Mental jujitsu to challenge Myth believers
Check off that resolution: Book a 2026 briefing for your leadership team to apply the lessons of The Myth and The Moment to your most urgent strategic questions.
After writing my series on understanding the Problem Solvers, I heard from some highly placed Problem Solvers.
The most intriguing message I received was a text: “I sit in a lot of rooms where The Myth is alive and well. How can you help me dispel The Myth?”
This is the heart of the challenge you and I face in The Moment. The only people who want to hear from me (or you) about why the energy transition will be neither easy, nor free, nor quick are the ones who already know it. And they’re surrounded by people who don’t.
These true believers don’t need convincing. They need help in carefully dismantling a belief that no longer serves them (or any of us).
This work is key as we lead the country and the world into the energy future. But how can we pull it off? How do we convince a true believer that something deeply tied to their identity—and often their life’s work—is a myth?
That’s not an analytical problem. It’s a human one.
So today, I take a different approach. Instead of arguing that The Myth of an Easy Energy Transition isn’t true, I ask a different question:
What would it take to convince me that it isn’t a myth?
I don’t believe The Myth. But in seriously entertaining what belief would require, I learned something useful about the people who hold it—and about how myths like this can be dismantled.
Read on for what you need to know about dismantling the Myth for the Myth holders in your world.
Both of these things are true:
- The Myth still tightly constrains what many leaders believe is possible—and therefore what they’re willing to approve, fund, and build.
- If we want different decisions, we must understand the beliefs that made The Myth persuasive in the first place.
The situation
To believe the transition will be easy, I would need to see:
- Ordinary, repeatable examples of large, diverse economies decarbonizing—not the one-hit wonders that have largely been debunked. (Germany’s Energiewend, Costa Rica’s drought-risked hydro … Shall I go on?)
- Energy replacement, not just addition—demonstrating clear evidence that lower-emissions energy is displacing higher-emissions fuels. Growth rates and headline percentages alone don’t demonstrate that the underlying system is changing.
- Momentum that endures when reality bites, in the forms of cost pressure, land conflicts, permitting obstacles, hard-to-abate sectors, and reliability stress.
- Political durability beyond a single election cycle, with progress that survives short-term lobbying, leadership changes, and shifting electorate priorities.
In other words, I’d need a lot of evidence.
Which leads to the next consideration: What would make me take the time to actually engage with that evidence—and then process it and seriously consider updating my thinking?
Here’s what I would require:
- I’d need a forcing function—a real crisis or difficult decision point. Why update my thinking if I don’t have to?
- I would be far more open to hearing from a skeptic who changed their mind than from a true believer.
- I’d want a reliable narrator—someone with credibility, experience, and no obvious incentive to oversell optimism—preferably a person I already trust.
- I would need corroboration: either a second trusted opinion or sources of the evidence, such as a news source that I rely on.
- I’d want information that respects my intelligence—acknowledging trade-offs rather than minimizing them.
And I’d need permission to change my mind without losing face.
Seize the day
So what does this tell me about the work ahead of us to engage with our stakeholders who are also holders of The Myth?
- We need a lot of narrative examples and data-driven evidence. These need to be both created and compiled.
- We should spend less time trying to convince true believers and more time equipping credible skeptics. It is the credible skeptics who can more effectively persuade the true believers.
- We need to be there for the Problem Solvers at moments of consequence—which means building rapport with them long before we are needed.
- And we need to speak to their energy-transition hopes—they need help acknowledging difficulty without surrendering decarbonization ambition.
It’s challenging, delicate work—and essential to preparing the ground for the energy future. Oil and gas leaders I work with know that without this work The Myth rebounds stronger than ever, with new force.
Making the most of The Moment
Here’s how you prepare the soil for your upcoming work with the Problem Solvers:
- Forward this to three colleagues who could help us build momentum.
- Reach out to conduct a bespoke briefing with your leadership team.
- Order The Myth and The Moment to set your mental framework.
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To changing hearts and minds one at a time,
Tisha
