Facing Change 6 sections

01 Start here

Facing Change is a curation of what I’ve learned about how to face and facilitate change. I began building it in 2019 as I was giving talks about the climate crisis and finding my way into strategic communications and narrative change work. Full of links to reports, insight, quotes and eventually my own thinking, it became a guide I shared with anyone who asked.

If you’re interested in how to make change happen, and have particular curiosity about the role of communications and storytelling, you might find the guide interesting.

Where we are

I’m sure you’ll be familiar with the following. The change we’re facing isn’t one event. It’s a long middle: decades of turbulence rather than a single cliff edge, already under way, unevenly spread, and increasingly understood as ‘collapse’. For many colonised peoples the world they knew has ended before, and there’s a lot to learn from them – as allies, not as a resource. Nobody knows for sure what will happen so I don’t claim to have a forecast, but look to patterns and pay attention. What we do know is that there’s room to act and make choices all the way through, and that how we do this steers how bad things get.

Where to go next

• The message – the craft: principles, structure, words, messengers, conversations and traps.
• Narrative and culture – the slower layers, and the dispositions beneath them.
• Why it’s hard – the psychology, the denial and the feelings.
• How you’ll know – how to tell whether it’s working.
• What’s changed – where my thinking has moved since the first guide.
• Toolkit – the order of work, and the frameworks I reach for, by job.
• By topic – what works now, issue by issue, with dates.
• Quotes – lines worth carrying.

02 The message

This section is about craft: the principles I work from, what to say, who says it, and how to handle the people who’d rather you failed.

Nine comms principles

1. Get people from where they are, with a voice they’ll hear. We listen to people who listen to us, people like us, or people we like. Understand your audience’s current needs and values and find a suitable voice that can appeal to them, on their level (it might not be you).
2. Speak on their terms, in their terms. Which quite possibly aren’t related to your concern, e.g. ‘climate’ (but might be about their children, health, safety and cleanliness). Reflect a range of emotions, use images and stories of real people, focus locally, lose jargon and don’t rely on facts unless people ask for them.
3. Be honest, then hopeful. Tell the truth about how serious things are, through people your audience trusts, then offer a way in. Honest so people step up, hopeful so they don’t give up. By hope I mean agency with a path, which is different from vague optimism. Much of what’s coming is a predicament to live with, not a problem to fix, and doom spreads but doesn’t tend to move people by itself.
4. Show the better party, and throw it. We are moved by visions of a better world, but they must be visions that we can believe, and see ourselves playing a role in – visions grounded in reality that we can feel. To be compelled to change (which means losing things) we need a ‘better party’ to go to (the line is attributed to Rick Ingrasci; I wrote more about it in A better party). I mean ‘better’ as in ‘healed’, as in ‘to get better’, and not only ‘improved’. Show the change that’s already under way, and make it something people can join; for many people, healing comes before imagining. If you don’t help people make sense of what they’re losing, someone else will.
5. Most of us already agree. Most people want action and wrongly think they’re in the minority, so they stay quiet. Say “most of us”, and show the people like them already acting. Say what people approve of as well as what they do: a line like “most people still don’t do/realise…” teaches the very habit you want gone.
6. Name the system, not the neighbour – and show the way out. Show how the problem is built and who profits from keeping it, without blaming ordinary people for living inside it. Then offer a fix the size of the problem, and a route out: “it’s rigged” on its own breeds fatalism, and US research found that fatalism can make a strongman who promises to tear it all down sound like the only way out. Pair every no with a yes that’s honest about its trade-offs.
7. Empower real choice, don’t impose action. We don’t like being told what to do, especially if it hinders our freedom; instead help people demand better options to choose from, as citizens (not ‘consumers’). This isn’t about ‘changing minds’, it’s about helping people find reasons to change their own minds.
8. Don’t take their bait. Opponents want you repeating their claims, angry, and fighting your friends. Stay calm, offer something better, reveal their motives where it helps, and spend your energy building with allies.
9. Repeat until it’s common sense, and tie it to practice. A message lands once. A narrative takes years of many voices saying the same thing. Minds change more through doing things together, and through relationships, than through debate – mood follows behaviour. Stories stick when they’re tied to something people do.

A structure that fails

1. There’s a big problem
2. Not enough is being done about it
3. We need your help to fix it
4. If we don’t fix it, we’re fucked

Here’s what people hear at each step. “I’ve got 99 problems, I don’t need yours.” “Why would I join a struggling effort and risk failing, or being left out?” “Why should I help you?” “I don’t want to think about that – and why should I believe you?” They can also feel blamed, as if it’s their fault not enough is being done. For a long time, this was how most change-seeking communication was built.

