Narrative Crisis Preparedness

Major, shocking events can have a huge impact on the narratives that underpin our understanding of the world. While narrative and culture change work tends to take years, events have the power to bring about rapid change, often in unexpected ways.

The period we are living in has been called a ‘permacrisis’: one crisis after another. This can be very disorientating - just as we have begun to deal with the last crisis and understand what it means, the next one hits. Too often organizations working on narrative change are unprepared -constantly in a state of disorientation, stress and confusion, scrambling to respond while others are taking advantage of the chaos to impose their agendas.

While we don’t know exactly what the next crisis will be, we do know there will be one at some point - so how can we make sure we are ready for the unexpected?

Workshop Outline

This workshop will give organizations concrete, practical advice about what they can do to be prepared for a crisis. It will cover the following areas:

The narrative perils and opportunities that a crisis presents.

Five things that generally happen in the field of narrative during a time of crisis and disruption, and historical examples of each, and key questions every organization needs to ask itself.

A toolkit to assess your emergency readiness, to help you outline practical steps you and your organization to start taking now, to better prepare you for whatever it is that might happen next.

Duration:

90 Minutes

Price:

$1000/group of 10-15 people (from a single organization)

$100/person (individual participants)

Consulting on Narrative Crisis Preparedness:

In addition to the workshop, I am available to discuss how I might organizations to think through and plan their narrative crisis preparedness.

The workshop is based on this piece I wrote in 2022, called Narrative Emergency Kit: How should we prepare for the next crisis?