Author: Patrick

June 2026

As MAGA fascism wages its onslaught on the poorly defended institutions of the American Republic, I have found myself thinking about the movie Jaws. Although a murderous Great White Shark terrorizing America is an apt metaphor for MAGA and their political agenda, it’s really just one line that I’ve been thinking about. That famous moment when the protagonist, played by Roy Scheider, first sees the size of the killer shark they are hunting and realizing they are out-classed declares: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” This echoes a tragically familiar experience to so many of us on the American left: the institutional gap between us and our opponents. In response, I hear a slightly different line looping in my head:  “we’re gonna need a bigger narrative.”

The Right’s Long Rise

The rise of the U.S. Right is a now familiar story. Starting in the 1960s, right-wing elites, still seething about the New Deal realignment and seeing democracy as a fundamental threat to their wealth hoarding, invested heavily in a long-term power-building strategy. At the heart of this effort has been the Right’s focus on building narrative power, that is the ability to redefine shared social expectations and change the parameters of what is considered politically possible.  For a deeper dive into what I mean by narrative power check out this post.

They funded think tanks, built their own media platforms, and trained generations of pundits to proselytize upon them. This all served a strategic orientation of contesting the narrative arena. Which is why, so much of the way the Right engages in politics is by attacking status quo narratives while promoting their own carefully designed authoritarian framing. 

Meanwhile the centrist and left establishments keep on playing what they thought was the real political game: policy. Actually trying to govern and deliver their campaign promises to their different (at times competing) stakeholders. Of course debate was part of their core skill sets too, but they had a significant disadvantage: a naive belief that having the facts on their side would be enough to win arguments and maintain the popularity of their positions. 

Tragically this represents a widespread failure to understand how narrative power operates. The realm of narrative is an arena where although facts are not irrelevant, the true currency of the realm is the ability to create collective meaning. Republican operatives learned long ago that it doesn’t matter whether their stories were actually true or not as long as they reinforce their audience’s core beliefs. Beliefs which have in turn been shaped and sustained by deep immersion in the carefully curated worldview propagated by right-wing media and cultural institutions.

Breaking out of the Right’s Narrative

Fast forward a few generations. This differential investment in narrative power-building has created a public discourse that is largely dominated by right-wing assumptions about race, the economy, and even what democracy means. As social media eroded the traditional gatekeeping role of professional journalism, so-called “conservative media” was well on its way to creating an ideological aligned mass base that was completely insulated from other information sources. The Right’s multigenerational investment in weaponizing narrative had paid off in spades. Add in an autocratic billionaire reality TV show host with a gift for performative grievance and a racist conspiracy theory about the first Black President and there was no going back.  

These are the conditions that helped allow Donald Trump, a blatant conman and predator to win an election and begin immediately implementing his authoritarian agenda. Trumps’ Make America Great Again (MAGA) narrative offers a permission structure for strongman politics based in racism and xenophobia. It puts a contemporary nationalist gloss on the type of supremacist us-versus-them worldview that has deep roots in American history. It may be popular with Trump’s base but it is also their movement’s achilles heel because it is not a majoritarian narrative. 

Which is why as the regime’s thuggery grabbed popular attention it also sparked mass resistance. The largest protests in US history represents the most visible tier of opposition to MAGA fascism. But even more important is the deeper local organizing happening through the community defense and mutual aid networks necessary to protect one another from ICE raids. Particularly the multi-tiered resistance to Trump’s Minnesota surge in early 2026 inspired the nation and showed the regime can be pushed back.  

It is important to understand how much the regime’s ability to extend and abuse its governing power is reliant on their MAGA cover story. Every government, even the most repressive, requires the consent of its subjects in order to function. Popular acquiescence, particularly in the face of unpopular policies, is based on perceived legitimacy.

Expanding the Believability Horizon for System Change 

The best way to inoculate people against MAGA narrative is with our own compelling alternatives. Not via shrill, ideological sloganeering but in ways that connects system change to real world issues.  But to do so we must expand the “believability horizon” for system change. Big, distant visions can be very inspiring and motivate us to rethink short-term priorities… but only if our audiences accept the vision as plausible. 

This is the “believability horizon” that any ambitious social change narrative must successfully define for its audiences. If our narrative stays on the credible side of that horizon, regardless of how far away it may seem, our vision will inspire the audience to follow us in taking the first steps towards that distant horizon. But if our vision falls on the wrong side of our audience’s believability horizon then it seems unstrategic, impossible or crazy. In this case our persuasion fails and people are unlikely to move at all.

Left narrative needs to articulate “transition pathways” that clarify potential ways forward and provide some shorter-term goals. Presenting smaller stepping stones of progress is an effective way to shorten the believability horizon. As the interlocking democracy and ecological crisis deepens we need bigger stories that build the conceptual and real world bridges between the limited political space we have now and actual system change. And the stakes are getting higher.

Fascism as the Bitter Frosting on the Eco-Collapse Cake?

There is widespread recognition in the anti-MAGA resistance that there is no going back. The fascist tendencies in the US not only pre-date Trump, they are baked into the original founding of the county as a settler colonial project using stolen Africans to transform stolen Indigenous land. Denying the systemic roots of our crisis is a recipe for continuing to cede political ground to rising authoritarianism.

Particularly because our situation is worse than just an attempted fascist takeover: we are also facing accelerating ecological breakdown. As our planet’s interconnected ecological systems are increasingly disrupted by the sustained assault of global capitalism, the shock waves are rippling into people’s everyday lives: deadly extreme weather, price shocks, massive displacement. Decades of scientific warnings have told us we need to phase out fossil fuels, transform our food systems and escape consumption-driven, growth dependent economic models. But standing in the way of these common-sense reforms is the entrenched power of economic elites including an ever-growing and increasingly emboldened billionaire class.

Tragically, when we zoom out to see the larger context, it becomes clear that many elites are choosing authoritarianism as their preferred response to accelerating ecological breakdown. They are promoting political movements that “punch down” to scapegoat those on the margins by blaming migrants or racial and gender minorities. Unless we break this pattern we may slide rapidly into a future where fascism is the bitter frosting on an eco-collapse cake.

Solidarity is the Antidote to Fascism

One bright side of Trump’s authoritarianism is that it is NOT subtle. He makes fascist threats, gives fascist speeches, appoints fascists to positions of power and increasingly passes fascist policies. Given the right-wing capture of much of our media system there is a lot of gaslighting telling us this is just a swing of the political pendulum and that things are really pretty much normal. But fortunately most of us know this is not true. But knowing is not the same as acting.

Some of the best movement comms has been helping people understand the situation and see their self-interest in uniting across differences to resist Trump’s attacks. Which is why some of the “bigger” narratives that movement organizers have been using to mobilize people are pulling from shared historical or cultural references. Whether it’s using Martin Niemoller’s famous poem about German complicity with the Nazis or symbols from the popular Star Wars spin-off Andor, shared references provide a shortcut to explaining what’s at stake and why people should join the movement to stop Trump.

We know there is an antidote to fascism, to war, to racism, to ecocide, and we all already know what it is because of legacies bequeathed to us by generations of our ancestors who fought on our behalf. The antidote is solidarity. Solidarity across divisions of race, class and culture. Solidarity across issues, across place and ultimately across time as we both act to repair past injustices and to defend the rights of future generations. Solidarity is an action but it’s also a bigger narrative that can connect and energize organizing across many different struggles. 

Because the truth is MAGA and the dominant system that birthed their movement, IS a giant killer monster. So if we are going to build diverse mass movements that is not only powerful enough to stop them attacking everything we love, but also to build the society that works for people and planet… we’re gonna need a bigger narrative.

Image credit: Maura Losch & Axios

May 2026

I was recently asked to describe the U.S. Right’s general narrative and explain why it has been effective. Here’s an excerpt from what I said:

At the heart of it, the Right’s narrative is mobilizing fear and resentment. Many of us are understandably preoccupied with the fact that their story is generally factually untrue. But the often overlooked part is actually the mobilizing part. They are telling a story with both urgency and agency.

Two big reasons that I think their whole approach is effective. First, The Right understands and prioritizes narrative power. If narrative power is a new or murky concept, you can check out some of my other short pieces on the topic here or here. The Right pushes a narrative-first strategy, meaning that they invest in popularizing big narratives that propagate a specific worldview and then they situate their priority issues within those narratives. Their audience doesn’t need to understand the nuance of policy or the complexity of governing, just that the fight is at hand. 

Their strategy is doing exactly what anyone who wants to align and mobilize large political blocs needs to do, which is to “narrate change” by providing shared frames that help people interpret the bigger trends they are already seeing around them. The Right is amplifying and repeating again and again a few big interconnected narratives that offer explanatory models for what people are experiencing in real life.

Like the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” which they have elevated from fringe racist conspiracy theory to a go-to excuse for every failing of our current system. The idea of a coordinated strategy to replace the white population offers a “permission structure” – an emotional and psychological justification that supports behavior change– for both scapegoating immigrants for any and all problems and for seeing Democrats not just as political opponents but as actual traitors with a secret agenda to destroy America. They do the same thing with the “woke-mind virus,” climate denial, or what they like to call “energy dominance” and even their central, and incredibly vague idea of “Making America Great Again.”

Weaponizing Transgression

The Right is constantly in attack mode and even pre-empting their critics by “projecting” their motives and techniques onto their opponents. As the saying goes: “every accusation is a confession.” Like how the Right has long used the spectre of “voter fraud” as an excuse to try and steal elections themselves even to the point that their more ambitious recent efforts to subvert electoral democracy, the SAVE Act is framed around safeguarding elections. Spectacle trumps (pun intended) substance as a way to monopolize attention and make it appear that their ideas have far more popular support than they actually do.

