. And if people trying to encourage uptake are unable to get into a PMA about the measures, and it’s literally their job to do so, how can we be surprised when those who have less interest to start with aren’t buying?

Differently together

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Since 2013 about £26bn has been spent on government and energy company obligations, of which a chunk would be made available on a project by project basis for comms, marketing and engagement – what value has been created by that investment of public funds?

Funding will often allow for up to 10% to be spent on scheme administration, and where it doesn’t comms and marketing will often be capitalised into the overall costs of the improvements. If 3% is used on comms and marketing that would equate to £780m, even at 1% that would be £260m.

Given where we are in terms of the perception and interest in retrofit, low and zero carbon technologies – potentially solar PV notwithstanding – it’s hard to see how that investment has catalysed action or interest. We still struggle to persuade people that the measures we think will help are either useful or desirable. It isn’t the only reason that there have been consistent levels of underspend on schemes, or a need to extend timescales for delivery or reduce the amount or level of interventions undertaken, but it is clearly a factor.

But what if that investment, or even a fraction of it, were used differently? Used more collectively to develop advice or materials or try different approaches and cascade that out. Or it could be used to provide some baseline services that can be used by everyone and could outlive the projects? Building capacity and seeding interest in local community activities?

Doing things that would involve working collectively and collaboratively to put in place the things we think are needed or could be useful. Trying and piloting and testing and maybe using government funding but in different ways to try and create a legacy from that part of it.

Of course, that same approach could be developed by the sector without using or re-purposing government funding too – it could be sourced from other budgets. There are examples of one-stop shops and other models which could be developed and adopted that are much more industry or community led too.

Either way, it’s sobering indeed to reflect on the massive investment which has already happened to date and how little that seems to have shifted the level of interest. It’s also clear that we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing and expect different results, we have to think and do differently.

New favourite things

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Yin yoga

Institutional isomorphism

French Blondes – the cocktail, not the cohort of French people

Gang of Youths new song ‘Things take time’

Antonio Gramsci and his concept of cultural hegemony

Having new favourite things has long been one of my favourite things. I was aware that my intake of new favourite things had declined and I tried different things to increase them – to tap back into the double delight of new favourites. More and more since I started the PhD I’ve felt new favourite things popping up again and again which I am loving and I can’t recommend looking for them highly enough.

As my list shows, new favourite things can come in many guises. Indeed that’s one of the things that makes them so enjoyable. It could be a new concept which helps you see and understand the world a little differently. It might be something delicious or joyful. It can also be something more prosaic, like the way I’ve rearranged my desk so it’s more comfortable to sit at. They don’t need to be massive, expensive or rare, although obviously they can be. The everyday new favourite can still engender the same sense of wonder.

Setting the bar low is really part of it though, which was why I knew the fact I was having to try and find new favourite things was a bad sign. That sense of being open to possibility and noticing is something which can enrich any particular or seemingly ordinary moment and definitely makes the finding of new favourite things more readily accessible. There’s all kinds of reasons why we can find that difficult to do but finding ways to keep lowering the bar to get new favourite things can help.

Whether it’s a struggle to get new favourites or you’re just a bit out of practice, putting in place forcing functions can help. Back in the day when I knew I wasn’t doing so well on noticing them I came up with a new years resolution to try at least 52 new to me food or drink things that year. It was a reminder to keep looking and exploring, I’m more likely to try something on a menu I’ve not already had but still, putting in place reminders and prompts all over the place can be helpful if new favourites are hard to come by.

I suppose having new favourite things is a bit like the gratitude practice, and if that works for you as a way into this then great, but I think for me those things do feel different. With my new favourite things it usually feels much more intense, whereas things I am grateful for often feel gentler and perhaps more intimate. When I find a new favourite thing I usually want to get everyone involved or knowing about it because it just seems so mind-blowing that I want people to have that chance of delight or astonishment.

And part of what’s exciting is that I just don’t know what my new, new favourite things will be. Being able to look forward to finding them is very wonderful though and fills me with a sense of abundance, for which I am grateful indeed. Only just discovered Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony and I’m very much not an expert but here’s a podcast I listened to as a way into it. I’m fascinated by the idea that a dominant ruling class maintains power in a capitalist society not through force, but by shaping cultural norms and values so that their worldview is accepted as natural “common sense”. What a way to understand and see the world and I’m looking forward to exploring that idea more.

