I’ve become more aware of story in the last few years. And it’s been ever clearer that recent UK national politics is all about story. The Conservatives constructed a mythology and hammered it in with brutish repetition. Labour failed to build a distinctive story that people wanted to follow. The Liberal Democrats spoke about a […]
story
The holes in the Earth Summit
It turned out the Earth Summit was more of a foothill. This was a huge event back in 1992. We hoped it would lead to fixing everything. Looking back I can see it was inevitable that it didn’t get that traction. It didn’t have a big enough picture. In the 1990s we simply didn’t know […]
If you want to change the world, stop
Do you think people are rational decision‑makers? That is: you put facts in front of them about problems and solutions, have a reasoned debate, persuade them of a different point of view, then they change their position and their behaviour. If so, you have to let go of that idea. Seriously. Do you want to […]
Facing the barricades kindly: the mental inflammation epidemic
It sometimes seems like people are queueing up to reject attempts to make the world better. When I’ve been thinking about barriers to change, worldview bubbles and all that, there seems to be one thing at the base of it all. Our brains have a directive to keep their processing workload down. They use all sorts of tricks […]
Agents of S.T.O.R.Y.
We’re living in a time when old stories of the world are breaking down. More and more people are seeing and feeling it, as a sense of unease at the edges or a head-on reality gap collision. People are hunting for ways of making sense of the world that they can believe in. And those […]
The upward path – video blog
It’s an old metaphor. The fork in the road. The point of choice. Do we take the upward path to the world we want to see, or the downward path of fear and short-term convenience? From personal development work helping individuals to campaigning to influence governments, if you are helping to make things better you […]