Trump himself, if not the architect of this style of politics is clearly its embodiment. He never concedes anything to his critics, not even the most objectively factual criticisms. Instead he just fills the air waves with counter-accusations and tries to monopolize all the attention. He is often not trying to persuade, rather just trying to overpower. 

Another horrifying but fascinating phenomenon at the center of the Trump appeal is his ability to mobilize his base by transgressing social and political norms. Transgression, first harnessed by the so-called alt-right of the twenty teens [check out Angela Nagle’s account of this phenomenon in her 2017 book Kill All Normies], has become one of Trump’s core political approaches. Since 2015 when he descended the escalator and launched his Presidential campaign by spewing racist attacks, he has convinced his supporters that his overt bigotry should be understood as “tell-it-like-it-is” authenticity.

Trump breaks discursive norms and in so doing he signals that his followers no longer need to follow the norms. As with all his politics, Trump’s approach to race is narrative first. As many have observed, he has forsaken conservatism’s coded language about race and turned racist dog whistles into air raid sirens. This approach is at the core of Trump’s evil genius for attracting attention. It has allowed him to harness racialized grievance into an explosive political force which he has used to undermine generations of hard-won progress challenging overt bigotry and ongoing structural racism. 

If You Have Lots Of Enemies You Must be a Victim, Right?

The Right is always naming enemies and they’ve got lots of them: it’s Democrats, liberals, trans people, immigrants, the woke-mind virus… and everything is a threat. For the Right the conflict is always existential: the fight for the survival of not only the nation but their supporters’ very way of life. Dems and their “Globalist” allies (note the antisemetic dog whistle) are opening the borders in order to steal elections so they can confiscate guns, ban hamburgers and brainwash children with their woke ideology. All the blatant exaggeration encourages their base to demonize and “other” anyone who disagrees with them. 

The Right is constantly generating resentment and using outrage as a mobilizing tool by casting their base as the victims. They are disrespected by the elites, who it turns out are not the billionaire industrialists or Wall Street bankers who actually destroyed our economy, but rather Hollywood liberals and condescending professors. You are unemployed not because corporate America shipped their factories to foreign countries with more exploitable work forces but because of critical race theory!

Perhaps most sinister among their reality-distorting narratives is how they have so rapidly shifted the discourse on racial discrimination. Trump’s skill for packaging transgression as anti-establishment truth telling has created a permission structure for overt racism and white supremacy. The universal moral appeal of the Black Lives Matter movements has been misrepresented as anti-Americanism that is a thinly veiled effort to legalize “reverse discrimination.” In fact the real racism, we are told, is the accusations against white MAGA supporters for being racist. It’s Orwellian, and not necessarily persuasive to audiences who don’t already share Trump’s underlying assumptions but it shows the critical role of narrative strategy in legitimizing real world power grabs. 

Controlling the Mode of Communication

The second reason the Right’s narrative strategy is effective might be even more important, because well-designed narrative alone doesn’t magically equate to power. The force multiplier for narrative power is the ability to communicate at scale and over the past 50 years they have built the infrastructure necessary to win this larger Battle of the Story.

The Right’s strategy of making massive investments in idea production through the funding of right wing think tanks is well known but it’s important to distinguish between idea generation and shifting the discourse to normalize those previously fringe ideas. From their original creation of direct mail in the 1970s, initial investments into AM radio in the 1980s and then cable news in the 1990s, the Right has been engaged in mass political education designed to shape worldviews and drag the Overton window to the Right. With the Democrats refusing to be an opposition party and instead embracing much of the same neoliberal, pro-empire, fossil-fueled vision of the country, the dominant discourse in the US is largely shaped by right-wing assumptions. 

And of course it is that context we should all be working to change. First and foremost through our organizing but also through the narratives we base that organizing in. The Right wants to trap us in their fake version of a left-right framework where they rebrand corporate centrists like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer as socialist agitators. But a better narrative for enabling the politics we need to overthrow an oligarchy is top versus bottom: the billionaires and their bought-and-paid for political lackeys versus the rest of us. As great resources like the Race-Class Narrative show, we can reject the elite effort to divide people and unite a multiracial majority around economic and racial justice. 

Trump is Just the Symptom. We Need to Change the Rules

So if we’re looking for how we can “narrate change” towards a more just and hopeful future, helping people understand the role of wealthy elites in undercutting democracy is one important place to start. Because the truth is that Trump is just the symptom. The rules have always been rigged in favor of the wealthy in America, but it’s gotten much worse recently.

In the past few decades organized labor has been sidelined and a bipartisan “donor class” now shapes political policy for both parties. The country has passed a tipping point into elite rule. The rapidly growing billionaire class undid many of the restraints designed to prevent the rich from translating their money directly into political power. Perhaps the best known of these is the Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United case which expanded previous (absurd) rulings casting money as a form of protected speech and opened the flood gates of electoral corruption.

This chart shows the sharp increase in spending after the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision legalized so-called “Super PACs” that allow unlimited anonymous donations to be channelled into the political process.

Now we live inside the system that legalized political bribery has created and we can’t get out without making sweeping changes to our current 2 party, “pay-to-play” electoral system. Our job as organizers is to help more people reject the Right’s scapegoating that “punches down” at already marginalized constituencies and instead join us in “punching up” at the people and institutions really running our system.

Our movements are already building the capacity and infrastructure to mobilize millions of people newly radicalized by Trump’s authoritarianism. As these new constituencies join in the collective actions spreading across America, it is disrupting the right-wing echo chamber. We CAN redirect mass outrage towards the economic elites who are actually causing our collective pain, and we MUST. There is no other way to move down the long, bumpy road towards America becoming a functioning multiracial democracy. 

Image created by J Cookson of smartMeme Studios

What Can We Learn from a Powerful Story?

The impact of effective storytelling is widely recognized. We are a culture that loves our stories whether it’s the latest Hollywood blockbuster playing out on a screen or a parable from a sacred text being recounted from a pulpit. Storytelling is a best practice for everything from selling shampoo to recruiting for political campaigns. 

When we hear an emotionally resonant story it is common to call it a “powerful story.” So that means that story has power right? But what kind of power is it? How should we think about it and what does it mean for the types of ambitious social change efforts that we know are so desperately needed?

All Power Relationships Have a Narrative Component

Let’s start with recognizing that we humans are fundamentally narrative animals who construct elaborate conceptual systems like culture, religion and identity that shape our lives. Our physical realities are deeply entwined with abstracted social constructions so we are constantly toggling between objective, fact-based “reality” aka truth and “representations of reality” aka meaning which is how someone chooses to interpret that reality. As we all experience, there are often a wide range of contrasting interpretations of the so-called “truth” so that process of collective meaning-making which creates those different versions of the truth is in and of itself, a type of power and often a site of contestation. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes this aspect of power as “the ability to fix meaning in the discourse.” This is how specific narratives come to structure our shared social realities such as defining conventional wisdom or making the status quo seem normal, as if were the only way things could be.

Narrative power is a way of talking about the narrative component of existing power relationships. Every power relationship, whether it’s coercive or collaborative or even so invisibilized it’s considered normative, has a narrative component. Narrative power helps us think about not only how specific stories might impact us, but also the deeper expression of how certain worldviews might shape our sense of reality. Narrative power is very multi-faceted and fluid: it operates more overtly as persuasion, motivation or coercion but also on deeper levels like defining common sense, shaping identities or normalizing current power relationships. 

Here in the United States where a history of genocide and mass enslavement has been whitewashed as “democracy,” many of the narratives that prop up the status quo are essentially lies. These toxic mythologies (what in my work I sometimes called “control myths”) are often harnessed by unscrupulous power holders for their own agenda.  As usual Donald Trump provides the most unsubtle of examples: His claim to “Make America Great Again” doesn’t sound that different from 19th century efforts to justify imperialism with narratives like “Manifest Destiny” or the “White Man’s Burden.”

Organizers are Storytellers

There is plenty of evidence for narrative’s deep roots in human evolution. Storytelling has been one of our species’ central activities probably since before we learned how to light the fire that we sat around as we shared important tales. However I think the changes in communication technology in the past few generations have expanded the scope and significance of narrative as a key arena of struggle. We live in an era of designer narratives. Our attention is besieged by pervasive advertising that has undermined our shared information environment and created the context for more aggressive PR and increasingly information warfare-style efforts to manipulate public opinion.

But narrative is not just a “master’s tool.” Not only is it a collective inheritance from our past it has always been central to the work of organizing and building power. Organizers help people come together to share their stories and find commonality in their experience. People then create a shared story about the problems they are facing and more importantly about what it will take to solve them. The classic community organizing process of uniting people around their shared interests and investing them in a vision of a better future is fundamentally an exercise in developing a shared narrative. When this shared narrative gets big enough that it connects lots of people across space and time it becomes one of the defining components of a social movement. 

But here in the United States, that same elite version of the national narrative that masks the true horrors of settler colonialism has also stolen our history of collective struggle. The very idea of a social movement has been distorted through broad erasure or where it does survive it has been turned into a toothless, sentimentalized caricature. So as change agents we need to always keep telling the larger narrative about what a social movement is and reminding ourselves that collective organizing has been one of the primary drivers of historic progress. [For more on this theme see my blog post on Reasons to Fall in Love with Social Movements ]

Messaging is Tactical while Narrative is Strategic

Given that modern electoral politics has become dominated by media spectacle and we are all bombarded by so-called “horse race coverage” there is a lot of casual familiarity with some of the campaign mechanics of this specific area of social change. For instance, “messaging,” or how we use language to persuade and mobilize specific audiences by crafting the right message, is a term of art that has become widely understood. Which makes sense since hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each election cycle on this type of elaborate, often poll-tested, word smithing, so we are all exposed to this particularly visible aspect of designer narratives. And presumably this is why I am often asked to clarify the difference between messaging and narrative strategy.