A structure that succeeds

1. Most of us agree that A matters – a shared value, quality or outcome
2. Right now, B is in the way of A – a problem, a risk, or someone profiting from it
3. But millions of people like us are doing C to get past B
4. Join them, so together we can secure D – a better world without B, grounded in A, reached through C

It starts on shared moral ground rather than the moral high ground. It starts where people, and people like them, are, and only then names the problem, which is now a shared one. Then it offers an invitation into a growing group of people like them, building a world full of the thing they care about. It’s close to the shape tested in the Race Class Narrative research: value, villain, vision.

Watch the words

Choose plain outcomes over jargon with any audience, including the most committed: “clean air” and “lower bills” rather than “net zero” or “decarbonisation”.

The orientations that test well right now, in Potential Energy’s 2026 guide, are everyday material life (not morality), building (not banning), local (not global), and manageable steps (not massive change).

Write small: carry the big issue in its smallest real detail – one street, one family, one bill.

Who’s in the room

No message works on everyone, so decide who you’re talking to.

For the UK public, More in Common’s seven segments are the best map, and Climate Outreach’s Britain Talks Climate applies them to climate; in the US, Yale’s Six Americas.

Then picture your audience as a spectrum, from active allies through the undecided to active opponents, and aim to move each group one step closer. Don’t spend your energy trying to convert the ‘active opponent’ people at the far end.

In business rooms, talk about investment rather than cost. Often the most useful thing a business can offer is its voice on policy, not just its own footprint.

Messengers

Audiences trust people who seem passionate, credible and caring, and they listen hardest to people like them.

Scientists, celebrities and anyone who sounds like a lecturer or a protester are less persuasive than someone who sounds like the audience. Sometimes the job is to give the story to the right messenger rather than to tell it yourself.

Roots in ancient rhetoric

Rhetoric is the ancient art of persuasion – the ancient behavioural science.

• “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”

It’s about arguing, rather than fighting. A fight tries to win, to destroy; an argument tries to win over, to move.

Character leads persuasion – the messenger is the message.

• “People don’t believe in ideas; they believe in people who believe in ideas.”

• It doesn’t matter what you’re saying if you’re not the right person: people won’t trust you.
• And often, if you’re the right person, it doesn’t matter what you say: people will trust you.
• Typically, people need to hear from people like them, or people they like.

Emotion comes next, then reason – as Jonathan Haidt puts it in The Righteous Mind (2012), “talk to the elephant first.”

Begin from, and speak to, an understanding of their position: “An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.” – Gene Knudsen Hoffman, Compassionate Listening and Other Writings (2003)

Rules of thumb:

• Be the two Ps: pithy and profound. If you don’t repeat, you can’t compete.
• Tell them where you came from, then who you are, then what you’re going to do.
• Don’t deny a story; create a new one.
• Master metaphor, because “unless our words, concepts and ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear.” – Lynell Burmark

• “Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”

The traps

Opponents of change have three favourite traps.

1. Getting you to repeat their nonsense. A false claim starts fragile and grows on the oxygen you give it. Don’t repeat their frame; reveal their tactics. On a platform even a rebuttal is oxygen: the ranking reads every reply, quote and view as interest and shows the post to more people. Pass over it, and answer in your own post rather than in their replies.
2. Making you outraged. Outrage keeps you in their conversation. Stay calm, offer a better conversation, and name their motives where it helps.
3. Turning you against your friends. The surest way to protect an old order is for the people trying to change it to fight each other. Spend the energy building together instead.

Today’s denial mostly attacks the solutions rather than the science. Name the delay tactics before they land. William Lamb and colleagues sort them into four families in Discourses of climate delay: shifting responsibility, pushing solutions that change nothing, dwelling on the downsides, and giving up. When you do need to correct a myth, lead with the fact, mention the myth once with a warning, then explain the trick it plays.

Conversations

Everyday conversation is the most under-used lever there is, and in Britain most people rarely talk about climate at all. Climate Outreach’s REAL TALK is a good start: respect, enjoy, ask, listen, tell your story, keep going. Deep canvassing takes the same spirit to strangers: candid, empathetic conversations about their own experiences in place of argument, so that whatever they conclude is theirs.

At the family table:

• Maybe don’t – if someone’s view is pure political tribalism, agree to disagree.
• Be curious: ask, listen, and repeat back what you heard.
• Avoid words that close the conversation down, like “crisis”, “emergency” or “revolution”.
• With conservatives, talk about safety and security for the next generation; with progressives, change and opportunity.
• Tell stories, including your own, and focus on solutions to the impacts people can see.
• Don’t make anyone feel stupid, and don’t quote the IPCC.

