Summary
Narrative enactment is the idea that stories change things only when people act them out. It is the working theory of Alex Lockwood, a campaign designer at Absurd Intelligence, who credits Hans Hansen’s book ‘Narrative Change’ (2020), drawn from death penalty defence work in Texas. People run on scripts, the common sense they ‘go by’. Lockwood argues that change needs three things: showing that an old script no longer works, offering a new one, and helping people repeat it in action while seeing others do the same. If stories shape our world, he writes, “they don’t do so by magic. It happens because people enact them”.
Rationale
Part 1 likens deep dispositions to habits, “developed through repeated experiences”; Alex Lockwood’s stress on repetition in action fits that. His three steps we’d treat as hunches to try, not a sequence to run.
Diagram not reproduced here (rights reserved) — see it at absurdintelligence.com ↗