So here goes: While messaging is certainly an expression of narrative power and therefore a part of narrative strategy development, since it focuses primarily on the words we use, it is best understood as a final implementation phase of a narrative strategy. Of course it is important, but it is really just a surface expression of narrative power. Messaging is a tactic. Understanding the deeper narratives at play––particularly as embodied by messengers, appeals to collective identity and perhaps most profoundly by the message’s relationship to deeper values and unstated assumptions––is the realm of broader strategy. When we think more holistically about narrative power, we can help our messages become more than just transactional appeals and better serve our goals of actually building transformative power and potential. 

Why We Need Narrative Power Analysis

So for those of us working for social change, narrative power is already an embedded aspect of the work we are all doing. And by naming it we can become more attentive to how this critical form of power operates. Which is why “narrative power analysis” (NPA) is such a useful framework. 

NPA helps us understand how different narratives work which is essential since to challenge them we need to take them seriously on their own terms. Anyone who thought just pointing out that your opponent was lying was enough to stop them hasn’t been paying much attention to the Trump era.

One easy way to do NPA is to use the five common “elements of story” as openings to explore how the story operates. This type of narrative power analysis explores the mechanics of how conflict is framed, which characters are centered while others are invisibilized, how imagery or metaphor is deployed and how different potential futures are foreshadowed. Perhaps most importantly, NPA invites us to identify the underlying assumptions of specific narratives, which I like to define as “what you have to believe in order to believe that the story is true.” 

This type of analysis can help us identify contradictions and vulnerabilities (aka “points of intervention”) where we can potentially disrupt destructive narratives.  Even more importantly we can use NPA to design more effective and compelling narratives to reframe debates and engage new people in our movements for change.

So as we are working to change the system one of the first places we should start is asking what are the stories that are at play and how we can change them?

Find out more about narrative power analysis including how you can use it to win campaigns and build movements in the book Re:Imagining Change which has a whole chapter on this critical topic.

Image by Dayne Topkin

Narrative is central to the human experience and thus it is entangled with every aspect of social change work. Which is why many social change leaders grapple with narrative as a crosscutting component that connects all their work and are often exploring how to grow their organizations capacity to “do” narrative work.

But the realm of narrative is expansive: from the way organizations articulate their mission and frame their campaigns to the internal meaning-making processes that nurture political alignment or the stories that organizers tell to explain, motivate and mobilize. So it’s helpful to have a simple framework to outline some different steps towards building narrative power, as well as some scoping questions to help organizations explore which aspects of narrative work to prioritize. 

Let’s start by defining narrative power. Like any other form of power, narrative power is about “the ability to achieve a shared purpose.” However, narrative power is unique because all power relationships have a narrative aspect. So for example if we want to change a policy or stop a bad thing happening, our narrative power defines our ability to reach, persuade and engage key audiences that can then put pressure on the decision-makers we are targeting. This narrative arena doesn’t exist separately from other types of power expressed in political or economic relationships but it does operate differently and therefore provide unique opportunities and often disproportionate impacts.

For more on narrative power and its multifaceted applications in social change work, check out my book Re:Imagining Change. For the purpose of developing narrative strategy the most important starting point for thinking about narrative power is that we aren’t just trying to tell stories, we are also trying to change stories, particularly the fundamental stories that justify an unsustainable and unjust status quo.

A Simple Framework Towards Building Narrative Power

Below are some key ingredients for building narrative power that can help your organization assess where support would be most useful. They are listed chronologically because that is the optimal sequence, particularly if starting from scratch on a new issue or initiative, but usually some work is already happening in all these areas.

Step 1) ORGANIZING: Coordination and alignment among key stakeholders “Define and align the sector.” This can be a big cross-section of groups or just a few practitioners. But it is important to be realistic about scale. It is very difficult for an individual organization to shift discourse by itself, but when aligned organizations coordinate, engage their networks and intentionally deploy narrative strategy together it can have a much bigger impact.  

Step 2) ANALYSIS: Development of shared analysis of narrative landscape To create an effective strategy to change narratives it is important to begin with some shared understanding of the existing narratives. This usually means assessing the dominant narratives that must be contested including their potential vulnerabilities and ways to intervene and shift the discourse.

Step 3) STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT: Co-creation of shared narrative strategy The process of engaging the right allies in order to co-create an effective product: some aspect of shared narrative strategy. 

Step 4) INFRASTRUCTURE: Development of narrative delivery mechanisms Preparing communications infrastructure such as strategic messengers and coalition coordination systems as well as communication assets like talking points, story banks, reports, videos etc.

Step 5 (ongoing) DEPLOYMENT & PRAXIS : Launch, assess, iterate The narrative comes to life through the actions we take–the campaigns your organization is running. But narrative shift takes time. So there needs to be some infrastructure to drive the cycle of praxis: action, monitoring, assessment and iteration. This is what allows for a narrative strategy to evolve and sustain over the time needed to have an impact.

Some Questions to Help Define the Scope of a Narrative Project

Assessment: What is the current state of your organization’s narrative capacity? 

• Where is your organization and broader work on your issue area in terms of the 5 areas outlined above? 
  • What already exists in terms of relationships, shared analysis and capacity that can be used to grow narrative power? 
• For campaigning organizations it can often be helpful to think backwards from your campaign goals to assess opportunity and align with potential activities.

Existing skill and shared orientation with narrative power?

• Some organizations are sophisticated narrative practitioners while some are new to the entire approach. So it is important to assess internal skill and capacity. Do the key participants already have a clear understanding of narrative power and how narrative strategy will connect existing areas of work? We often call this a narrative orientation.
• It is often helpful to start a narrative project with some training or capacity-building to do some level-setting and create shared frameworks.

Deliverable: what would be a useful end product of a narrative project at this time?

• Given the expansive scope of narrative, a group can do a lot of thinking and creative work without it necessarily translating into a clear outcome. So it is helpful for your broader assessment to anchor the process in some clear deliverables. “Constraints drive creativity!”
• Particularly some deliverables are easier for an outside consultant to do without requiring much organizational capacity, like a narrative landscape assessment or messaging audit. While a more ambitious narrative strategy might require broader stakeholder engagement in both participatory research and facilitated strategy sessions.
• Maybe you already have a narrative superstar on your staff and all they need is some training and coaching to lead an internal process?

How participatory does a project need to be to succeed?

• Narrative Strategy work is time consuming and therefore needs to be appropriately scaled to match your organizations budgets and timelines. It’s important not just to have the budget to hire outside practitioners to design and lead a narrative strategy process but your staff also needs to have the time to prioritize that process and ensure it will shift outcomes.
• Given all the stakeholders inevitably over-stretched capacity, what is the best way to access different stakeholder’s insights? Maybe a survey or interviews with constituency leaders and key issue experts? Will the right people have the capacity to participate in co-creating a strategy?

Capacity? Not just money but your time!

• Narrative Strategy work is time consuming and therefore needs to be appropriately scaled to match your organizations budgets and timelines. It’s important not just to have the budget to hire outside practitioners to design and lead a narrative strategy process but your staff also needs to have the time to prioritize that process and ensure it will shift outcomes.
• Given all the stakeholders inevitably over-stretched capacity, what is the best way to access different stakeholder’s insights? Maybe a survey or interviews with constituency leaders and key issue experts? Will the right people have the capacity to participate in co-creating a strategy?

Timelines and integration?

• Are there other processes, convenings or external events that a potential scope should take into consideration? For example: maybe a key coalition already has a working group that meets monthly and we could use some of those sessions to do generative work together. Or there is some other external campaign hook that offers a narrative launch moment or an internal organizational process that should sync up with any narrative work that happens.

What to Get more Specific? Contact Patrick to see if he could support you or your organization on the project you are exploring…

More at: https://www.patrickreinsborough.com/home/consulting/

or How Automated Time Changes Give Me Sci-Fi Dystopian Tingles

The ongoing techno-capitalist enclosure of our imaginations is happening every day. But sometimes it takes something as seemingly innocuous as the time change to make you write about it…

Daylight savings time. Spring forward. Fall back. A seasonal ritual easily adapted into daily life. But as the computer age made the process more automated it has always felt a little claustrophobic. The invisible forces that are revealed. So convenient. What’s not to like? But it’s a fine line between convenience and control. Which is why I wrote this poem to explore the theme.

An Age of Exquisitely Rational Cannibals or How Automated Time Changes Give Me Sci-Fi Dystopian Tingles

i. seamlessness can be quite unseemly

May 2025

It’s easy to dismiss Trump as a poorly scripted conman who wears his narcissism on his sleeve. But if the Trump era proves anything it’s that something can be both absurd and incredibly dangerous. If we want to reverse the slide into authoritarianism we need to understand how Trump has weaponized narrative.

Trump is famous for his endless firehose of blatant lies––from his stolen election metanarrative to blaming Ukraine for getting invaded, to his constant dehumanization of migrants and people of color. But this deceit is so systematic that “lying” is too small a term to capture its grandiose ambition.

The Make America Great Again narrative is more accurately understood as a type of mass PsyOp unleashed on the civilian population. The Trump regime is weaponizing make-believe, manufacturing fake crises to terrorize and manipulate their base and in the process disrupting any shared public understanding of what is actually happening. American politics has been transformed into an information battlefield so immersive it is best described as an effort to disrupt reality. 

