The Whys and Why-Nots of Narrative Change

I went to the Eras concert tour this summer with my daughter. She has been a Taylor Swift fan ever since she was a preteen; in fact, I took her to her FIRST Taylor Swift concert when she was 13, and then this was the second time for me, the umpteenth time for her. I can’t say that I’ve been a longtime Taylor Swift fan but the concert was an awe-inspiring experience. It felt spiritual, to be caught up in that level of joyful energy with that many people. I felt sorry for the chaperones who had ventured inside the stadium gates (instead of waiting in the designated areas for pick-up) who were spending the majority of the time looking down at their phones.

Since that time, I’ve been obsessed with Taylor Swift although I realized the other day that I am just as obsessed with the narratives about Taylor Swift as I am with her music. I read the article that accompanied the announcement of Swift as Person of the Year with great interest and I realized that I am not the only one who is tracking Swift’s impact on a narrative level. The writer of the piece, Sam Lansky said of Swift: “She has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique—a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.” Later on in the piece Shonda Rhimes, the powerhouse creator of hugely successful television shows, was quoted as saying essentially the same thing as Lansky—and if there’s anyone who I would trust on the subject of narrative, it would be Shonda Rhimes.

This all led me to reflect on the work of narrative change, which I’ve been heavily engaged in for the past two years, the latest iteration in what has been a multi-chapter career in social sector communications. Narrative change is a hot topic in the social sector these days because many funders and nonprofits are realizing that it’s a powerful ingredient when it comes to making change. In other words, if you want to motivate people to act on racial injustice; climate change; inequitable health care, you not only have to show them how it can be done through pilot/demonstration projects, or through legal and policy levers, you also have to change people’s hearts, minds, and beliefs–and ultimately, the culture–about why this issue is important and why change matters. Narrative change can help you do that. As the Swift example I just shared demonstrates, narrative is a form of power, full stop.

I realize, however, that not all people understand how narrative change strategies align or integrate with other change strategies (the aforementioned legal, policy, and program levers), so I thought I’d use this space to share some thoughts about narrative change that are pretty much always circulating in my mind. There are lots of guides and resources to narrative change out there and I’ll list some at the end of this piece. I just want to be clear that I’m not an expert on this topic: think of me instead as an interested observer and practitioner, trying to figure this stuff out like everyone else. Also, for the purpose of this piece, we’ll go with the definition of narrative as a “pattern or a system of stories.” Lots of people define narrative in different ways–for example, many people use it interchangeably with “story” or “storytelling.”

Let’s begin.

What IS the work of narrative change, anyway? And how is it different than communications in general, or communication campaigns?

The work of narrative change, as I’ve been involved in it, is one step up from what we called message research (in the old days). A couple of decades ago, if I was involved in the launch of a massive, multi-site effort to engage target audiences on a particular topic, we’d call that effort a campaign. And before launching the campaign, we’d want to get our messages set—what talking points, feelings, and facts might resonate the most with our target audiences. So we’d commission research with those target audiences and let me tell you, that was fun stuff. For those of us in the social sector, we were all like ooh! and ah! about how sophisticated consumer research had gotten over on the for-profit side of things, and many of us wondered if those same research techniques could be applied to social change campaigns. To this day, I still remember reading a case study on Proctor & Gamble’s approach to marketing a heartburn medication, which yielded an incredibly detailed and rich profile of their target customer base. Much of their consumer research utilized what was called “psychographic” research, which involved an examination of the deep emotional and belief frameworks that existed across diverse groups of human beings.

The narrative change projects I’ve been involved in recently feel somewhat similar to those message research projects. There’s usually a phase where goals are set and clarified—who are you trying to reach, on which issue, and what change do you hope to see as a result of the changed narratives? Then there’s a phase where you look at what the dominant narratives are with respect to the issue you’re working on—the ones that you want to counteract or replace, because you think they are harmful for the groups you are trying to help. Then there’s the phase where you test what narratives might help support the change you want to see, and then eventually, you test those narratives in real-life settings, not research settings.

Here’s the rub: all of the steps and components I’ve just described? Those are actually just the preliminary steps towards achieving narrative change. And before you get deeper into the work of actually trying to change narratives, here’s another thing people ought to know:

Narratives are not subject to absolute control.

There is an old saying from crisis communications, when it comes to getting ahead of a crisis that affects you or your organization: tell your story and tell it first. In other words, if you don’t put your version of events out, others will fill that void and write your story for you.

In general, as a communications professional, I’d still advise people to get their story straight and get it out there as soon as possible. But I would never, ever make the claim that getting your story out there first is a guaranteed way of making your problems go away. Narratives are not subject to yours, or anyone’s, absolute control. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that narratives resonate or don’t resonate with audiences based on audiences’ beliefs and emotions, and some of those beliefs and emotions are deeply hard-wired into audiences’ mindsets—to the point where they either can’t change, or will require multiple interventions over long periods of time to even shift just a teeny bit.

