What is a narrative strategy and why do we need one? This is something I’d like to explore with you today. In a world where most of our stories are broken, this is an opportunity to bring about the profound healing that is truly needed.
Humans are a storytelling animal. Some even go so far as to say that we were misnamed by scientists when they chose to call us Homo Sapiens (the hominid who is wise) — preferring instead to say we should be Homo Ludens (the hominid who plays). See this Wikipedia page for more about the deeper thinking behind this distinction.
Play is how we discover the world. How we create stories and live them out. Go to the theater and you will see people enacting a play so they can take on different characters, explore ethical themes, and develop new ways of being in a safe environment. We need stories. We are stories. They are fundamental to social life. And humans are profoundly social.
We need better strategies for our stories. Better ways of choosing which stories we live into being and which ones no longer serve us. About eight years ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by katie teague about the false choice between hope and doom. She created a beautiful short video so I could say how we need to live a new story into being because it doesn’t exist yet. You can watch it here:
If a story doesn’t exist yet, it needs to be manifested. Guided into being. Shaped with intelligence, conscience, and care. This is where strategy comes in. We need to understand how narratives work and apply this knowledge to how we bring about the changes that need to emerge.
In one of my recent articles, I shared how I devoted ten years of my life to creating narrative strategies as a cognitive linguist — working with social movements all over the world. This is an area I know very well. For example, a story will only take hold in your mind if it becomes dynamically entangled with unresolved emotions. An example might be that if you felt a deep sense of rejection in your family when you were a child, you might be lured into stories about adventure and discovery to help you construct a new sense of identity for yourself.
Stories are alive in us. And they bring us to life. They animate us. And we need them for our spiritual, emotional, and social wellbeing. I gave a webinar two years ago when we birthed the Earth Regeneration Fund to share how it is not primarily about money. Mostly it is a tapestry of stories weaving new realities into existence. Here is the webinar recording:
In essence, the narrative strategy is that we design immersive experiences and live them out as part of a larger, coherent framework of transformational change. We hosted a learning journey in the Design School last year called How to Organize Your Bioregion and we introduced the lens of design immersions for bioregional regeneration. In parallel with this, we flowed funding into several powerful transformational processes — supporting design immersions in different parts of the world.
The immersions were funded with a reciprocity agreement:
(1) Receive the money.
(2) Organize a design immersion.
(3) Share your story out into the world.
(4) Weave the stories.
This is how the Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating Earth emerged with such clarity this year. We were already living the stories that move us toward the birthing of bioregional learning centers (our learning journey from two years ago) as real-world experiences. Stories that people are living out in a fully embodied way. See how it flows? This is powerful stuff!
Here are the design immersions that we funded last year:
Each of these immersions is a narrative. A story of people living into a different way of being. Expressed uniquely in each place with its distinctive cultural and ecological patterns. The weaving is at the strategic level. Through our learning journeys in the Design School, bioregional activations and pilgrimages that we embark upon. And more that is hard to see because it is interwoven in a distributed way into the tapestry of realities as they emerge.
This year, we have flowed financial resources into three bioregional pilgrimages to seed the Dandelion Strategy into being. We have also flowed money to the bioregional learning center of the Northern Andes and that of the Mediterranean. And we are moving toward the birth of the BLC Action Network that will sustain our narrative strategy as it grows out to the planetary scale — all of this is part of the phase transition we described in one of our webinars of this year’s learning journey. This year’s learning journey is called Regenerating the Earth Thru Collapse.
Part of the strategy is the way I use my Substack account. I launched here in February of this year and have already grown to several thousand subscribers. Each subscriber receives the stories and is invited to live out their own story. You can join us and be part of it. Also, we are seeking wealth stewards with conscience who seek Return of Legacy instead of “Return on Investment” to help us pool the Living Flows at the planetary scale that was described in my Billion Dollar Proposal for Regenerating the Earth. Can you help these people find us? We want to enter into meaningful relationships with philanthropists and investors who care about the future of life for our beautiful planet.
Perhaps I should add that last year we also launched Historias Regenerativas to document regenerative stories in the Northern Andes as part of our work that is continually advancing in Colombia. They created these videos for the Sueños del Bosque funding round on Ma Earth that just concluded about a week ago. These are living stories that breathe the narrative strategy into being. Living it. Expressing. Doing. Weaving continuously.
In summary, our strategy is to weave a tapestry of living stories as they emerge. Seed the stories into being with design immersions and bioregional pilgrimages. Flow financial resources into the growing network of places around the world as part of the Dandelion Strategy. This is how we can birth 1000 BLCs by 2035. And you can help. Share this story. Reach out to friends who might contribute money into this. Join us in the Design School and move towards creating your own bioregional learning center.
We are a living tapestry of stories. This is what humanity truly is in a deep and profound sense. Let the new stories rise up from the biological world — bringing deep meaning, spirituality, purpose, and reverence to how we can relate to the only home we’ve ever known, Mother Earth.
Onward, fellow humans.
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