5 years of changing the story

When we set up FrameWorks UK in 2021, I knew I was stepping into a potential quagmire of words that are often said and rarely understood. Words like reframing, storytelling, strategic communications, narrative, discourse, and mindsets.

But I wasn’t too interested in debating definitions – I wanted to get on with the work of helping charities to use excellent evidence and communications to make sure their campaigning and advocacy work was effective in winning hearts and minds for change.

Five years in, and the work we do to support charities’ comms to be more efficacious is vital, but our work is bigger than shifting one organisation’s voice. We do narrative change work. There’s no avoiding that word quagmire anymore and I’m ready to get stuck in!

Here are FrameWorks UK’s quick guides to our favourites: ‘narrative change’, ‘framing’ and ‘mindsets’.

Narrative change

Narrative change aims to shift culture by replacing a dominant narrative with a counter-narrative.

Counter-narratives challenge the status quo – to change it for the better. We’ve seen this first-hand in the slow but steady changes in the story around issues like gay rights and smoking. And just this month, we’ve seen another counter-narrative prevailing, with new junk food advertising restrictions for TV and online coming into effect – as a new story about children’s health and food starts to drive real world change.

Narratives work through the repetition of stories that share a pattern over time. These stories come up in pop culture, activism, advocacy, and everyday conversations in relation to all kinds of different issues and events. The stories reinforce one another and influence what we see as normal or possible.

Narrative change does not matter for its own sake. This disruption of dominant narratives matters but because by changing what we see as normal or possible, it can shift mindsets, change norms, and in turn, transform systems.

Mindsets

If narratives are patterns in stories, mindsets are patterns in thinking. They influence – and are influenced by – narratives. Mindsets are the sub-conscious patterns of thinking that sit below the level of opinion or talk. They are deeply held, enduring, and shared across a culture.

If your background is in storytelling, you may know them as deep narratives. If it’s anthropology, as cultural models. If it’s psychology, as heuristics or mental shortcuts. These are all – broadly – names for the same thing: it’s those deep, taken-for-granted ways of thinking that shape how we see the world – and how we act, within it.

For all of us working to create shifts in policy, norms, practice – mindsets matter.

Because mindsets shape how we think and how we reason about our world. They’re activated by what we see, hear and experience. The culture that surrounds us. This makes narratives one way to move mindsets.

And there are different ways that mindsets may move over time:

1. We might see a change in strength, as a mindset becomes more or less dominant in public thinking. Efforts to move mindsets on obesity, for example, are shifting from the absolute dominance of the personal responsibility mindset to a strengthening of systems mindsets – in the form of recognition of the role of the food industry.
2. We might see a change in boundaries, as people use existing ways of thinking to make sense of new realities. Just as over the last decade people’s ideas of homelessness have been expanded to encompass more than just rough sleeping.
3. Or we might see a displacement, as one dominant mindset is replaced with another. Such as when the mindsets changed from assuming welfare is the job of charity to being the job of government.

And when mindsets move in these ways, it creates the space for systems change.

Framing

Framing is one element of a narrative change strategy. Framing is the choices we make about the ideas we share – and those we don’t – and how we share them. These choices bring some ways of thinking, or mindsets, to the fore and push others back. Our framing choices determine the mindsets we activate. And so, our framing choices affect how people think, feel and act.

There’s only one way to really understand which mindsets are dominant on important social issues, and which counter-narratives could bring about narrative change and shifts in mindsets – that’s research, proper research and smart strategy. Here’s to 5 more years of that!