(Following Emily Holden’s advice in the Guardian, 2019.)

Who you’re talking to decides where you start. With the public, open on a value you share. With decision-makers and sceptical professional rooms it works the other way round: in eighty-odd talks to business audiences, I found it helps to restore the scientific consensus first, as shared authority, before anything emotional or systemic.

People who’ve been pulled away

Sometimes the person you want to reach has been drawn into something: conspiracy thinking, a closed group, extremist politics. The research on people who’ve left those worlds agrees on a few things:

• Belonging comes before belief, so people are rarely argued out. Almost every account of leaving names someone who wasn’t trying to change them. Be that person: stay warm, stay in touch, and don’t make the relationship depend on the outcome.
• Talk about what you still share, and ask more than you tell.
• Let their group’s own contradictions do the work, rather than supplying yours, and be there when those contradictions bite.
• Help them keep ties to people outside the group, and make sure there’s somewhere to land if they start to leave: friends, work, a place to be.
• Never shame them or treat their view as stupidity. Contempt pushes people further in.
• Expect years, not weeks. Many people leave on their own, and you may never see the moment it turns.

In the conversation itself, VERA helps (as taught on the Resist + Renew podcast):

• Validate (“I can see why it seems that way”)
• Explain (“I think of it more like…”)
• Reframe (“so if we look at it from that angle…”)
• Ask (“what do you make of that?”).

These lessons come from people who did leave, so treat them as hopeful rather than guaranteed. Two places to start reading are the Radicalisation Awareness Network’s The role of civil society organisations in exit work (2022) and Katharina Meredith and John Horgan’s After They Leave (Journal for Deradicalization, 2024). If someone may harm themselves or others, get professional help.

For the frameworks behind all this, see the Toolkit.

03 Narrative and culture

Messages are the visible part. Underneath them are narratives, which can take years to move, and culture, which can take decades.

What follows are some basic reflections on narrative and culture work.

Stories and narratives

Stories aren’t frivolous entertainment. They’re the coding that shapes and is shaped by what we believe, what we choose and who we are: from myths, parables and fairytales to textbooks, blockbusters, taglines and headlines.

A story is a unit of a narrative, like a tile to a mosaic or a thread to a tapestry. Together, many stories weave a narrative, and the narrative forms the fabric of our reality – the reality about which new stories are then told. And so the cycle spins.

That’s why one campaign rarely changes much on its own. It’s a drop in an ocean of stories pulling the other way. Narrative work means building the infrastructure for many voices, modes and places to carry connected stories over years: funding, networks, research, and patience. And budget for reach: good content nobody sees changes nothing.

Andre Banks argues in Built For a Different War that the right spent decades building decentralised but coordinated narrative infrastructure while progressives kept paying for broadcast ads, media relations and think tanks. Banks’s answer has three parts: go low, funding storytellers and meme-makers as well as policy experts; contribute on today’s platforms rather than wait for them to be regulated; and build lasting relationships in the spaces where people’s identities form, making things with creators rather than broadcasting at them.

Rashad Robinson defines ‘narrative power’ as “the ability to create leverage over those who set the incentives, rules and norms that shape society and human behavior”. It’s worth asking who holds it on your issue, and how they got it.

Culture

‘Culture’ means different things, and these things are often conflated. It can mean ‘Pop Culture’ or ‘Arts and Culture’. It can also mean ‘the ties that bind us’, ‘the waters we swim in’ or ‘the soil we grow from’. Or as Culture Hack Labs put it: “culture refers to the normative values and belief systems that coordinate human activity.”

Pop Culture is shaped by and also shapes culture. Changing culture will almost certainly change Pop Culture. But changing Pop Culture alone will not necessarily change culture.

I used to agree that “culture sits upstream from politics”. I don’t any more. The two shape each other: culture, law, money and institutions hold an order in place together, and the stories that stick tend to be the ones with the channels to repeat them. Upstream is still a good argument for where to put money, but it’s the wrong picture of how change happens.