So this is the tough thing about recommending narrative change strategies to funders and advocates and leaders: I want to say, look, I don’t see how you’re going to make progress on this issue without investing in narrative change, but I also can’t promise you total control over the outcome. In actual fact, most change strategies, narrative or not, are subject to lots of unknown factors that affect or limit the desired outcome. For example, you can support a food bank and in all likelihood, your investment will help address the food insecurity of some families in need. But you also have to acknowledge that your food bank investment will not make a meaningful dent in the health and economic disparities that many families are experiencing across multiple dimensions.

I would also argue that narrative change strategies are particularly susceptible to going awry due to lots of factors outside one’s control because a) we’re living in such noisy, cacophonous times and b) not everyone is playing by the same rules when it comes to narrative change. Which brings me to my next point:

Narratives are not always based on truth.  

This is a hard thing to come to grips with, let me tell you. I was raised by very strict Korean parents and developed a lifelong fear of getting in trouble; I went to law school; I was schooled in my career by a lot of people who believed in the power of facts, evidence, data, research—you get the point. In other words, my sense of integrity about what is true and what is not true is deeply-felt, and I would not want to stand behind any case study, story, or report I write or put out there without the assurance that the piece was informed and shaped by many credible sources and perspectives.

However, my own sense of integrity about truthful narratives sometimes runs counter to what narratives people want to believe, and actually DO end up believing. This is, unfortunately, the diabolical narrative genius of Trump and many MAGA Republicans; they understand that people want to believe in certain narratives because they already feel a certain way about specific topics, so they feed their audiences a steady diet of those narratives, regardless of whether they have any basis in fact (they usually don’t). It reminds me of this episode from the StarTrek: Next Generation television series in which a crew member discovered a game on a planet the Enterprise was visiting that was intensely pleasurable to play (but also a form of mind-control), and brought it back to the Enterprise, and soon everyone was addicted to the game, which turned out to be a plot to infiltrate and take over the Enterprise.

Narratives can work something like that game. They make people feel a certain way; they strengthen or resonate with people’s existing beliefs and predilections. The MAGA Republican voters are filled with fear and uncertainty and anger, some of it having to do with their perceptions of their own economic and social standing, and the MAGA Republicans continue to feed them the narratives that not only validate and stoke their fear and uncertainty and anger, but also direct these emotions to target and harm other groups: Muslims, Black people, immigrants women.

I realize this may be discouraging to hear, although for anyone who’s been paying attention, none of this should feel novel or surprising. What I would say, if I were advising anyone who was working on the right side of things on whether to engage in narrative change strategies, is this: the fact that MAGA Republicans are cynically exploiting the power of false narratives should encourage everyone else to double-down on their investments in narratives that are based in truth and justice and hope. I would urge you to double-down NOT to change the minds of those who want to continue subscribing to false narratives, but because we need more truth-based narratives to inspire and motivate the people who want to keep on fighting for the good causes. This leads me to my final point, which is:

Narratives can help build alliances.

Narratives provide a center around which groups can coalesce and share power. To go back to the Taylor Swift narrative example: she and Beyoncé, who also dominated the entertainment and cultural discourse this past year, were clearly aligned in fighting back against the dominant narrative that women must compete with each other. As she pointed out in the Time interview, “There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé…Clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.” Their refusal to participate in a dominant (and harmful) narrative put out there by the media represented an alignment of power; and in turn, that weakened the dominant narrative.

There are few things as powerful or as uplifting as a positive narrative that is taking hold—the consistent success of abortion rights in state elections has been a welcome antidote to the corrupt display of power that was the Dobbs decision. Similarly, there is nothing so disheartening as narratives that divide and splinter groups that should be actually be in solidarity with one another, such as what’s happening with the ongoing and polarizing commentary on the Israel-Hamas conflict in which people are seemingly being asked to take sides on whether they are human beings or not.

For all of us who work in the narrative space—and that really should be all of us, because we all contribute to or perpetuate narratives in some way—we need to stay focused on the ultimate goal of developing and promulgating the narratives that will help drive and eventually, I hope, reflect the positive changes we want to see in the world. It is not easy work, by any means—as I hope you’ve grasped from this piece, many narrative change strategies will fail or spiral out of one’s influence, or they will take effing FOREVER to take hold and influence the hearts and minds of enough people to make a difference. But narrative change is necessary work. Otherwise, our lives become dominated by the stories that truly are not about us and our communities and take us further away from the futures we want for ourselves and for others.

Resources on narrative change:

—A nifty little video explainer on what narrative is and how narrative change works

—A media research lab to help people re-shape their relationship with the media

—An organization dedicated to shifting narratives for social justice