Hi friends — I’m trying out a new format this week. Please let me know what you think of it!
This is Andrew Benedict-Nelson, your friendly neighborhood strategist. This Substack is a place for you and me to get better at social change strategy — the art of deciding how you want to change the world. Each week, I send out an exercise you can use to make these decisions more clearly. Reply to this e-mail or comment below and we can continue the conversation together! Okay, let’s get into it…
A BRIEF REVIEW
A social change strategy consists of three steps:
Decide what human behaviors you want to change.
Decide what social norms or “unwritten rules” underlie those behaviors.
Decide what new behaviors might best challenge those social norms.
I’ll occasionally add posts about this framework for social change strategy. But time has shown me that anybody can do a better job of changing the world if they make these three decisions. So give it a try!
THIS WEEK’S EXERCISE: New Hero
Here’s what to think about this week to improve your social change strategy:
Every story has a hero. But it’s not always obvious who it is. It is sometimes said that “every villain is the hero of his own story.” It’s one of the reasons we find villains like Darth Vader or Cruella de Vil so fascinating — they’re one their own twisted quests.
Yet there are more subtle ways to change the hero. Sometimes a character who seems peripheral emerges to save the day. Other times an author crafts a completely new story by focusing on a different character. For example, the Roman poet Virgil plucked a Trojan character from the Greek Iliad and made him the founder of a new civilization in the Aeneid. The losers can become the winners if you give them a millennium or so.
Now it’s time to imagine a new hero for your story. Of course, no social problem is solved by just one person or group, but you are probably accustomed to centering your thinking on a particular kind of professional or organization. So instead imagine that someone else holds the key to fixing the problem you care about most — especially if it’s someone you don’t particularly like!
THE THREE DECISIONS
Here’s how this exercise can help you get better at the three decisions for your social change strategy:
Decide what human behaviors you want to change. - You think of yourself as knee-deep in the behaviors that make up your social problem. But other people and groups are aware of behaviors tied to the problem that you have never even considered. For example, an advocate for the homeless is probably aware of the lack of affordable housing stock. But do they know the behaviors that lead to that problem as intimately as a real estate developer does? Just paying attention to what the “new hero” observes can give you a new focus for change.
Decide what social norms or “unwritten rules” underlie those behaviors. - We all want to believe that the norms that affect us most are critical to changing the world. Sometimes we’re right, but more often we are just being myopic.
For example, when I was working with corporate lawyers to make their profession more gender-inclusive, many of them told stories of a small number of women who had clawed their way to the top of their firms hierarchy of “rainmakers” and partners. They thought the social norm they needed to challenge was “women can’t be rainmakers.”
But I asked them to consider a different model where the traits women value in workplaces, such as flexibility and transparency, were allowed to truly transform their organizations. In other words, they could challenge the norm “rainmakers are the only important people” — then let the female heroes that already existed in their firms emerge.
Decide what new behaviors might best challenge those social norms. - This may be the step where a “new hero” may be the most useful. If you’re facing an entrenched social problem, it’s pretty likely that the behaviors of people like you aren’t very effective at challenging the relevant social norms. If they were, you wouldn’t still be facing this problem!
Consider the changes in the climate change movement in recent years. For decades, the face of the problem was scientists — people who speak in measured tones and deeply believe that logic can solve every problem. Now it’s young people like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Villaseñor who make clear that the problem isn’t about whether you believe the science — it’s about whether you care about their future. They challenged the polite norms of the scientists, and they’re probably the only reason this planet has a chance.
NOW YOU TRY
How might picking a “new hero” help you see your problem in a new way? Give it a try and let me know how it goes.