#NarrativeTips Celebrate the wins loudly - and explain the role of collective effort and solidarity.
The work of progressing towards a more inclusive, more just, more sensible set of policies and practice is hard. Boy is it hard. And we spend a lot of time in the difficult space of thinking about and talking about the problems. Most of you will know about negativity bias - part of our fast thinking system that means we recall and tend to create predictive mental models around negative outcomes. Which makes it hard to believe positive change will happen. But the reality is it does! and to counter this (and other mental models that get in the way) we need to frame the wins well.
When we win, when progress is made (even imperfect progress because we are humans after all), its useful to celebrate it in a way which explains for people the steps that were taken, especially the collective, collaborative steps that were taken to get us there. Frame the solidarity of different groups of people coming together across different parts of our community (as a side note I think it is not so useful to frame it in war like terms which is an extrinsic set of values).
So yesterday, people in local politics in Wellington made some great decisions about housing in the city. It was a win for a more inclusive city, and to get here took the efforts of many people working together, across different communities, to demand better long term decisions from our decision makers for our public good. It included enormous efforts into deepening public understanding on the issues (yup framing matters), as well as just good old fashioned organising so decision makers can hear. That is how big change happens. Keep at it
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