Narrative Change is…the Destination and the Road

Photo by Pierre Jeanneret on Unsplash.

“Can you give us a definition of ‘narrative change?’ I recently received this simple enough request from a client I’ve supported with narrative change strategy facilitation. I responded that certainly, I could. In fact, I was slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t already. In all the materials I had provided during our previous facilitated sessions, why had I not included a clear-cut definition of narrative change?

I have definitions and frameworks I regularly reference or have developed myself at the ready. Yet somehow I forgot to come up with a succinct definition of the term “narrative change.” In fairness, I’m not alone. After consulting the many downloaded articles and highlighted PDFs I’ve collected about narrative change, I quickly realized many others had neglected the obvious task of defining exactly what “narrative change” is, preferring to define narrative strategy, narrative power, or even narrative organizing. But what do the two words “narrative change” in particular mean?  

…coming to a definition of narrative change requires us to imagine differently what it even means to define something.

It would be satisfying to rattle off words to complete the sentence, “narrative change is dot, dot, dot.” However, coming to a definition of narrative change requires us to imagine differently what it even means to define something. When we expect a definition to be conclusive and authoritative, we will invariably find frustration in attempts to pin down what narrative change precisely means. Narrative change can be a bunch of different things, depending upon the context and people doing the work.

For an example of what I mean by expanding the concept of defining, I turn to adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. In her work, brown describes and contemplates social justice strategy as a non-predictive, participatory process that mimics the movement of nature from small actions to large impact. Emergent strategy rejects attachment to preordained outcomes. The process requires a deciphering of what emerges in the groups and settings within a particular context. This process does not lack rigor. Indeed, the rigor lies in the process of seeing, feeling, deciphering, and discerning what exists among a specific set of people in a specific location at a specific time. Emergent strategy offers ways of drawing together threads of thoughts and imaginings as they emerge rather than trying to force preconceived ideas.

To describe such a strategy in a few words or sentences would be reductive and miss the magic of what emergence offers. In her own rejection of a typical, narrow constriction of defining, adrienne maree brown spends 23 pages sharing the lineage of her conception of “emergent strategy” — all the roads that lead her to this conceptualization from literary inspiration, to observations from nature, to lessons learned from great mentors and friends. When she finally acknowledges what readers have secretly been opining: “…what EXACTLY is emergent strategy?” she offers a bulleted list of possibilities that start with opening phrases like…

Emergent Strategy:

• was initially…
• then grew into…
• which evolved into…
• and now it’s like…
• and maybe, if I’m honest, it’s a…

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy. 2017. AK Press.

If, in, reading Emergent Strategy, you expect a linear, clear-cut definition of what it is, you might be disappointed. By redefining definitional construction to include expansion, curiosity, open-endedness, and perhaps even contradictions, brown points us to an important lesson about what narrative change might be – a rejection of a dominant, limiting belief and a proclamation of one’s individual or collective narrative truth.

In furthering the spirit of redefining defining, let’s see if I can offer some definitional proposals:

Narrative Change…

• Might be the social justice strategy that this generation – meaning the people alive on earth in this timeline – has the most to learn from and contribute to
• Often shows up as tactics of persuasion, but I think that’s just scratching the surface and not even really getting to the good stuff underneath
• Can be a way of collective healing
• Will hopefully lead to the final dismantling of centuries-long supremacist ideology
• But ultimately is a practice that requires time, continuity and more than a little faith.

I see narrative change as a type of emergent strategy. We can’t know a person’s or community’s narrative truth until we ask them. And we can’t move a transformative narrative change process until we acknowledge the narratives supplanted onto us and offer the healing supports to begin dismantling them. Building the muscle to distinguish between stories that are authentically ours and those that are the result of oppressive systems is a crucial step toward deconstructing internal narrative oppression, building narrative agency – or power – and moving outward toward the exercise of power for political demands. So, here I’ll offer another definitional proposal: Narrative change is the pairing of internal narrative transformation with the external exercise of political power.

There is, of course, the question of provability. How do we know when we’ve done the job of narrative change? The contemplative in me believes we will know a thing by knowing it. Others prefer actual data, numbers, weights, and measures. I respect the people who count things. So yes, narrative change is emergent and internal, moving outward…and maybe, possibly, in some instances must also be verifiable. (Oof, that was hard to type). Okay, but can we at least have a deeper discussion about what “verifiable” means?

I’ll conclude with my favorite definitional proposal for what narrative change is, and the one I sent back to my client. Narrative change is the destination and the road. It is the actual transformed narrative conditions that ground our liberatory longings. For instance, one of the most oppressive narratives holding us hostage to environmental injustice and climate disaster is the idea that (only some) humans have a divinely ordained right to extract all resources from the land at all costs. When we successfully transform that worldview, healing the chasm between people and land created by colonization, and remember Indigenous wisdoms from around the world about the sacred duty of land stewardship, we’ve created at least part of the narrative change needed to embody policies and practices that uphold a regenerative relationship to our environment.

Narrative change is the destination (the transformation) and the road, all the steps to getting there.

Like,

• Healing narrative oppression and building agency through self-defining and bearing witness to others’ stories,
• Building community and solidarity through narrative coalitions,
• Exercising narrative power through public story sharing, and
• And the many other surprises that we encounter on the road.

Narrative change is holding onto the vision of where we are trying to go, while letting go of the need to perfectly predict all that we will learn, how wayward our path might be, or how long our journey might take. It is believing in the power of the process as much as the provability of the outcome. It is making space for the magic of what we can’t know before asking the first question.

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Courtney M. McSwain is a writer and principal of NarrativeSeeds.

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