As Italian anti-fascist Ignazio Silone famously wrote in 1938 “Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.” In other words, fascism is first and foremost an attack on reality. Trump is using the same playbook. By weaponizing lies about a stolen election, DEI or immigrants causing America’s systemic inequality he is constructing an alternate reality. In his reality – amplified by the vast right-wing communications infrastructure – he is leading his patriotic supporters on a life or death crusade to save the nation from existential threats. Everything he says and does re-enforces this alternate reality where he is reacting, defending the true America against an imaginary revolution of “radical left socialist Democrats.”

This is extraordinarily dangerous. It is using narrative power to create the permission structures which legitimizes the kind of dehumanization that leads to violence and mass repression. So how do we build mass resistance to Trump’s assault on our political norms? 

Nobody Stormed the Bastille Because of a Pie Chart

Well, nobody stormed the Bastille because of a pie chart or a well researched report. Not to say the facts aren’t important but sadly they don’t help that much with fighting fascism. They are waging a reality war on us, exploiting what Steve Bannon has famously called “muzzle velocity” to bombard us with a daily stream of egregious attacks on rule of law and human rights. That pace, and Trump’s skill at monopolizing attention, keep us all off-balance and reactive.

The work of building a mass democracy move to overthrow the regime is deeply enmeshed with the work of building narrative power. If MAGA wants to pretend they are countering a revolution then it’s up to us to give them an actual revolution, one that represents the broadest united front to stop the Trump’s regime’s assault on rule of law.

We need to organize across differences and engage in the process of crafting umbrella narratives that can help scale our movements for resistance and transformation. That means organizing an inviting insurrection, where we articulating a collective refusal that is as compelling as it is unignorable.

Remember you don’t have to wait for Trump to invade your city to get organized. Courage is contagious. Here’s the simple 3 step version of what we need to do.

How We Organize to Stop MAGA #Fascism

1) Don’t legitimize a wanna-be dictator: denounce, obstruct, resist.

2) Build the biggest pro-democracy movement possible: skip purity tests. We need numbers.

3) Don’t let him divide us: whoever Trump attacks, we defend. Solidarity is the antidote to fascism.

UPDATE Dec 2025: Some of the concepts in this post have been expanded upon in my recent article for The Forge Winning the Reality War Against Fascism and Ecological Collapse: Lessons from the Right’s Narrative Strategy.

3/11/2025

The Silicon Valley billionaires have an endgame

The Silicon Valley billionaires have an endgame. It’s called the Network State and it’s essentially an openly fascist mashup of techno authoritarianism and feudalism. It is a stunningly ambitious agenda, sometimes called “Start-Up Nations” all stemming from venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan 2022 book The Network State: How To Start a New Country although the idea of the Network State has been around for a decade before that in elite tech circles.  It’s already coming to life around the world in corporate city-states like Prospera in Honduras or the mysterious new city tech elites have been trying to build in California’s Solano County.

Driving wedges into the fault lines of the MAGA coalition

I think the idea of the Network State is a great target to publicize because the ideology and naked billionaire class interests that it represents, are way out beyond what the MAGA base supports. It’s half crazy, sci-fi fantasy, very aligned with transhumanist and even post-biological visions of the future. The ideology it represents is the reason for Steve Bannon’s public attacks on Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen. He is fighting their influence in the MAGA coalition because he see that their ideas would elevate oligarchs like Andreessen, founder of one of the largest Venture Capital firms in the world as essentially kings in a new system that Bannon has called technofeudalism.

Think of the way the Right used “critical race theory” – identifying an esoteric part of the broader progressive project, elevating it out of context and using it to frame the debate in a way that mobilized right-wing resentment and split progressives. It was unethical and highly effective. I’m not suggesting we borrow the unethical part––because our claims are actually true––just the effective part.

If we want to defeat authoritarianism we need to drive wedges that break up the larger MAGA coalition. Drawing attention to the Network State ideology can mobilize ordinary people to resist technofascism while heightening the contradictions that could split MAGA. 

Beware the Network State agenda is coming to life as “Freedom Cities”

And it’s important we do it now, before the tech broligarchy manages to normalize this new type of extremism. Or worse, harness the very crises they are generating to make it seem like the best path forward. Their vision is coming to life legislatively as “Freedom Cities.” The VC clique that created Prospera (the corporate city in Honduras) has now put together a “Freedom Cities Coalition” that is actively pushing legislation. We stand at the cusp of a huge historic pivot away from even the semblance of Democracy towards tech authoritarianism. It’s essential we stop it now before the oligarchs solidify their alliance with the MAGA rank and file and build a whole new power base.

And don’t forget to connect it all to world class creep Curtis Yarvin 

And for folks familiar with Curtis Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment ideas around replacing the U.S. President with a CEO with full dictatorial power, there is an opportunity to connect all this to his creepy worldview. The Network State blueprint emerges from the same set of Silicon Valley thinkers and is seen by many as an aligned vision. It could be their stepping stone to a full transformation of the US system or just a way to abandon large swaths of the population by destroying governance as we know it. Or step towards Yarvin’s infamous fantasy (he claims he was joking) of “converting non-productive people into biodiesel.”

These careless oligarchs have left a long paper trail of their elite, undemocratic, and frankly spooky ideas. We need to use it to expose their sinister intentions and frame the ongoing battle against MAGA and authoritarianism.  Which is why we should all be talking about the Network State now before they can solidify the power to implement this dangerous agenda.

Some different resources to learn more about the Tech Fascist Agenda

Here’s a couple of good resources to learn more:

• Gil Duran’s blog https://www.thenerdreich.com  has dedicated the last year to tracking the rise of Bay area technofascism and broke the story about the Freedom City vision for the Presidio. I highly recommend his handy 5 minute explainer video.
• Wired has good coverage of the Freedom Cities Coalition: https://www.wired.com/story/startup-nations-donald-trump-legislation 
• https://www.vcinfodocs.com/what-is-the-network-state

UPDATE 4/13/25: Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor have written a very useful piece in the UK Guardian called The Rise of End Times Fascism which analyzes the apocalyptic assumptions that have united the Christian Right, Tech Oligarch “accelerationism” and the MAGA base. Highly recommend as a good overview and political compass since we can’t stop their doomsday agenda unless we understand it.

UPDATE 5/22/25: File under Sh*t-Is-Getting-Weirder… Emile P. Torres, the researcher who coined the term TESCREAL to help explain various overlapping ideologies like transhumanism that have become popular among the tech elite, outlines some of the existing tensions around Artificial Intelligence within the MAGA coalition in this fascinating piece in Truthdig:Machine Learning MAGA: Rise of the Christian Cyborg

May 6, 2025

I grew up in the 1980s acutely aware of both the threat of nuclear armageddon and the fact that millions of people had been working for decades to end it. I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard the phrase “Ban the Bomb” but it had a great ring to it and it stuck. Although 122 nations have banned the bomb, the nine countries, including the U.S. that currently possess these weapons of mass destruction have refused to join this common sense movement. So sadly amidst all the various threats emerging in this time of polycrisis nuclear weapons are still in the mix. The work continues.

But today I’m struck by a different type of bomb that has been amassing more and more explosive power in our society for the past few decades. The is the force of global economics which has been sucking up planetary resources and concentrating them into unimaginably large amounts of wealth in the hands of an infinitesimally small global super-elite.

Let’s call it the BILLIONAIRE BOMB, the astounding fact that according to Forbes as of April 2025, roughly 3000 individuals (87% of them men), have over $1 billion dollars of personal wealth. On a planet with over 8 billion people, they represent less than .00003% of the global population but control nearly half of all wealth on the planet. The accumulation of wealth has gotten so extreme that a new term has been coined: centibillionaire, to describe the 15 individuals with fortunes valued at over $100 billion. And the phenomenon is continuing to get worse. In their latest annual report on global inequality Oxfam predicts that we are on track for up to five trillionaires within the decade.

Now the existence of billionaires may not produce a blinding flash of annihilation or mushroom clouds of toxic radiation, but make no mistake it is still a deadly bomb. It is exploding in a slower, far less visible way that is in fact undermining the basic structures and poisoning the principles of our society. 

And with the return of Donald Trump, the United States once more has a billionaire as President. But in reality Trump is just the symptom, a metastasization of the broader cancer of unchecked money that has long-been growing in the U.S. political system. In an economic system where money is power you can’t have billionaire level concentrations of wealth and continue to have a functioning democracy, even one where the idea of democracy is as over-hyped and aspirational as it is in the U.S. 

Because you know what capitalism has been really great at producing for the last generation? BILLIONAIRES. Lots of them. As the chart below shows the United State went from 66 billionaires in 1990 to 748 in 2023! And their ranks have continued to grow so that according to the latest reports in April 2025 the US now has 902 billionaires.

Trickle Down is a Sick Joke

Meanwhile, to the extent that it is even acknowledged, our politicians and pundits tell us more billionaires is actually good because it means the economy is growing and that’s good for everyone right? WRONG.

Yep, that’s a  bunch of Republican members of Congress, back when Paul Ryan was still the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, laughing after they got away with passing yet another tax cut for the rich. Even they are amazed that they continue to get away with such blatant deceit.

They made up “trickle down economics” as a control mythology to convince us there is something reasonable about having super wealthy oligarchs. “Trickle down economics” is a lie intended to distract us from a reality that is more accurately described as SUCTION UP economics where the super rich get even richer while the rest of us fall behind. Their wealth grows exponentially. Our wages grow… sometimes not at all.

