What are some of the stories you tell to get people excited and ready to take action?
It’s something I’ve been thinking about since @getgood started up the idea of #storycamp, a platform for sharing and learning about effective storytelling for social change. This initiative has influenced my storytelling approach, as I now use stories that are different from the ones I used only a few years ago. I’m more motivated to inspire people to collaborate creatively than get stuck into conflict — using the @tessybritton diagram, I’ve navigated across the diagram!
But recently, I’ve reflected that my values haven’t changed and that I don’t think campaigning can’t be done in ways that build people’s capabilities; I think people need to experiment with different experiences to explore their motivations. Things would be pretty dull if we acted and felt the same way throughout our lives! So here’s a story I used to get people fired up about getting involved in social action…
When I started at university in Paris, it was just a couple of months after this, and students were pretty fired up to not let that happen again. So, over the next few years, I, as a student activist, wanted to make sure that we were heard again, so we mobilised class to class and cafe to cafe.
The most significant campaign we won wasto stop the French government from taking away employment rights for young people just because of their age. Up until the last moment, we never knew for sure that we would win. At each stage of the campaign, we experienced moments when we felt we were sinking; at other moments, we thought we were making a breakthrough. It certainly taught me about local democracy (getting together 2000 people in the university square to agree on a set of demands for our student union), creative campaigning (always getting art students to create stunts to get the public and the media involved) and symbolism (studying at the Sorbonne we had the intelligentsia all over us as if it was 68).
How was the problem being framed?
The government framed the conflict as making it easierfor employers to hire young people. Young people were framed as having their rights taken away and being discriminated against because of their age. There was a visible conflict between the government and young people, but there was a latent conflict between employers and young people based on the assumption that because of their age, they are not as valuable as older, more experienced people.
Who are the victims? Villains? Heroes? Who are the messengers that tell the story?
The “victims” are the young people. Not only are they being stereotyped by employers as not being trusted to fulfil a contract or skilled enough to do the job, but they are also having their employment rights taken away by the government.
The “villains” are the government. Not only is the government not doing anything to tackle employers’ implicit discrimination against young people, but it is also enshrining it in law by taking away their employment rights.
The “heroes” are the campaigners who are keeping up the pressure on the government to protect the rights of their peers and are getting other groups, such as trade unions, parents, and teachers, on board to show solidarity with the young people’s cause.
The storytellers, in this case, were the student campaigners speaking to the general public through the media, engaging people on the street where they study, and the other partners in the campaign, like the trade unions. Their role was crucial in telling the story, making it relatable, and encouraging people to choose a side and get involved. They were the ones who made the story come alive, and their efforts were instrumental in the success of the campaign.
How does the story show us (rather than tell us) what’s important? How does the story engage our values and encourage us to choose sides?
The story shows how those in power will often act in ways that maintain or even extend the power that the power already has over others in the name of the national interest. However, the only hope of those without power is to ally with others who are just as powerless, whether attacked or not. This helps build a movement and shows others that thecause is their cause.
The story asks you to choose between those who want to defend workers’ rights and those who want to accept being undercut.
How does each story show us the future? What is the vision that the story offers for resolving the conflict?
It shows that building coalitions into movements supports a critical mass to create tipping points and shared memories. People will remember how to plan, adapt, and respond to conflict. The story it offers for resolving conflicts looks at all the tools that might be needed to solve the problem. In this case, the movement didn’t stop the government from enacting the law to exclude young people’s employment rights, but it was the Constitutional Council that stopped the law from being implemented.
What are the underlying assumptions? What does someone have to believe to accept the story as accurate?
The underlying assumption is that as long as you keep growing the movement and keep the movement going, you will wear the opposition down. This is different from the case mentioned above. For someone to accept the story as accurate, the government intended to push through this law rather than use it to lower young people’s expectations of their role. In other words, if the government tries to exclude young people from employment rights when there is 40% unemployment amongst their age group, then young people will be happy to have won the campaign. When actually, all they’ve done is defend their pre-existing rights, they still haven’t gotten any support to make it easier for them to get jobs with employment rights.
What are the other story’s vulnerabilities? Limits? Contradictions? Lies? How can underlying assumptions or values be exposed?
The story’s vulnerabilities are that although the campaign achieved its defensive aims, it didn’t achieve its constructive aims. In other words, it didn’t get its alternative proposal accepted by the government or the employers.
It didn’t change the government’s or employers’ behaviour, making it easier for young people to get jobs without having to trade off their working rights.
The state must incentivise supply through investment, skills, and even jobs. Still, if this isn’t accompanied by a change in employers’ perceptions of young people, policies to reduce youth unemployment will always be constrained.
Underlying assumptions or values could have been exposed by pushing the government to debate the students’ counter-proposal as much, if not more, than discussing the government’s proposal. By framing the argument around what the students have to offer, it would have been the government that would have had to respond to what aspects of the proposal they would accept — those they won’t take to justify why they don’t agree or why they can’t implement it.
So that was the story I would tell people to get fired up about when I was at university. What stories do you get people fired about?
