Sometimes the work of social change calls not for working harder or being more confrontational, but rather for “changing the conversation.” If your argument for altering society’s approach to an issue is a losing one, making it more strenuously won’t help, and it might hurt.
This morning I read an example of this in the New York Times. In a guest opinion piece, an academic from Yale University addressed the issue of rising crime by saying that we need to change the conversation around crime from “tough candidates punishing bad people” to “strong communities keeping everyone safe.” His argument is consistent with what I have been learning about the criminal legal system from some of the grantees of Focus for Health, a foundation I do consulting for, such as Chainless Change and Equal Justice Under Law.
This reminded me of two articles that I have assigned to the students in the nonprofit leadership and social entrepreneurship courses I have taught. One of them, titled “When Good is Not Good Enough,” is mainly about the transformations that the organizations led by two of the authors underwent to achieve greater impact. But along the way they mention how a program to reduce teen smoking in Florida changed their approach from lecturing teens about the evils of smoking to calling for them to use their smarts and skepticism to “investigate” the practices of tobacco companies and come to their own conclusions about what they were up to. As a result, smoking among middle-schoolers fell 19.8% in a single year !
In another classic article in the Atlantic, the author analyzed how gay marriage went from being seen as an unrealistic goal—even to most gay rights organizations—and being rejected by voters in liberal states like California to being a constitutional right in 2015. (Today it is supported by more than 70% of the country and a new federal law.) One of the key parts of going from a series of losses to a long string of victories was having the leading organizations in the LGBT community change their argument from trying to change marriage to trying to join it.
In many cases, creating positive social change requires more effort, more money, more people, and more confrontation with vested interests and other opponents. At other times, however, it may simply require framing the issue, and possible solutions to it, in new, more appealing ways.
What current issues do you think could benefit from being reframed, and how?