Narratives need enacting, otherwise they’re just words

Summary

Reflecting on Marshall Ganz’s recent work, Lockwood identifies two key insights: 1) “We learn best by doing (like riding a bike); get on, fall off, learn, keep going” and 2) “Narrative is a crucial part of organising to make change; but narrative is not going to work on its own – you have to get others riding the bike too.” He notices that “sometimes the narrative world wangs on about theory” forgetting the need for “practical enactment” and that although narrative proponents “know how to analyse the separation at the heart of social challenges and polarisation”, they can often be, at the same time, “very consciously separated from embodied action.” With this “cognitive distance” considered, Lockwood proposes a practical model for “narrative enactment”, encouraging us to be “practicing narrative not as theory but in the service to organising.”

Rationale

Alex was one of our studio collaborators, and ‘narrative enactment’ is in our glossary: stories take hold when lived. We’d lean less on campaigns and tipping-point targets than he does.