“Well they are all geniuses who invented things and worked super hard. They are self-made billionaires.” Yeah right. Don’t believe that bullsh*t. This is just rich people gaming the rules so they can get unimaginably richer.

The Billionaires Dream of Becoming the Ultimate Vampires

And here’s one more chart just to help us visualize how much the billionaires and richest echelons of society increasingly control almost all the wealth in American society. This chart showing the distribution of family wealth is an insane hockey stick curve that helps us visualize how much of the total wealth is being hoarded by a tiny number of super wealthy families. This perverse distribution translates into concentrations of power that are fundamentally at odds with a functioning democracy

And in addition to the billionaires getting more and more powerful they are increasingly getting weirder. As University of Chicago history professor Gabriel Winant described it in a post-election essay in Dissent magazine: “… the rise of an engorged, predatory, and increasingly insane billionaire class, obsessed with eugenics and immortality”

I think we should be talking more about the billionaire immortality obsession. Not only are they trying to hijack our society’s medical research agenda for their longevity fetish, rather than say curing cancer or just giving working people health care. But imagine if they actually succeeded? The richest people in human history, burning our dwindling global resources at a previously unimaginable rate while consolidating unprecedented power, and then on top of all that…they live FOREVER!? This is a true horror story. The ultimate vampire capitalism where our overlords are rapidly morphing beyond the healthy constraints of what it means to be human. Even Steve Bannon, terrifying in his own right as a MAGA Field Marshall of 21st Century Ethnonationalism, denounces the billionaire oligarchs, their technofeudalism and their obsession with eternal life.

So let’s face reality. We don’t need to accept billionaires. In fact we can’t, if we want to have a shot at a creating a true multiracial democracy.  So as we mobilize to (nonviolently) overthrow our fascist billionaire President, let’s help people realize if we want an democratic society, not to mention an economy that works for people AND planet, then we need to get rid of the whole idea of billionaires. It’s time to BAN THE BILLIONAIRE before it’s too late.

Nobody is saying it’s going to be easy because as it stands right now, it is too late. Our political system and economy have become completely co-opted by billionaires and the super-rich.  However part of the value of articulating a clear vision is so we can organize around it.  We name billionaires as the villain so that when elite propaganda tells people to punch down by blaming migrants, or transkids or whatever latest marginalized group is being scapegoated, nobody falls for it. 

Instead our job is to point out that the whole idea of individuals having billionaire–level wealth is an unacceptable pathology that a healthy society cannot tolerate. We are helping people understand the real source of our current problems and offering them a chance to punch up. This is critical because if left-wing populism is invisible then right-wing populism is inevitable.

So let’s all “Rise” like the determined orca targeting an ostentatious, super-polluting megayacht in this beautiful “Rise” image by artist Roger Peet of the Just Seeds Collective. After all there’s only 3,000 of them and there’s eight billion of us.

March 22, 2025

Yeah that’s right. The title is meant to warn you that this is a high concept post (or “experimental” if you prefer). I am arguing that the oft-mocked mullet hairstyle is a relevant symbol of America’s distorted, dualistic self-image. But before I can explain that I need to give a little context about what brought me to this unlikely but hopefully illuminating perspective.

Remember Mutual Assured Destruction?

I’ve been a peace activist since I was a kid in the 1980s and learned that my government’s official policy was something called the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. I was so horrified that world leaders believed gambling our collective future on the knife edge of nuclear armageddon was a rational approach to global governance that it inspired me to spend my life advocating for system change.

In the subsequent four decades the U.S.’s persistent military aggression has unfortunately offered multiple opportunities to join many of my fellow Americans in stopping our country from waging war around the world.  I was part of the massive resistance to the first Iraq War in 1991 and the even more massive resistance to the blatantly illegal second Iraq War in 2003. And I’ve done my best to support more other efforts to defang American imperialism than I can list here.

But now in the wake of an alcoholic, rapist, Christian fascist being elevated as Donald Trump’s latest Secretary of Defense I’m inspired to finally write down something I’ve been thinking about for over twenty years.  How a uniquely American hair style is actually a pretty good metaphor for the invisibilized dynamics of U.S. empire.

It’s a classic American tale of self-mythologizing, contradiction and hyperviolence. A slice of a larger story bookended by two Secretaries of Defense, who on the surface are quite different but in their own way both embody the split personality of the American empire. Which is why I think of them both as a kind of national mullet, metaphorically speaking.

A Bipolar Empire Needs A Haircut To Embody Its Dichotomous Nature

Mullet you say? That’s right, arguably the most American of haircuts so let’s start there. Despite being proudly worn by a diverse range of people, (shout out to working class style and of course the many queer and lesbian folx who have artfully made the haircut their own) the mullet is a much defamed haircut. 

To be clear I’m no mullet shamer. I am hair style agnostic and generally think if you can pull off a mullet, go for it. (Check out this great pro-mullet article.) However, I’ve always found the haircut’s dual nature, epitomized by the popular description of “business in the front, party in the back,” to be a rich metaphor for the bipolar nature of American state power. 

The elephant in the room: the story the U.S. has about itself doesn’t match either the historical record or the geopolitical reality. We are taught in school that we are a country of ideals, a beacon of freedom that is celebrated around the world. This doesn’t square with the reality that we have used our unprecedented military might to create a global empire with over 750 military bases and troops in over 150 countries. 

So if the U.S. empire had a haircut that was going to reflect this bipolar presentation then wouldn’t it be a mullet? America has a “business in front” orientation where we claim our foreign policy is about promoting democracy. But depending on which side of our imperial dichotomy a foreign country finds itself, this can quickly morph into bombardment and invasion, the proverbial “party in the back.” The mullet, that most American of haircuts expresses the imperial psychosis at the heart of U.S. politics. It would probably be best diagnosed as a dissociative identity disorder which is apparently the new name for multiple personality disorder.

Back to Secretary Rumsfeld and his Iraq photo-ops: Suit and boots

My strange attraction to this metaphor began over 20 years ago as an anti-war activist opposing the Bush administration’s illegal invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq. I was working with the media team of Direct Action to Stop the War and we were fighting soundbyte by soundbyte against the Pentagon disinformation machine. (Check out this article about DASW’s still very relevant 2003 uprising). The government was on it’s way to launching it’s “Mission Accomplished” narrative and was trying to convinced the American public the war was over including highlighting Bush era Defense Secretary (aka war criminal) Donald Rumsfeld visiting the troops. Amidst the larger propaganda narrative what always struck me was his clothing choices. Weird, you might think, but when it comes to information warfare details matter. Rumsfeld, who served as both the youngest Secretary of Defense under President Ford, and the oldest under George W. Bush clung to his aging whiz kid look by wearing the uniform of the technocrat: the business suit. But since he was in the middle of an active war zone he would swap out the dress shoes for combat boots.

Something about the dissonance of suit and boots popped for me, an unnoticed symbol, a little clue pointing to America’s imperial denial and for a fleeting media moment, exposing the contradictory mythology propping up U.S. empire. Generations of Cold War ideological indoctrination have tried to convince Americans that democracy and capitalism are fundamentally interconnected. However when we look beyond the propaganda it is obvious that it is actually war, not democracy, that is capitalism’s truest partner. The second Iraq war, orchestrated by oil men cosplaying as the U.S. government and paving the way for a corporate-led occupation, exposed the mechanics for all who wanted to see it.

Grappling with how to explain the contradictions of the bipolar mythologization, I was inspired by the mullet’s popular ethos of  “business in front, party in the back.” I called it the imperial mullet. 

Rumsfeld’s suit symbolizes the “Business” of how the military occupation made it safe for U.S. corporations to access Iraq’s massive and previously state-controlled oil fields. Meanwhile the combat boots invoke the grim “party” that had made it possible, the orgy of violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion and 8 year long military occupation. A military operation so devastating researchers can’t even figure out the actual number of people that were killed in the era, with most estimates falling upward of a half a million people.

Hegseth Has His Own Version Of Business In Front/Party In The Back

Now two decades later authoritarian conman Donald Trump comes to power, again. Ironically part of his appeal was to harness American resentment about the empire’s so-called “forever wars.” Turns out that a lot of Americans didn’t like being foot soldiers in imperial projects to control resources and maintain U.S. hegemony on behalf of corporate elites.

As part of Trump’s rise to power he nominated, and the Republican sycophants in the Senate approved, a new Secretary of Defense who embodies the MAGA right’s obsession with white Christian supremacy. His name is Pete Hegseth and his aesthetic choices offer us the latest expression of the imperial mullet metaphor.

But for Hegseth the contrast is not about the shoes or even the clothes. It’s what’s under the clothes. His short-lived but high profile career as a war crimes apologist and Fox News host profiles his TV friendly “business” front. 

Good looking, well dressed, Aryan – just the way Fox News likes its on air presenters. The suit symbolizes his commitment to the “business” of ensuring the U.S. military will continue to do the bidding of Trump’s billionaire friends. 

But get a few drinks in Hegseth and the next thing you know his version of “party in the back” will be staring you in the face. He has proudly covered his body in tattoos that communicate a terrifying worldview, even less subtle than Rummy’s combat boots. His version of “party” means unleashing hateful supremacy and racist violence backed by the Pentagon’s full firepower. Why yes, that is the Jerusalem Cross, symbol of the 12th Century European Crusader Kingdom based in Jerusalem. It is a common symbol among Christian fascists and right on brand for Pete’s book American Crusade.

