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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.