The term ‘narrative change' is used a lot these days, but since it has many overlapping meanings and entails very different functions and applications, conversations between people who say they do narrative change can sometimes get a little confusing. There are several contending or competing conceptions of what narrative change aims to do—the ends of narrative change—and how we should be doing it—the means.

In a widely viewed TedX talk back in 2009, Tyler Cowen urged his audience to be suspicious of stories. Cowen’s advice came in the context of increasing use of storytelling that Cowen felt could be manipulative because it moved people while hiding its creators’ biases, perspectives, and assumptions.

In an article in The Atlantic in 2023, James Parker observed that we now distrust narrative. We are in a crisis of narrative. Not (just) a contestation between different stories but a contestation and crisis over narrative itself. So what does all of this mean for those of us who work in the world of story and narrative?

In May 2023, Global Impact Producers Alliance (GIPA) hosted a two-day, two-timezone Virtual Assembly for the community of impact practitioners to connect, learn, grow and more than anything: create a Safe Space to Share Everything. During the Share Everything event, GIPA comrade Maya Newell asked an important question: how do we turn distribution campaign priorities upside down?

It’s time to be more intentional about using machine metaphors for machines and telling better stories about humans.

Through descriptive language, music, sounds and images, stories engage our senses and our embodied thinking. They combine emotion, factual information and various forms of tacit knowledge, often in deceptively simple ways.

In April 2023, IRIS and the Skoll Foundation co-hosted the first Storytellers’ Community Breakfast at the Skoll World Forum, gathering over 100 story stakeholders.

Jornalismo, interesse público e democracia. Por Paula Miraglia, Co-fundadora e Diretora Geral do Nexo Jornal.

In 2022, IRIS hosted a series of events we call Tertúlias.

In 2011, I had been forced out of Syria at the height of the crackdown of its peaceful revolution. I have yet to visit the country again, and may never be able to return to my home there.

We need new ways of thinking about our narrative change work.

When people think beyond the immediate problem they are trying to solve, when they envision a world in which they’ve already won, those visions of a just world end up being remarkably similar, no matter what issue they started from.

What does it mean to tell our own stories? What does it mean to speak out and to be listened to, or to write and to have our words read? When stories are told, whose voices ring the loudest? Who determines which of our stories are amplified … or even valid? These questions are not new, the answers far from simple.

A large and growing partisan media divide presents challenges to those using popular culture to promote democratic values across society.

Impact will require more attention to audiences than ever.

Connecting ethical storytelling and narrative change

If storytelling is to be a truly powerful tool for social justice activism, it is important to pay as much attention to the process of storytelling as to its outcome. Unless it is approached thoughtfully and with great care, impact-driven storytelling can easily become transactional and extractive, inflicting some of the very harms it seeks to address.

In October 2021, International Resource for Impact and Storytelling (IRIS) gathered together more than 70 storytellers and activists to share inspiration and evoke curiosity about new forms of storytelling and impactful narratives that respond to our present moment.

What Makes Narrative Change So Hard?

Nonprofits and funders can go too far in pointing fingers at their own shortcomings. The reality is that they are playing on an uneven psychological field.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve come across three different reports observing that the course of the Covid-19 pandemic does not follow our expectations for how a story should play out. All three suggest that this narrative failure partly explains the difficulty in mounting a unified public response to the virus.

Watching tragedy unfold in Ukraine, I have been thinking about the powerful, rapid, and often unexpected impact that major, shocking events can have on narratives that underpin our understanding of the world. While narrative and culture change work tends to take years, events have the power to bring about rapid change, often in unexpected ways.