For organizations working toward social change, there’s no shortage of things to respond to.
A policy announcement drops.
A harmful frame takes off online.
A certain elected official says something outrageous.
A crisis erupts.
The Slack channel lights up, the rapid-response machinery kicks into gear, and everyone asks:
What do we need to say right now?
Sometimes, that is exactly the right question.
But response is a narrative stance, not a narrative strategy.
We’ve written before about how to identify the dominant narratives shaping our work and how to make sure our own communications aren’t inadvertently reinforcing the stories we’re trying to change. But once you understand the narrative terrain, what stance should you take toward it?
Depending on the audience, issue, and moment, we generally have three choices: work with a dominant narrative, counter it, or seed something new.
- Work with what’s already moving
Not every dominant narrative needs to be disrupted. Sometimes the culture has already moved—or is moving—in a direction that creates an opening.
Consider housing.
After years in which debates often centered on whether new housing should be built at all, the idea that California needs more homes has become increasingly prominent in mainstream policy debate. Housing advocates who share that diagnosis don’t have to persuade audiences from scratch; they can connect their solutions to an increasingly familiar story about scarcity, affordability, and the need to build.
The strategic question is: What do people already believe that can help them understand where we want to go?
Working with a dominant narrative doesn’t mean accepting every assumption embedded within it. It means recognizing when you can ride a current instead of swimming upstream.
- Know when you need to counter
Sometimes, though, the dominant story itself is the obstacle.
Consider immigration.
Advocates have long had to contend with narratives that portray immigrants primarily as threats, burdens or outsiders. Counter-narrative offers a different way of understanding who immigrants are and what their presence means: neighbors and community members who belong, contribute, and share many of the same aspirations as people born in the United States.
That’s more than correcting a false claim. It changes the frame through which we understand the issue.
But counter-narrative comes with a risk of becoming trapped inside the story we’re trying to defeat.
Every rebuttal maintains a relationship with the original frame. Repeat it often enough, even to dispute it, and we may help keep it at the center of the conversation.
Counter-narrative is essential. But it can’t be our only move.
- Seed what could come next
Which brings us to the narrative stance that can be hardest to sustain in moments of crisis: aspiration.
Instead of asking What do we need to refute?, aspirational narrative asks: What ideas would have to take hold for the world we want to be possible?
The care economy movement offers a useful example.
For generations, American culture has largely treated caregiving as a private responsibility; something families—and disproportionately women—figure out on their own. Care advocates are putting a different story into the culture: the idea that care is something virtually all of us will give or receive, that care makes the rest of our lives possible, and we can build a society that values and supports it accordingly.
That story is being advanced not only through policy campaigns, but through television, film, journalism, art, and personal storytelling—places where people can encounter a different picture of what care could look like before the policies and systems to support it fully exist.
That’s what we mean by seeding an aspirational narrative. It isn’t simply positive messaging or a vision statement describing the world after you’ve won.
It’s putting new ideas, language, and possibilities into the culture so they can become familiar—and eventually imaginable as common sense.
Permacrisis can make countering our default
The challenge isn’t to stop responding. It’s to make response a conscious strategic choice rather than our default setting.
Years of permacrisis have made advocacy organizations remarkably good at responding quickly. But if we’re not careful, the urgent narrative can continually crowd out the aspirational one.
Narrative strategy requires retaining the capacity to operate across all three stances, and knowing which one the moment calls for. There’s no hierarchy among them, and an organization might use all three at once with different audiences or aspects of an issue.
The discipline is in asking the right strategic question:
Rapid response asks: What do we need to say right now?
Narrative strategy asks something bigger:
What can we build on? What must we contest? What ideas need to take hold to make the future we want possible?
Holly Minch is a strategist, facilitator, and co-founder of LightBox Collaborative. Holly and the LightBox team offer strategy, training, and coaching to help your organization move from reacting to the moment to shaping the conversation. Get in touch: holly@lightboxcollaborative.com