If you don’t already have a new favourite thing then feel free to take any and all of mine. And if you can’t find one new favourite thing, then I’d suggest instead you try to find five…

Contextually compassionate

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Are we basically saints or utterly evil good for nothings? There can be times when we can convince ourselves of both propositions, sometimes swinging between the two from second to second. In ‘The Character Gap’ Christian Miller, a Professor of Philosophy, argues that while we are indeed flawed, sometimes in ways we can’t even see ourselves, it is a much more mixed picture than that.

There has been discussion about the extent to which our character is broadly fixed or more fluid, with a return to a broad consensus that it is more fixed. However, Miller argues that while this is true, a character gap can arise in practice.

There are lots of situations where we will act in ways that we or others might consider to be out of character because the context allows it. People are less likely to help others who are in danger if they are with someone else who isn’t acting – the bystander effect. Studies suggest we are much more likely to cheat if we think we can get away with it, yet the act of signing up to an honour code can override that and people will return to their honest selves. We will go to the assistance of complete strangers, or act selflessly in situations where the conditions allow us to connect to our character.

Character is the outward expression of our values and Miller’s conception of the character gap fits with Shove’s idea that the value-action gap is ‘only mystifying if we assume values do (or should) translate into action’. Taken together this suggests that it isn’t surprising we can’t draw a straight line from how someone characterises themselves or the values they hold, to how they will behave. There are lots of factors which determine if and how a link manifests itself but context is one of them.

Over and over the picture that emerges from the literature in different areas is that context is important. People aren’t making decisions in a vacuum and the various factors surrounding them influence what they do. Therefore, trying to understand and engage with that context is helpful in trying to explore and unpick what really makes does a difference.

Not trying to get on the hedonic treadmill

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If we’re not good at knowing what makes us happy, and our attempts to do the things we think will make us happy work against us, might that suggest we shouldn’t hitch ourselves to the happy wagon when trying to persuade people to take action?

Brickman and Campbell developed the idea of the hedonic treadmill in a 1971 essay ‘Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society’, reflecting that people seem to have their own happiness baseline and positive or negative events can take people away from their baseline but they return to close to it over time. This idea was translated into the specific treadmill metaphor by Eysenck in his work exploring how people can chase happiness without making progress towards it. It then seems the chasing can itself then raise the bar for what we need to be happy – and you might be able to think of examples in those around you who focus on something like a holiday and being able to relax and do nothing, then come back complaining about some seemingly minor aspect, rather than giving a sense the holiday had been really relaxing.

So if this is the case, in the search for things that can catalyse action – in ourselves and others – it’s obvious why there might be an appeal to happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy after all? Yet over and over we choose meaning over happiness. We do the difficult things. We also chase things that we think will bring happiness yet turn out not to . Perhaps then, if we can see and feel in ourselves and others that tension which exists between meaning and the pursuit of happiness, it might be worth exploring other avenues than happiness to try and engage people?

The in-crowd

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Reading government and industry reports can leave me wondering where the individual is. The primacy of the family, and the subset of ‘the hardworking family’ is something that I’ve long noticed. Perhaps because I’ve spent lots of time as a single person it’s something I am more primed to see than people who have been in a relationship for years. This framing made me wonder how representative the representation is and why it might have been chosen.

Reading ‘The Warm Homes Plan’, families get mention after mention – albeit in amongst some more general references to people or tenants. Still though, four references in one paragraph doesn’t happen by accident I think. Linguistically it creates a sense of intended repetition that even just twice might not. From a logistical perspective, the amount of times that document would have gone through a review process makes it harder to imagine it was accidental. Of course things can slip through if the version control gets a bit messy and there are twin or more track reviews happening. Putting together those kinds of documents isn’t always as elegant a process as we might want to imagine yet the fact I noticed it in that document was a reflection of that longer-held awareness of how often the term is used.

