WHY STORIES MATTER
The Art and Craft of Social Change
By Marshall Ganz
I grew up in Bakersfield, California, where my father was a rabbi and
my mother was a teacher. I went to Harvard in 1960, in part because it
was about as far as I could get from Bakersfield, which was the terminus
of the dust bowl migration that John Steinbeck made famous in The Grapes of Wrath.
I got my real education, however, when I left Harvard to work in the
civil rights movement in Mississippi. I went to Mississippi because,
among other things, my father had served as an Army chaplain in Germany
right after World War II. His work was with Holocaust survivors, and as a
child the Holocaust became a reality in our home. The Holocaust was
interpreted to me as a consequence of racism, that racism is an evil,
that racism kills. I made a choice to go to Mississippi.
I also was raised on years of Passover Seders. There’s a part in the
Passover Seder when they point to the kids and say, “You were a slave in
Egypt.” I finally realized the point was to recognize that we were all
slaves in Egypt and in our time that same struggle from slavery to
freedom is always going on, that you have to choose where you stand in
that. The civil rights movement was clearly about that struggle. It was
in Mississippi that I learned to be an organizer and about
movement-building.
I went to Mississippi because it was a movement of young people, and
there’s something very particular about young people, not just that they
have time. Walter Brueggemann writes in The Prophetic Imagination
about the two elements of prophetic vision. One is criticality,
recognition of the world’s pain. Second is hope, recognition of the
world’s possibilities. Young people come of age with a critical eye and a
hopeful heart. It’s that combination of critical eye and hopeful heart
that brings change. That’s one reason why so many young people were and
are involved in movements for social change.
THE INITIAL CHALLENGE for an organizer—or anybody who’s going to
provide leadership for change—is to figure out how to break through the
inertia of habit to get people to pay attention. Often that breakthrough
happens by urgency of need. Sometimes it happens because of anger—and
by anger I don’t mean rage, I mean outrage. It’s the contradiction
between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Our
experience of that tension can break through the inertia and apathy of
things as they always are.
How do organizers master urgency to break through inertia? The
difference in how individuals respond to urgency or anxiety (detected by
the brain’s surveillance system) depends on the brain’s dispositional
system, the second system in the brain, which runs from enthusiasm to
depression, from hope to despair. When anxiety hits and you’re down in
despair, then fear hits. You withdraw or strike out, neither of which
helps to deal with the problem. But if you’re up in hope or enthusiasm,
you’re more likely to ask questions and learn what you need to learn to
deal with the unexpected.
Hope is not only audacious, it is substantial. Hope is what allows us
to deal with problems creatively. In order to deal with fear, we have
to mobilize hope. Hope is one of the most precious gifts we can give
each other and the people we work with to make change.
The way we talk about this is not just to go up to someone and say,
“Be hopeful.” We don’t just talk about hope and other values in
abstractions. We talk about them in the language of stories because
stories are what enable us to communicate these values to one another.
ALL STORIES HAVE three parts: a plot, a protagonist, and a moral.
What makes a plot a plot? What gets you interested? Tension. An anomaly.
The unexpected. The uncertain and the unknown. A plot begins when the
unknown intervenes. We all lean forward because we are familiar with the
experience of having to confront the unknown and to make choices. Those
moments are the moments in which we are most fully human, because those
are the moments in which we have the most choice. While they are
exhilarating moments, they are also scary moments because we might make
the wrong choice. We are all infinitely curious in learning how to be
agents of change, how to be people who make good choices under
circumstances that are unexpected and unknown to us.
In a story, a challenge presents itself to the protagonist who then
has a choice, and an outcome occurs. The outcome teaches a moral, but
because the protagonist is a humanlike character, we are able to
identify empathetically, and therefore we are able to feel, not just
understand, what is going on.