And of course Hegseth sports other tattoos celebrating his violent mixture of Christian supremacy, white nationalism and guns. As this article in the Bulwark explains:

[One of his tattoos is] a sword embedded in a cross on Hegseth’s inner forearm—it represents Matthew 10:34, the verse wherein Christ says, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”—and, most disturbing of all, a gothic inscription on his bicep: “Deus Vult”…Latin for “God wills it.” During the First Crusade, it was raised as a battle cry…It provides the last words in American Crusade: “See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!

Imagine What Could Be Possible If We Gave Up On The Empire?

Given that in Hegseth’s view the enemies of America are as much domestic as foreign, some might say the chickens have come home to roost. That a country which has inflicted so much violence on the world is now turning that violence inward on itself. I hope not, but I either way America is long overdue for a reckoning.

This country’s metaphoric mullet says as much about the American empire as any hairstyle choice does about the person who chooses it. The only difference is most Americans didn’t choose it.  We get glimpses of the imperial reality when our loved ones come home in body bags, or bearing physical and psychological scars from their deployments. And whether we realize it or not, we constantly experience its long shadow in the artificial austerity created by our government’s choice to fund a global military empire rather than healthcare, education or things that actually help people.

In 2024 the US allocated $824 billion dollars on the military budget which is more money than the GDP of all but the 20 largest economies in the world. What did that unimaginably large amount of money buy us or anyone else? Record profits for military contractors, some relatively high paying jobs for the 1.4% of American workers employed in what is euphemistically called the Aerospace & Defense Industry, plus plenty of campaign contributions to keep the wheels of American politics well greased. And of course the product as promised: lots of industrial scale mass murder, mayhem and destruction, not to mention plenty of toxic waste and climate pollution.

America has always had a giant gap between our mythologized story of who we are as the “Land of the Free” and the reality of a country built on mass enslavement and genocide. Similarly we need to admit you can’t be a democracy and a global military empire at the same time. 

Time for a haircut? Well here the metaphor gets a bit trite but we do need to at least collectively look in the mirror. If as a country, America were to actually see the reality, and then reject the unflattering imperial reflection that is shining back at us…imagine what is possible? 

It may seem unlikely given the current trajectory of U.S. politics. But that’s pretty much how every major change worth making feels, often right up until happens. So whatever piece of the polycrisis you are spending your time addressing let’s reminder that America’s unacknowledged military empire is making it worse. Particularly now as we all work to defend what little U.S. democracy we have from rising MAGA fascism, let’s keep reminding our fellow Americans where their tax dollars are actually going.

Just think what the richest country the world has ever known could do to address some of the existential problems that threaten our civilization, if we were NOT using our so much of our resources to maintain a military occupation of the planet. That’s some business in the front that could create a real party in the back. A party we could ALL enjoy.

Cover art for the sound art concept album MARSIFICATION: a tale of planetary grief created as part of the spread of the neologism.

Language as a critical arena of struggle

Effective campaigns and social movements don’t just react to to the realities imposed upon us, we also fight to change it: to normalize new ideas, transform structural relationships and create new social realities. So language is often an important area of struggle, battling over the meaning of words, challenging their misuse and even creating new language in the form of neologisms. 

Here’s an update on a little project I’ve been involved in for a few years around the neologism MARSIFICATION which was created as an intervention to challenge techno-salvationist narratives.  

Techno-fix narratives are at play in many different sectors

A little background: Over the years I’ve done various narrative strategy projects to support campaigns challenging dangerous deployments of new, untested technologies being pushed on an unsuspecting population mainly by unscrupulous corporations. Many of these have sparked large-scale and in some cases global resistance movements challenging things like genetically modified food and organisms (GMOs), synthetic biology, nanotech, killer robots and a huge growing fight currently: exposing polluters’ fake climate tech.

Over and over again I’ve seen different versions of the same basic techno-fix frame derail pressure for transformative and system change solutions (body cams on cops anyone?) When techno-fixes have been successfully fought off it is often because movements won the race to frame public awareness like food justice movements framing Monsanto’s GMO sterile seeds as “terminator seeds” which helped block their deployment.

Mocking the ultimate techno-fix: replacing Earth with Mars 

So a few years back collaborating with the participatory art project the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, I helped coin the word MARSIFICATION (verb tense is MARSIFY) to critique the whole Mars-will-save-us narrative that is being pushed by a number of tech-billionaires. The term picked up steam recently through various media attention and then New Scientist named it as one of their words of the year for 2023 and then it got into wikipedia.  

We created the word to help activists specifically name how fantasies of turning Mars into Earth are distracting us from the fact global capitalism is rapidly turning Earth into Mars. Here’s some of the definitions:

Marsification: The various cultural, political and economic processes through which techno-salvationist fantasies divert our attention from the dominant global economic system’s erosion of Earth’s capacity to support life.

We also want to show how all these techno-fixes are rooted in the same flawed and oppressive worldview. My favorite definition, which I can imagine activists using to fight almost any elite techno-fix is: 

Marsify: To attempt to solve a problem in the most statistically unlikely and unselfconsciously grandiose way possible.

One potentially powerful rhetorical strategy to challenge bad ideas by linking them with the most extreme version of the misguided idea. Since the current fantasy that Mars could somehow become a replacement Earth is so transparently ridiculous, it can hold up a mirror to discredit a lot of the more normal-sounding techno-fix proposals. Polluters selling phony “offsets” so they can keep polluting? Creating a massive whole new global industrial complex to suck carbon out of the air, ship it around on pipelines and dispose of it (somewhere…?) all so fossil fuel companies can keep profiting from destroying our atmosphere? Those are not only unjust and dangerous proposals, they are also wildly unrealistic terrible ideas that won’t even work. So let’s call them out as polluters trying to “marsify” climate policy. 

Exposing the ongoing legacy of colonial worldviews

In addition to mocking some of the crazy billionaire techno-fixes Marsification draws attention to the deeper historic roots that the obsession with Mars colonization reflects. A second definition of the word is:

Marsification: The expansion of colonial fantasy beyond the atmosphere of the Earth.

Many of the drivers of our current planetary crisis have their roots in the worldviews spread through force by European colonialism: Unlimited expansion, human exceptionalism, seeing complex interdependent natural systems as just resources etc. It seems reasonable to assume that since space extractivism is largely a continuation of the same underlying logic it will have basically the same few winners and many losers. Just like historic colonialism primarily benefited European elites I’d suggest colonialism in space – Jeff Bezos mining asteroids or the U.S. and China carving up the moon – isn’t really in most people’s interests. Already most of the ongoing extraction & “economic growth” is merely increasing corporate profits NOT meeting human needs and generally not increasing collective well-being. Expanding into space isn’t going to change those core power dynamics.

And now MARSIFICATION the sound art concept album!? 

The latest development in this neologism journey towards influencing discourse is two artists (one of them who co-created the word with me) have released an amazing audio art concept album called Marsification: A tale of planetary grief. It is basically a love letter to the Earth and a fun, artistic critique of “astro-colonialism” ranging from details about zero gravity pooping to an homage track to Gil Scott-Heron called “Whitey Out on Mars.” I had a very limited advisory role on the album so can take zero credit for its awesomeness but I am a huge fan. I highly recommend checking it out. You can access it from their adorable album website or any of the main streaming platforms. If you like it please share the album because it has zero promotion behind it and it deserves a wider audience. Plus it’s another exciting way the concept of marsification is moving in the culture and inspiring more critique of the most absurd techo-fix narrative of them all. 

So if marsification/marsify is useful to your work please take the word and use it. Experiment with it. Spread it. Who knows what powerful, creative, strategic ways folks might put this word and concept to use. And really shouldn’t we all be trolling Elon Musk these days? 

A Messaging Resources for Telling the Story of Grassroots Movements

May 2023

*** Get this post as a formatted downloadable hand out

As the polycrisis expands there are a lot of new constituencies trying to understand social change from panicked decision-makers to a new generation of emerging philanthropists to impacted communities turning to activism. For many of us––who participate in contemporary social movements or are familiar with the history of social movements’ transformative impact––their value is self-evident, perhaps even axiomatic. But in a mainstream U.S. context the role of mass movements in driving social progress is often downplayed, even whitewashed out of our collective history. 

The idea of a movement is hidden in plain sight. The word is well known, even if only through generic accounts of the “Civil Rights Movement” yet most people don’t have much actual understanding of the real history, the mechanics or ongoing impacts of grassroots movements. 

So below is a list of talking points about some of the things that grassroots movements actually do. These are a resource to support anyone promoting movement-building as a key change strategy and/or making the case for investing in movements. As a messaging resource it is primarily intended to offer lots of rhetorical entry points that supplement, but not replace, the many more substantive arguments, frameworks and research on the role, structure and mechanics of social movements.

Amazing things that Grassroots movements do:

BUILD/SHIFT POWER Movements build the power of traditionally marginalized constituencies and challenge powerful interests that block action on collective problems. Building the power of an organized constituency is one of the most versatile strategies for change.

STRENGTHEN DEMOCRACY Movements organize, mobilize and engage people in multiple ways that strengthen our democracy. 

INSIDE/OUTSIDE Movements operate both inside and outside official processes and therefore provide a check on institutional power and accelerate the process of change.

ROOT CAUSES/STRUCTURAL CHANGE Movements address root causes and therefore are effective vehicles for challenging oppression and accelerating structural change. 

CREATE NETWORKS movements connect diverse actors into networked ecosystems and therefore are able to address problems at all levels of society. 

RESILIENCE Movements are an investment in resilience. They build the multipurpose infrastructure and capacity to mitigate, adapt and transform. This is particularly urgent in the age of rapid climate breakdown. 