Looking at the Office of National Statistics (ONS) information published in 2025 – the most recent year statistics are available for – shows that while it’s true that 66.8% of households are a family, there are now 29.5% of households where only one person lives in the home. By way of completeness 2.8% of households are where two or more unrelated people live together and multi-family homes make up 0.8% of homes. The ONS notes that the figure for single-person households is a similar proportion to the previous census, there are now more young adults aged 20-34 years old who are living with their parents.

To leave out c.33% of the population from language around who is important, to be emphathised with or needs to be supported feels odd. I assume the references don’t mean family in the sense of connections to people that you might be related to but no longer living with. Apart from anything else if that is what is meant it feels a bit garbled and unclear, and the context doesn’t suggest that is the intention. It isn’t as though there isn’t language available instead – why not just say everyone deserves x?

The use of this language can be seen as a way to try and engage people. Some of it might be about trying to head off arguments at the pass, particularly from more right-wing media and politicians for whom the family can be a key focus. There can be something respectful about going to where people are which resonates with them and helps get them on-board. This can also be a sign of pragmatism, changing the language to get things done and finding ways to go with the grain of how people might think about things

However, the danger in using language that way is that the argument is never made on its own terms, it accepts the framing of others. This creates a danger that the thing itself becomes obscured with the attendant risk that there can be an appearance of progress but later on down the line it becomes apparent you were talking at somewhat cross purposes. By reinforcing the framing rather than staking your own claim it can create the need for more of a rearguard action if the frame no longer fits the argument.

As such, the repeated choice of language around families does read as intentional. It comes across as language which seeks to be more collective and inclusive, rather than seeing people as atomised individuals. Yet the exclusionary nature of the language then serves to undermine that same intention. It is hard to see what value there is in choosing language in that context which doesn’t seek to cover the widest group of people possible. Other choices are available, so when they aren’t taken, it feels like a missed opportunity not to tell a more inclusive story.

Luxurious and necessary

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I’ve just done a thought exercise where I was trying to imagine what I’d do on day one if I were put in charge of all of the things in government and it fried my brain. It created a real tension between my understanding of what changes are needed to generate change – systemic and cultural shifts which lead to cascading and tangible changes, with my sense of what politicians are looking for – tangible things that sound good even if they don’t really deliver anything meaningful. Beyond hurting my head, it was a good reminder of why change can be hard for politicians to enact.

Even just pretending to play the part of a politican made me feel I had to silence all of those parts of my brain that think how politics tends to operate isn’t helping, and I started to grab around for something that felt like a ‘good answer’. Trying to think about how I could turn something systemic, which also recognised the limits of government responsibility, into something that was shiny and press release worthy. I think that a big issue in the retrofit sector particularly is the extent to which it looks to government to create and fund the conditions for scale, and that in itself undermines the conditions for scale. That means more government isn’t going to help, and indeed can undermine the cultural and attitudinal changes needed, albeit there are things government can do to help unblock action which will help with those shifts. Yet the short-term press release driven nature of politics is too rarely a good fit for the deeper, harder engagement with the substantive issues or ambitions. Yet in that thought experiment I could feel the pressure towards that endorphin hit of one shiny thing because that felt like what I was ‘supposed’ to come up with – that it wasn’t a serious answer if I didn’t.

In the end I just pretended the world was different and politicians can give those kind of answers. I figured that’s a luxury of not being in that position and if I can’t use that luxury in a no-stakes thought exercise, how can I be surprised that people in those actual positions don’t do that? It felt both like a cop-out given I can imagine the push-back someone in that situation would get, and also like the thing that’s actually needed.

But it was a great reminder of how institutional isomorphism and social norms can help edit out those calls to think differently. It was also useful to reflect on that temptation to try and fix things and assume control of it, rather than saying there are limits to what government can do in terms of shaping attitudes and action.

Scattered thoughts

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A friend tightly hugs her knees to her chest as she tells me she’s not felt this anxious about environmental issues and the state of things for a couple of decades

It rains and people share photos of it with their friends and family. Look at this they say. Mad scenes.