What that means in practice:

• New culture is lived before it’s told. You can’t workshop a big new story from the top down. It grows from many smaller lived stories, and it takes hold when people practise it together, so offer free samples of the better party, not just descriptions of it.
• Alternatives need defending. Showing a better way of living is necessary, and never enough on its own: undefended alternatives get absorbed or crushed. Build the better party, and protect it.
• Tie stories to practice. Story alone fades: climate fiction measurably moves its readers, and the effect is gone within about a month (Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and colleagues, Environmental Communication, 2020). A story lasts when it emerges from what people do, the relationships they’re in, and what their surroundings make easy.
• Pop Culture is infrastructure. Long-form stories, and the characters people feel they know, are among the strongest measured influences on attitudes. Television, film and games reach people that campaigns never will. Stories get past defences that arguments can’t: absorbed in a story, people stop arguing with it and start caring about the characters. And representation on screen is only half of it; who writes, commissions and gets paid is the other half.
• The right currently does culture better. Decades of market-first politics have left a longing for community, safety and agency. Culture-first movements on the right are building spaces for belonging while progressives send messages. The job is to build a broad enough ‘us’ to carry what comes next before the arbiters of deluded and deadly paradigms finish building their own.

Six roles

Stories need organised power behind them, and organising needs stories. Each fails without the other: a story with no one organised to act on it fades, and a policy win without a story that makes sense of it doesn’t hold. So work both fronts, tied together. No one does all of it. Drawing on the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops, Joanna Macy’s Great Turning, the Ayni Institute’s Movement Ecology and Julia Roig’s Block, Bridge, Build, I find six roles a movement needs filled:

• Resist – block harm, defend the people most targeted, and slow the damage.
• Hospice – help what’s dying to end well: decide what to let go of, and keep people safe through the ending.
• Build – alternatives, ways of meeting needs, and the institutions that can receive change, then make demands of the state from there.
• Bridge – connect the old system with the new, the two sides of a divide, and the work aimed at decision-makers with the work aimed at the public.
• Narrate – make meaning, and carry the story between the others while keeping it tied to what they do.
• Tend – grief, healing and care for the people doing the work.

Pick yours, and know who’s holding the others. Each fails in its own way: resistance that’s performed but no longer bends power, hospicing that slides into resignation, building that becomes an undefended subculture, bridging that turns into absorption, a story that floats free of practice, healing that becomes a private retreat.

Deep dispositions

Stories never arrive on neutral ground. They meet people whose sense of the world has already been shaped, below conscious belief, by everything around them: their bodies, relationships, surroundings and culture. With Ella Saltmarshe and Ruth Taylor, I’ve been calling these ‘deep dispositions’; we set them out in Getting Deep (Part 1).

A few things follow:

• These ‘dispositions’ are like ‘cultural habits’, and like any habit, argument alone doesn’t move them. The work is to grow the places where people can live different ones – cultivation rather than conversion.
• None of us stands outside them. Change-makers reproduce the dispositions they’re trying to change, so it pays to check what our own work assumes, as well as what it argues.
• One reorientation keeps coming up: from separation, the sense that we’re apart from and above each other and the living world, towards interbeing, the understanding that nothing exists independently but comes into being through relationships, long cultivated in many Indigenous, Buddhist and ecological traditions. Another way of describing this is john a. powell’s: from othering to belonging.

Separation is one of three roots I keep coming back to, alongside an economy built on extraction and power concentrated in a few (typically white, male, ‘western’) hands. Most of the crises we face grow from them, so if the work only treats the crises, which are symptoms, the same diseased system keeps growing back.

What the work is for

Every piece of work leaves a cultural footprint, intended or not, and what it assumes teaches more than what it argues. Before you launch, ask:

1. What values does this feed?
2. Who acts, and who is acted upon?
3. Who’s missing?
4. What does it treat as natural or inevitable?
5. What does it ask people to do, and what does the ending put back as normal?

And consider how to help people to:

1. Feel the power they already have, and use it with others
2. See themselves as part of a ‘larger us’, and a ‘broader self’
3. Think, feel and act on a longer timeframe
4. Act as citizens with a stake, not consumers with a choice
5. Fall in love with nature as a relative, not a resource

Behind all of it sits love. I mean love as a unitive energy, beyond the current diminished, sexualised, commodified version of it: the energy that can carry us through and beyond healing, and expand what we mean by ‘self’ and ‘family’. An orientation towards that kind of love is also a source of moral authority.

04 Why it’s hard

If information were enough, we’d have sorted our crises decades ago. It isn’t. Here’s what gets in the way.

We aren’t calculators

We decide from feeling, identity and belonging, then find reasons to justify our decisions. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that reasoning evolved more for winning arguments than for finding the truth – reason as our PR department, rather than our R&D department (Rory Sutherland). When a fact threatens who we are or who we belong with, we protect who we are.

Climate breakdown and other complex system collapses add their own problem, which researchers call ‘psychological distance’: they can feel far away in place, time and social circle, and uncertain to boot. Most people also worry about this month’s bills before the end of the world.

These are the mental shortcuts I see doing most of the damage – some keep our beliefs in place, others keep our world as it is.

