Our 4 design principles are the result of years of research, experimentation, and collaboration with partners. According to Executive Director Brian Waniewski, they emerged “in the context of real projects where we were figuring out how to help people tell more powerful and impactful stories.” Over the years, they crystallized into a set of principles that inform the design of all the work we do. We share them here in the hope they’ll be useful in your work. You can listen to our team delve into them in more detail.

Audiences on Their Own Terms

“Trying to fix people is fruitless. If you aren’t respectful of where an audience is at and eager to make stuff they want to consume, you’re not making effective organic media.” —Riki Conrey, Principal Scientist, Harmony Labs

One of the first narrative projects we did was about climate skeptic networks on Reddit and Twitter. The first draft of that report was really opinionated and polemical, designed to take the wind out of the climate skeptic perspective. It was then that we decided we did not want to do that kind of work. We threw away our draft and started over. We wanted to present what we were seeing with wonder and curiosity, even if we didn’t agree with the perspectives it represented. This, after all, is what would be most helpful to the long-form filmmakers we were working with.

Over the years, this instinct crystallized into an understanding that stories can only build bridges, if we’re able to start with seeing audiences as they are, not as we want them to be. This includes people with values different from our own, who make choices that do not resemble our own. If our goal is to broaden a base of support or build a coalition, then by definition we are trying to connect with people who don’t already agree with us.

Meeting audiences on their own terms doesn’t mean endorsing every belief. It means starting from a place of respect and curiosity, with as little judgment as possible. In all aspects of our work, we strive to represent audiences in ways that they might represent themselves, often in their own words or through media of their own choosing.

Story for Narrative Strategy

“When we tell a story, we transport people into a world. Instead of deciding whether they agree or disagree, they’re feeling something.” —Elsie Iwase, Strategy Director, Harmony Labs

Tell a story and you immediately disarm. You activate a different kind of mental processing. You build a relationship. There is nothing like a story for taking people on a difficult journey that ends in an unexpected place. That’s why we center storytelling—whether through films, shows, memes, or social media posts—over argumentation, which tends to trigger people’s defenses, to put them in a frame of mind to argue, making them less likely to try on new perspectives.

Vision as Offense

“If you’re always defining yourself against something, you’re letting the opposition set the terms of the conversation.” –Brian Waniewski, Executive Director, Harmony Labs

So many modes of public communication rely on critique, on problem or conflict-focused story telling. This kind of work has a place. But in the research we’ve done on content that moves people, it’s most reliably content that looks forward to something, that lays out a picture of where we’re headed. Unfolding a vision is something stories are uniquely well suited to do: visions that people want to be a part of and are willing to fight for, that help them make sense of, survive, improve, or transcend their current material reality.

Evolution All Around

“[In our project with Rewiring America], we thought we’d be talking about climate, but what mattered to rural audiences was reliability and self-sufficiency. Once we stopped leading with ‘the planet’ and started listening to what people actually cared about, the message landed.” —Riki Conrey, Principal Scientist, Harmony Labs

So often people talk about this kind of work as “changing hearts and minds.” Which is code for making people think what we think. We’ve come to understand that change isn’t something we do to others—it’s something we do with others. When narrative change work succeeds, it always entails transformation for everyone. In other words, we don’t want to fix anyone. We don’t want to change people’s values. We don’t believe it’s possible, or even desirable, for everyone in a society to share the same values. Rather, we want to help people understand one another a little better, to learn, to grow, to make new connections.

Learn More

These four design principles underlie all the work we do with audiences and partners, and we hope they spark ideas for your own work.

Listen to the episode to hear our team delve into these principles in more detail.

Get in touch if you’d like to start a conversation.