My partner tells me that when he was in the office and it briefly rained, or really heavily drizzled, people went to the window to look at it in wonder – just as they would do for snow

At the same time – and there are so few times it rains of course it’s likely to be the same time – I stand outside feeling each drop of rain as it touches my skin. It feels so refreshing and also as though it’s making my skin burn. I hadn’t felt so hot, it’s been cooler the past few days – by which I mean in the late twenties – that I thought my body wasn’t so hot now. The contrast between the heat of my body and the cool of the rain tells me that’s not the case

I walk alongside the playing field on the way to the gym – a place I visit most days, sometimes twice a day – and I see the dry earth now has a crack in it. I try but can’t remember if it’s always been there, or if it just recently happened. How could I not have noticed?

We’ve not really talked a lot about his reasons why, but I have a friend who doesn’t believe in climate change. I think he says it’s because he’s not convinced by the science. I think it’s because he likes to be a contrarian, he feels he can look dispassionately at the science or other evidence and honestly who wouldn’t rather it was all made up and everything was fine? In an earlier heatwave – over a May Bank Holiday I think – he comes over to mine for lunch. When asked how I am in the standard just arriving kind of way, I languidly say I’m very hot. He quickly replies that it is hot but it’s totally normal for this time of year and this kind of thing happens all the time. In a later heatwave we’re exchanging stories about things we’re currently really obsessed by – I talk about the World Cup. He tells me about a theory he’s discovered that he’s very excited by. It’s by someone he connected with during the pandemic – they both agreed that it was basically not anything to be worried about and there was no need to take the kinds of actions that were being taken. Essentially the theory is that every c.5,000 years the Earth’s poles flip – that there’s a bit of a wobble in the rotation of Earth and eventually this wobble builds up and everything floods. And it’s getting ready to flip soon by this reckoning. This theory apparently explains why there are more earthquakes and volcanoes happening – it’s a sign of more wobbling. That isn’t the technical term but I can’t find it – when I tried searching for the theory after my friend and I met and I could remember the actual word I still struggled to find anything online. This theory also explains some aspects of climate change too. I wondered if the attraction of the theory for my friend was that it offers a way to continue to disbelieve the science of climate change while still acknowledging that things are changing – this isn’t normal. I don’t know how I could ask him that, what good it would do

Struggling one day to work, irritated and frustrated with myself at not being able to concentrate or get things done. The next day it’s down from the peak of the heat and all of a sudden work feels much easier. All of a sudden? Even as I try to recognise the need to adjust work or play, I can still bump up against my expectations of how it should be

I look online for news about when it’s likely to rain next. For some reason the algorithm shows me a story from February this year. I read it, astonished and half-remembering the news and reality of ‘biblical floods’ with some places experiencing rain every day for forty days. The jokes we made about at least we’re not going to be needing hosepipe bans this year

Decisions, decisions?

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Influencing decisions is difficult at the best of times because so many factors are part of how and why people make decisions. When people don’t even realise they are making a decision it seems that much harder to influence them.

One way decisions can become invisible is through institutional isomorphism, where isomorphic means the same or a similar shape, structure or relational properties. In this scenario organisations of a similar type, and the people working within them, adopt the same kind of approaches to each other. DiMaggio and Powell, 1983 identified that this might be because people are forced to adopt an approach by coercive means through law or mandates from Head Office; it can also arise because people copy successful peers or where professional standards shape ways of working across a sector.

In the coercive scenario people might feel like they are consciously making decisions – where their own sense of what the ‘right’ thing to do bangs up against what they are being told to do. Equally though, where there’s a mandate it can feel like there isn’t any decision to make in practice, that’s just how things are or have to be. For the other scenarios, it might be less clear that a decision is getting made though, that sense of professionalism unintentionally or unconsciously leading people to repeat approaches or ways of working. Hard to know where they come from and harder to unpick.

Another way it can be hard to see that a decision is getting made is where there is path dependence – when the weight of historical precedents make a choice seem inevitable, or a different choice unknowable or impossible. QWERTY keyboards are seen to be the archetype of path dependence leading to lock-in, the example comes from W. Brian Arthur’s 1994 piece. For many people, if they need to get a keyboard they would just find when searching that they are being offered a QWERTY keyboard and most of us wouldn’t think to look for another one. Yet there are other options out there but a series of circumstances have led to QWERTY domination. It’s not impossible to unpick but the number of steps needed to do so feels prohibitively high and most people aren’t motivated to look for other options when the current one seems to work well.