Changing my beliefs

Changing my world

Two you’ll often hear that I’ve stopped leaning on:

1. The backfire effect, the idea that correcting people makes them dig in, turns out to be rare in large studies: corrections usually help, if imperfectly.
2. The Dunning–Kruger effect, the idea that the less you know (generally, or about something specific), the more you think you know, is smaller and more disputed than the meme suggests.

Denial and delay

Most denial isn’t ignorance. It’s protection – of comfort, identity and a way of life. Some of it is socially sanctioned: whole cultures look away together from the violence their lifestyles depend on, from the limits of the planet, from how entangled we are, and from the size of what’s needed – what Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, in Hospicing Modernity, calls the four socially sanctioned denials.

Delay becomes more prevalent as denial becomes harder to maintain. Alex Steffen calls it ‘predatory delay’: slowing change down because someone profits from the status quo. It comes in recognisable forms, which William Lamb and colleagues sort into four families in Discourses of climate delay: shifting responsibility, pushing solutions that change nothing, dwelling on the downsides, and giving up.

The methods are recognisable too. Ben Nimmo’s four Ds describe the playbook: dismiss, distort, distract, dismay. RAND’s “firehose of falsehood” adds the delivery: high volume, many channels, fast and repetitive, with no commitment to truth or consistency. You don’t beat a firehose by building a bigger one. Volume decides what gets seen, so get yours seen with real people and true content – no fake accounts, bots or bought reach. Trust, relationships and friction decide what’s believed. The big channels are already rewarded for carrying stories that serve current power, and AI will make those stories cheaper to produce and more persuasive, so you’ll also need routes to people that don’t run through those channels.

Feelings

The threat of major change and collapse brings up the full range of human feeling. Panu Pihkala’s taxonomy of climate emotions, summarised by Britt Wray in Gen Dread, runs from shock, dread and grief to anger, envy, pride, belonging and love. Caring is at the root of most of them: we feel anxious and angry because we care.

Feelings faced alone tend to harden, into numbness or into the resentment populism feeds on. Faced together, they can become fuel. So make room for them: in a talk, a workshop or a campaign, give people somewhere to put what they feel before asking them to act. Expect one feeling in particular when people do change: the shame of realising they’ve been getting it wrong. Alex Lockwood, drawing on Hans Hansen’s Narrative Change, advises building a safety net for it into anything that asks people to act differently.

The same goes for us. Grief that people working for change haven’t faced tends to harden into denial, moral certainty or a rush to fix things, and groups that can’t hold uncertainty, conflict and strong feeling don’t last a long fight. So build time, ritual and people who tend grief into the work itself – without letting healing turn into a private retreat from it.

My position: the impasse of doom

One camp thinks doom is being pushed by vested interests to make people give up. Another thinks the backlash against doom is being pushed by vested interests to make people complacent. Everyone is probably a bit right. I think both efforts are needed, one facing decision-makers and one facing the public, and the job is to make them work together rather than compete. It’s the territory and the compass that are different; the map is shared.

05 How you’ll know

Most change work is never measured, or is measured with the wrong ruler. A few habits help.

• Decide what success looks like before you start. Agree two or three signs you’ll watch, and what you’ll do if they don’t move. Agree, too, what would make you stop.
• Test before you launch. Try short competing versions on the people you want to reach, and check both whether they pay attention and whether anything shifts. Attention on its own doesn’t mean anyone was persuaded.
• Learn as you go. Where cause and effect can’t be known in advance, don’t write a fixed plan: run small experiments, watch what happens, back what works, drop what doesn’t, and don’t settle on one answer too early.
• Don’t mistake reach for change. Impressions, views and recall tell you a message travelled, not that anyone thinks or does anything differently.
• Measure in ripples. Start with what you can see – your own capability, then partners taking the work up, then the public conversation, and only then people’s underlying beliefs – and claim a contribution rather than the credit. The rings are Brett Davidson’s, from Measuring Narrative Change (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2023).
• Watch concern and priority separately. People can stay concerned while an issue slips down their list, and that’s when they’re easiest to pull away.
• Measure the perception gap. Ask how many of your audience think others agree with them, before and after.
• Check for harm. Culture work can misfire. Build in a light check from the start, and take what you learn back to the people making the work, not only the funders.
• Be honest about scale. Never promise culture-level change for message-level work. And for climate, the weather does its own persuading: after a summer of floods opinion moves whatever you did, so don’t claim it without something to compare against.

06 What’s changed

I started compiling this guide in 2019. I’ve learned a lot since then, though much of the first version still holds. These are the places where my thinking has moved since.