MULTISOLVE PROBLEMS Movements not only help identify social problems they also solve them. In fact they often “multisolve” them which is a useful concept from systems theory to describe “when one investment of time or money solves many problems at once.”* The term provides some intellectual specificity to the multifaceted ways movements operate.  

SHIFT THE DEBATE Movements highlight issues in ways that prevent them being ignored. Look at the way #MeToo or Black Lives Matter has managed to bring attention to long-standing injustices in a way that has driven changes across society. 

EXPAND THE POSSIBLE/MOMENTUM Movements generate momentum which makes lots of different types of change more possible. Investing in movements is the solution that strengthens all other solutions (“acting like a rising tide that lifts all boat”).

INNOVATION/EMERGENCE Movements are OUR best bet for unexpected innovation that can shift the trajectory of our society. Where do paradigm shifts come from?  Bottom-up often scales much faster and easier than top-down. 

RETURN ON INVESTMENT Grassroots movements are dramatically under-invested in compared to other parts of the social change ecosystem. Given how much frontline communities fighting for racial/economic/environmental/climate justice have already accomplished, imagine what they could do with a little more investment from philanthropy?

HELP US MAKE BETTER DECISIONS & POLICIES Movements aggregate and amplify the perspectives of those most impacted by problems. This helps society as a whole make better decisions. Policymakers should look to stronger movements to help solve this key knowledge problem because when we solve problems for the most impacted it creates better outcomes for everyone.

MOVEMENTS INVITE PEOPLE IN Movements are inclusive, operating in locally and decentralized ways that offer many pathways to engagement. By inviting us all to take action, movements are foundational to creating and maintaining a democratic society

HISTORIC TRACK RECORD  Organized social movements have played a central role in almost every positive change in modern society from ending injustices, expanding rights to shifting culture and creating whole new legal frameworks. (Pick your favorite example). Movements have undeniably strong metrics and a proven historic record. And now they are being super-charged by communications technology so that may well make their future track record even stronger.

MOVEMENTS GIVE US HOPE, or at least they should… At a time when mounting global problems can seem on the brink of overwhelming many of our institutions. Movements invite us to imagine whole different scales and types of social engagement in recreating our world. They offer us collective agency in the face of growing despair about society’s future. This is where hope lies.

 * This definition of “multisolving” was created by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, a student of Donella Meadows, who runs an organization dedicated to the concept call the Multisolving Institute

Movement Meta-Verbs: How Movements Solve Problems

A foundational idea that informs much of contemporary advocacy and organizing is the understanding that collective action can scale into “grassroots movements” and these types of emergent movements can help solve many of our problems. Many of us, particularly those who work in philanthropy or adjacent sectors, have lots of different research, reports and glossy materials to make this case.

Effective communication is action oriented and so it can be helpful to have what we call meta-verbs, that is an overarching verb that communicates the logic of your action or intervention.* So here’s a simple list of potential meta-verbs that help synthesize the story of how grassroots movements help make positive change. These meta-verbs can be used in conjunction with the more substantive talking points above to promote social movement oriented theories of change

NAVIGATE: Having powerful, democratic movements operating can help society NAVIGATE the complexity of the coming transition with the most co-benefits and the least amount of destructive trade-offs.

TRANSLATE: Movements shine a light on issues, explaining obtuse power structures and technical jargon to TRANSLATE the issues to those who will be impacted so they understand what is happening. 

POPULARIZE: Movements spreading new concepts and helping people apply them to their local struggles. Just look at the way transformative concepts like just transition, abolition, intersectionality, agroecology, regenerative economics [etc. add your favorite] have been POPULARIZED through trans-local networks. 

MOBILIZE: Movements sound the alarm, and MOBILIZE people to get them involved in the democratic process to stop bad things and collectively build better things. 

PRESSURE: Movements channel public outrage in order to apply strategic PRESSURE at the places that will break through institutional inertia and force change.

ADAPT: Movements help communities ADAPT to meet new circumstances and build resilience.

SCALE: Movements SCALE impact by connecting dispersed initiatives under a common umbrella that aggregates and amplifies. The alchemy of social movements means the whole actually becomes greater than the sum of its parts. 

* For more info on the concept of “meta-verbs” see page 86 of my book Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements and Change the World

Turning the Tide on Organizational Toxicity

The past few years there has been growing attention to dysfunctional internal dynamics within progressive and left organizations. Whether it’s contentious unionization fights, high profile failures to address racial justice and other equity issues or mass resignations, it’s been hard to miss the upheavals at many organizations. In this context perhaps it’s not surprising that the term “toxic” is frequently used to describe the culture inside some social change organizations. Many practitioners have been analyzing the phenomenon and trying different interventions. In that spirit of collective inquiry, here’s a draft framework that emerged from my work coaching leaders grappling with how to steward organizational change.  

There are many sources of toxicity but one common place where I have repeatedly seen problems overtake organizations is when needed change processes are either thwarted or fail.  By the time some organizations have acknowledged a problem and begun considering how to make change, the stakes have often become very high. Either the organization will succeed in a certain degree of transformation or toxicity will grow, and sometimes literally kill the host org. 

The chart below is intended to define two ends of a spectrum. At one end are the qualities of a successful change process that I’ve seen lead to organizational breakthroughs and transformation. These are contrasted with qualities of toxic organizational culture that undermine organizational function and can sabotage change processes. However, far more important than my distillation of these qualities is the simple idea of a spectrum that contrasts these qualities. 

For the framework to be most useful, a group should determine for themselves the specific qualities that define their spectrum. Participatory work to create shared definitions of toxic qualities and transformative qualities is a great way to start an organizational change process. These qualities can then serve as “guard rails” to keep a process on track. The power of co-creating this type of framework and transparently holding it at the center of the change process can help give all stakeholders the agency to counter toxicity if and when it develops.

Sample Framework

TRANSFORMATIVE                     ←	→                           TOXIC
“Leaderful” where all stakeholders feel agency	Lack of leadership or leadership that disempowers stakeholders
Community: everyone recognizes there is a problem even if they don’t all know or agree on what it is	Isolation: people feel like they are facing the problems alone, might feel gaslit
Momentum: progress is happening at an appropriate pace that works for the group	Inertia: change feels impossible
Process “works” meaning it meets community expectations on pace and level of clarity of outcome	Imbalance between process and outcome
Trust in people’s best intentions. This creates the safety needed to express concerns and be vulnerable about one’s own role in problems	Lack of trust. This is corrosive in so many ways but critically for a change process it often undermines people’s ability to be honest
Organization has functioning equity and justice practices that balance existing power differences and create the space for all stakeholders to fully participate regardless of rank, identity or historical marginalization.	Unacknowledged/unhealthy power dynamics. Organization lacks functioning equity systems, patterns of dominance and marginalization are unaddressed and disrupt participation and agency.
Hope	Cynicism (change feels impossible)
Everything is a tool	Everything is a weapon
Curiosity	Animosity
(Appropriate levels of) transparency	(Unnecessary) secrecy
Clear boundaries on the process. Everyone understands which parts of organization are changeable and which are not.	Unclear boundaries. Either because of fundamental disagreement, gaslighting by leadership or just poor process design.
Clear shared vision, purpose or theory of change that can act like a lighthouse guiding the group through the dangerous waters Aka “accountability to mission”	Lack of political alignment = no shared vision to anchor process or provide a compass for navigating disagreement
Time is managed well. People have the time they need. The process is not too fast but also not too slow.	Poor time management undermines process: not enough time for critical work, or the process drags on too long.
Shared models that help people embrace individual differences such as frameworks that address organizational culture, personality, information processing, conflict styles, etc.	Underdeveloped understanding or appreciation of difference on the team. Lack of shared frameworks.
Metaphor: The spiral of evolving change and creativity (systems are complicated and we may need several passes over the same content to get someplace new)	Metaphor: The circle of repetitive doom (nothing will ever change; we are just going round in circles)
Emotion is welcomed and there is a group container that can hold a range of expressions	Lack of group container to hold and channel strong emotions
Collective sense of potential, that a new organizational state is possible	Blocked energy, sense that failure is inevitable
Excitement and engagement by all stakeholders	Withdrawal of stakeholders from process either through lack of engagement or overt departures (quitting, leaving group, etc.)
Unleashing of collective creativity leads to lots of new ideas and unblocked energy	Status quo thinking remains dominant and old debates repeat without producing new insights
GROUP LANDS WITHIN SUCCESS RANGE	FAILED PROCESS OUTCOMES

REMINDER: “leadership” shouldn’t be seen as an exclusive skill to be hoarded atop hierarchies or feared when it is expressed from unexpected sources. We should all be growing the leadership capacity of the people around us. We are in a planetary emergency and we need LEADERFUL movements to face it.

The graphic above is from 2011 when a group of core organizers were intervening in the Occupy Wall Street movement to challenge some of the misconceptions that horizontal and consensus-based organizing models are “leaderless.” Instead successful movements actually unlock as much leadership capacity was possible. As the Black Lives Matter movement helped amplify we need to get beyond scarcity and prioritize building “leaderful” organizations and movements.

There are many great resources to help us implement these ideas but one I often return to is the 2005 article “We the Leaders: In Order to Form a Leaderful Organization” by Joseph A. Raelin, in the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 2005, Vol. 12, No.2. The paper is not specifically focused on social change organizations, but many of its suggestions align with the best practices of directly democratic organizing models.

Raelin’s research identifies 4 Cs which organizations engaging in “leaderful practice” can utilize. Leadership should be concurrent, collective, collaborative and compassionate.

