Narratives need enacting, otherwise they’re just words

Also catalogued elsewhere

Narratives are important for social change, but they need to be actively enacted, not just talked about. People learn by doing, and to create real change, we must engage others in action. Successful campaigns show that new stories can shift behaviors and help build a sense of community.

Highlights

We learn best by doing (like riding a bike); get on, fall off, learn, keep going;

Narrative is a crucial part of organising to make change; but narrative is not going to work on its own – you have to get others riding the bike too.

A lot of the public intellectuals in the field can write the words but, as smart as they are, don’t know how to get people to do stuff

Sometimes the narrative world wangs on about theory, forgetting that campaigns need practical enactment – from voting to physical protest to occupying space.

Narrative proponents also know how to analyse the separation at the heart of social challenges and polarisation, while often being at the same time very consciously separated from embodied action.

I prefer the term cognitive distance to cognitive dissonance. It suggests spaciousness rather than pain or confusion.

It is this distance from the story you used to ‘go by’ that is critical to give you space, to think differently about a new story about yourself you can ‘go by’ (and to notice the barrage of messaging around you that shaped how you enacted before).

Mood and behaviour follow action, not the other way round. Get people doing stuff!

if we agree that stories shape our world, then they don’t do so by magic. It happens because people enact them, ‘go by’ them to make sense of their actions.

We run on scripts. At the individual and societal level, we run on stories (some of which are heuristics) that make it easy for us to navigate our worlds – common sense that we ‘go by’ so we don’t have to stop and think about every tiny thing.

For change to happen, we need to do three things:

1. Show people the old stories they ‘go by’ no longer work for them (bike’s broke);
2. Give them new stories they can try out (get on the new bike);
3. Help them repeat the new story through enactment (ride the bike) while also showing them that everyone else is enacting them (also riding the bike).

This is the change action loop of narrative enactment.

Be one step and only one step ahead of the existing script.

there’s another 20% of the population who need to be seen supporting the 3.5%, for change to happen;

practicing narrative not as theory but in the service to organising while holding the grief of what is being taken/lost