A story communicates fear, hope, and anxiety, and because we can feel
it, we get the moral not just as a concept, but as a teaching of our
hearts. That’s the power of story. That’s why most of our faith
traditions interpret themselves as stories, because they are teaching
our hearts how to live as choiceful human beings capable of embracing
hope over fear, self-worth and self-love over self-doubt, and love over
isolation and alienation.
HOW DO WE recapture that power of public narrative and learn the art of leadership storytelling?
A leadership story is first a story of self, a story of why I’ve been
called. Some people say, “I don’t want to talk about myself,” but if
you don’t interpret to others your calling and your reason for doing
what you’re doing, do you think it will just stay uninterpreted? No.
Other people will interpret it for you. You don’t have any choice if you
want to be a leader. You have to claim authorship of your story and
learn to tell it to others so they can understand the values that move
you to act, because it might move them to act as well.
We all have a story of self. What’s utterly unique about each of us
is not the categories we belong to; what’s utterly unique to us is our
own journey of learning to be a full human being, a faithful person. And
those journeys are never easy. They have their challenges, their
obstacles, their crises. We learn to overcome them, and because of that
we have lessons to teach. In a sense, all of us walk around with a text
from which to teach, the text of our own lives.
The second story is the story of us. That’s an answer to the
question, Why are we called? What experiences and values do we share as a
community that call us to what we are called to? What is it about our
experience of faith, public life, the pain of the world, and the
hopefulness of the world? It’s putting what we share into words. We’ve
all been in places where people have worked together for years, but
there’s no us there because they don’t share their stories. Faith traditions are grand stories of us. They teach how to be an us.
Finally, there’s the story of now—the fierce urgency of now. The
story of now is realizing, after the sharing of values and aspirations,
that the world out there is not as it ought to be. Instead, it is as it
is. And that is a challenge to us. We need to appreciate the challenge
and the conflict between the values by which we wish the world lived and
the values by which it actually does. The difference between those two
creates tension. It forces upon us consideration of a choice. What do we
do about that? We’re called to answer that question in a spirit of
hope.
Our goal is to meet this challenge, to seize this hope, and turn it
into concrete action. After developing our stories of self, then we work
on building relationships, which forms the story of us. From there we
turn to strategizing and action, working together to achieve a common
purpose, learning to experience hope—that’s the story of now.
I LEARNED IMPORTANT lessons in Mississippi that underlie the art and work of organizing.
All the inequalities between blacks and whites were driven by a
deeper inequality—the inequality of power. Paul Tillich taught us that
the work of justice requires power, and for power to become justice
requires love. All three are intimately related. We cannot turn our love
into justice without engaging power. Justice is not achieved without
struggle. It’s not achieved without mobilizing power. Organizing is
about mobilizing power.
The Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 1956 was an example of turning
individual resources into collective power. To resist the segregated
buses, the black bus riders refused to pay the fare to the bus company,
and they refused not as individuals but as a community. By withdrawing
that financial resource from the city of Montgomery, they turned an
individual resource into collective power.
Gandhi taught us that most systems of power are based on
interdependence and require some degree of cooperation between those who
are exploited by them as well as those who benefit from them.
Communities get organized because there are people among them who are
skilled organizers, who are skilled leaders.
Leadership is about enabling others to achieve purpose in the face of
uncertainty. When there’s certainty, when you know what to do, you
don’t need leadership. It’s when you don’t know what to do that the art
and creativity of leadership matters. It matters even more in enabling
others to work together to achieve a common purpose in the face of
uncertainty.
One way to look at leadership is reaching down to mobilize the
resources of a constituency and turning them into goals consistent with
that constituency’s values.
We start with the skill of relationship-building, the story of self.
Then we develop the skill of motivation or the story of us. Third, the
skill of strategizing, the story of now. And fourth, the skill of
action.
Learning skills and practices is not like learning a formula; it’s
more like learning how to ride a bicycle. You can read 10 books about it
or listen to someone lecture about it all day, but how do you really
start learning to ride a bicycle? You get on. And you fall. That’s how
you learn practices. That’s how you learn
organizing.
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