6/4/2021

The last few years have been a crash course for many of us in virtual team-building. Now after many organizations took COVID-informed hiatus from in-person retreats I’ve been contacted by several groups who are once again planning them. I believe deeply that in-person time to focus on strategy and collaboration is critical to any team’s success. I’ve found that particularly in remote teams, in-person time is uniquely precious. It’s hard to do the deeper, transformative work virtually, particularly to build shared culture or address conflicts. So in the interests of supporting any group or facilitator working to have a successful strategy retreat I’ve listed below some of the specific principles and practices that inform how I approach participatory strategy work with groups.

Build the container: Sure the term “container” is facilitator speak and may sound a little geeky. But in order to hone specific skills it’s helpful to have specific language. Group container is one of those words I think is useful enough that I’m willing to sound a little geeky saying it. The term is a shorthand for all the complex, dynamic factors that define a group’s ability to act collectively. Things like an environment of collective trust, clarity of purpose, the degree of political alignment, a shared culture. These are all preconditions for a group to be powerful together. Collective action – rooted in “power together” can most effectively emerge when there is a strong “group container” that supports the group to do deeper work. Successful agenda design and facilitation requires attention to building and sustaining the container.

Preparation is half the battle: Successful retreats begin long before everyone is in the room together. The design process should identify the priority issues to address as well as which necessary info the entire group already has vs. what needs to be presented. It’s important to level the information playing field and avoid unnecessary knowledge gaps or strategizing based on caricature. Materials should be shared in advance with clear expectations around prep for all staff so precious in-person time can be spent on generative work. I often recommend doing a prep call with all participants to share frameworks or overview critical info before the retreat. Your strategy process should begin well before everyone arrives at the first session.

Culture matters: All groups have culture but usually many aspects of group practice are invisible or unstated so groups often need support to surface default cultural practices. When we create intentional space to assess cultural norms we can distinguish between practices that are useful and should be codified versus ones that are unproductive or are outgrowths of unhealthy power dynamics. I believe when groups intentionally create organizational culture together it can greatly increase collective agency and impact. [For more on this topic see my blog post on Toxic vs Transformative culture.]

Less is more (spaciousness supports clarity). A common mistake is to try and cram in too much content into an agenda, thereby creating an artificially frenetic pace that reduces visionary and strategic thinking. Of course there are times when we have to push and meetings that need to go long. But in general people need spaciousness and time to do deeper work. I believe in frequent breaks,15 minute break every 90-120 minutes of content is my general role. I also believe in 60+ minute meals to allow time for socializing, relationship building and individual recharge.

Design to engage the group’s diversity: Diversity is one of a group’s greatest strengths when harnessed properly, particularly since new insights often come from the margins of a group (just like in society, frontline of the problem = frontline of the solution.) I believe in using activities appealing to different learning styles such as audio, visual and interactive/kinesthetic so I design agendas using a range of modalities: individual reflection, pairs/small group/whole group, creative teams, gamification, generative sprints etc. Additionally, I think it’s important to harness non-meeting time, such as evening and meals (without over-structuring) to support relationship building and different types of processing.

Prime the pump: It is important to get people primed in the appropriate headspace to do strategy work. Good agenda design takes this into account through sequencing, structuring generative exercises and creating the conditions to tap individuals’ experience and power.

Constraints drive creativity: When asking a group to do generative work providing constraints helps drive out-put. It is amazing what smart people can accomplish in short periods of time with the right constraining instructions. Sure you can create a multi-tiered campaign plan but what happens when you try to create one in 15 minutes?

Surface generative conflict: Many groups are held back by unexpressed conflicts that linger, undercutting group unity and morale. Artful leadership and facilitation support the group in effectively surfacing and resolving conflict. Conflict is a great driver of strategy as long as the group has a strong enough container to engage in healthy conflict that is generative. Make sure you understand the deeper forces and play and do unleash past traumas or conflicts the group doesn’t have the capacity to address. A group can make the best strategy in the world but if the process destroys the group then none of it really matters right? 

Reality Check: Ensure that as strategies are developed they are incorporating political reality: group capacity, funding, political moment, enthusiasm factor, etc. This is not juxtaposed with visionary and ambitious strategy, but rather a check and balance to make sure the strategy is not a set-up for failure. Groups often have a hard time prioritizing but strategy is not only what we do it is also what we choose not to do. Likewise we need to check the group’s appetite to actually do the things they think need to be done. A smart plan that some other vague somebody is going to do isn’t going to get us far. As we make our plans we need to ensure we are creating the desire to carry them out. 

Skills sharing/leadership development: A core orientation of my movement support approach is to Identify leadership development/skill-building opportunities and include them in the process whenever possible. Which staff members can I tap to facilitate different sections? Ideally I’m able to manage my own capacity so I also have some time to coach someone into a new skill area. We should always be developing people’s capacity and leadership. 

 Define and Test Hypotheses: Evaluation should be baked into everything we do. We should always work to surface our assumptions, hone them into clear hypotheses and ensure they are testable so we can evaluate them in order to build upon success or learn from failure. The point is to be rigorous enough to ensure our evaluation creates positive feedback loops to grow a group’s collective skill and impact. 

Success grows upon itself. The facilitator needs to ensure the group is set up with realistic outcomes so the meeting can stay focused on the specific questions that need to be answered in the sequence that allows collective insight to build upon itself. But beyond achieving the tasks at hand it’s important the group FEEL successful. This is why it’s important to set and manage expectations and for facilitators to be reinforcing the group’s spectrum of success. We need participants to have an experience of collective power that creates momentum that will surge into the post-retreat work. 

Many of these principles are common sense but by naming them it helps remind us to pay attention to them, so we can turn the ideas on the flip chart into real world change . They are all means to an end, to catalyze a successful group experience that produces alignment, enthusiasm and momentum. This is what turns retreats into the key moments of focused dreaming that let the work advance.

These times call on ALL of us to be better leaders

One of the most important ways to be an effective social change practitioner is to cultivate leadership, your own and others. Our movements have come a long way in shifting the paradigm of leadership. The old paradigm elevated a simplistic ideal where leadership was often seen as the charismatic person (usually male) at the top of a hierarchy with all the decision-making power.

Now thanks to the efforts of newer generations of activists––particularly BIPOC, women, non-binary, and LGTBQ leaders steeped in the lessons of organizing for racial, gender and environmental/climate justice––the realm of leadership practices has been dramatically expanded. The orientation long used by organizers in struggles for systemic changes has become much more widely embraced. We now increasingly understand the need for “leaderful” movements where leadership is not seen as just a role in a hierarchy or approached from the perspective of scarcity or exceptionalism.

These movements have taught us that leadership is a set of qualities and practices that can and should be widespread. In fact it’s an orientation ALL of us must cultivate in order to be better organizers and grow our collective capacity for transformation. 

One of the most fulfilling parts of my consulting practice is coaching leaders of varying  levels of experience. I get to both support and co-learn. Through aiding my client’s growth and pulling on my own decades of experience in organization-building and social change work, I’ve distilled 10 key leadership practices below. Whatever our role in the movement, these 10 tips should be part of everyone’s toolbox who is working for a better world.  

*** Get this post as a formatted downloadable hand out

1. Cultivate self-awareness.
   • Pay attention to what’s going on inside yourself. Self-awareness is a foundational skill that undergirds almost all leadership orientations. Recognize the impact of circumstances and when you’re out of sync with your goals or intentions.
2. Incorporate self-assessment into how you do your work.
   • Build time for self-assessment into your routine in multiple places: planning, prioritization, mid- project and after-the fact reflection.
3. Pause and explore what’s happening BEFORE it’s a crisis.
   • Do hard things when they are easy. Intervene early. Shift dangerous dynamics before they become a crisis. Auto-pilot leads to accidents.
4. Ask yourself for help.
   • Part of why coaches are helpful is they are outside the situation. Try to model the same dynamic by getting some distance to reflect and reconsider. 
5. Interrogate the situation from multiple perspectives. 
   • Multiplicity is your friend. Ask yourself: what are different things that might be happening? Create mechanisms to check your blind spots.
6. Develop more than 1 hypothesis to test. (Play what if…?)
   • Try on new perspectives, without committing to them.  Don’t let yourself get trapped between only 2 choices. Imagination is a super power.
   • TOOL: Polarize to recenter: articulate worse case/best case, hopes vs fears,  what if I did B or C instead of A?
7. Embrace complexity. 
   • Accept that cause and effect is difficult to predict except in very simple situations. 
   • TOOL: “Probe” difficult situations with small experiments. Let feedback loops guide you towards solutions.
8. Give yourself homework (Invest in yourself)
   • Your leadership is a critical part of your work, so invest in yourself. Include personal development in your goal-setting. Build capacity to take risks. 
9. Give yourself a day off.
   • Social change work is a marathon, not a sprint and we need to pace ourselves.
10. Take the work seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously. 
    • Humble revolutionaries are more effective and resilient revolutionaries.

I’m so excited to announce that the new updated and expanded edition of Re:Imagining Change is now available! Order your copy from PM Press HERE! 

 

I’m very excited to announce that PM Press will be releasing a 2nd Edition of Doyle Canning’s and my book on story-based strategy in September. We’ve expanded it with new tools, examples and case studies as well as updated it for the Trump resistance era. We’re also honored to have a new foreword by Jonathan Matthew Smucker author of the great new book Hegemony How-To (AK Press 2017). You can find out more from PM Press here.

January 2017

Welcome to my personal website. Nothing fancy, just a place to keep some of my writing and some other thoughts all in one place. Bigger pieces are in the “Selected Writings” section but this blog is a grab bag of little strategic gems often pulled from some of my larger narrative and strategy projects.