And with all of the talk of behaviour change in relation to climate related actions, those examples show how much can be missed when trying to jump to change territory. There’s often an assumption that the behaviour, decision or rationale is clear to people and so it’s just a case of helping people realign their behaviour into another ‘better’ pathway. If that isn’t the case though, it’s hard to unpick something people don’t realise is tangled up.

These theories that make visible the invisible decisions can help us have some empathy when trying to understand where others might be starting from. Recognising that for many people, choices now considered to be environmentally unfriendly – such as getting a new boiler – don’t feel like decisions is a helpful way to ground yourself in the reality of people you’re trying to persuade. Starting from that point might then provide a better basis on which to sell or persuade.

Same but different?

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As summer temperatures increase, at night as well as during the day, people are becoming increasingly aware of how uncomfortable their homes can be but there isn’t an easy fix. One of my PhD supervisors reflects on the fact that part of the challenge is that the same homes are both too hot in summer and too cold in winter. We’re not, for the most part, trying to address one issue in one set of homes and the other issue in the rest of the homes. Yet we’re better equipped for dealing with the cold than we are the hot.

In the event of cold weather, most homes can be improved if you were to throw lots of money at it, without doing anything to the home. You could just subsidise people’s bills, or flat out pay the whole lot. It would be massively expensive and wasteful but still, there’s an immediate lever that could be pulled if we lived in a parallel universe and felt that something needed to be done. We already have an equivalent for cold weather of the Winter Fuel Discount and the Energy Bills Support Scheme in 2022.

Most homes have central heating, so to try and warm up the homes it’s then a case of having the heating on more. Census data from 2021 suggests that only c.1.2% of homes don’t have central heating so there are a lot of homes where it is then easier to provide funding towards the cost of energy to make it more affordable. For those households that aren’t using mains electricity or gas to power their central heating there would be more steps because they have to procure extra oil or solid fuel. If they already have this fuel system, this is something that they are used to doing and would have suppliers that they are able to contact to try and source supplies.

That isn’t the case in terms of cooling a home though. Even if you subsidised everyone’s bills in the same way to try and make the home cooler, there would be more steps in between. Some of that would involve getting more immediate cooling options such as fans or cooling units. Having invested in a fan the internet told me was whisper quiet and effective, which turned out not to be so, I don’t think we can assume that it’s quick or straightforward for people to get something which will make a difference. There are things that could be done but they aren’t quick – from shades, shutters and awnings to more hard-core air conditioning units. That means there are a lot more steps, which need a lot more levers.

This also suggests that where possible, it obviously doesn’t make sense for people to be coming up with separate but related proposals. Too often adaptation and mitigation can get separated out but in many cases it should be the same approach which addresses both, or could be the same approach with some tweaks. That if there are going to be works done to a home, they should be things that will make sense for as many of those scenarios as possible. Instead – as my supervisor’s work surfaces – they can work against each other. Measures to improve the ability of the home to retain the warmth in winter can, if not properly detailed and dealt with as part of a wider approach which considers ventilation, make the home warmer or more difficult to cool in summer too.

If vulnerability is a mix of the underlying circumstances and the extent to which you can or can’t adjust, then these heatwaves reflect how much more vulnerable we are to hotter weather than cold weather. The design of our buildings increases our vulnerability as the climate warms up because, for the most part, they aren’t designed to cope with this amount of heat, this regularly – particularly with nights where the temperature doesn’t drop that much. The fact we have much less ability and focus on managing in the heat than the cold will continue to exacerbate this. A lack of quick levers we can pull to try and help (some?) people in emergencies compounds all of this.

Addressing this vulnerability therefore needs a focus on both addressing the underlying conditions alongside the levers to provide more immediate support. To date the focus has been more on trying to address the way buildings operate or how we can use them differently. Reducing the vulnerability to extreme heat will need a more systems based approach to try and make a substantive difference, focusing on one aspect is better than nothing but ultimately has limitations.