This can be difficult to wrap your head around.  It may be helpful to have some context.  This is our story.

Humble Beginnings

Cognitive Policy Works (CPW) started out like so many things do, as a conversation among friends both old and new.  Some of us had met at the now-defunct Rockridge Institute where we came together with the lofty goal of empowering progressives to communicate deeply and powerfully through an understanding of political frames.  When Rockridge fell away in April of 2009, we grieved our loss and pondered how to continue doing the important work that was left undone.

During the summer of the same year, we began reaching out to others who were clearly new-friends-in-the-making.  We came together in a series of conference calls about filling the void where Rockridge had once been and taking our respective works to the next level through a strategic partnership.  We talked about the need to bring psychologists together with media experts; the challenges associated with incorporating insights about the political mind into organizational settings; and our shared vision of a world inhabited by people capable of applying deep insights into themselves to successfully manage the Great Transition that is the 21st Century.

These conference calls culminated in the design of a new organization that (we hope!) will result in a new professional class of highly-trained expert practitioners who understand the workings of the political mind and can skillfully apply their knowledge “in the trenches” where our current political culture is unable to function properly.

Cultivating New Practices

We were quick to distinguish the product emphasis of other organizations in our domain that focus their energy on producing articles and reports from the process emphasis that we embody through a focus on the implementation of new organizational practices and learning environments that make professional change agents more effective in their daily work.

Right away we set out to design new tools for practitioners to use.  We applied for and received a grant from the Arthur W. Page Center to partner with Tom Crompton at the World Wildlife Fund, UK and create an Identity Campaigning Framework that combines insights from social psychology with the deep frames discovered through George Lakoff’s work on the political mind.  Our framework is nearly complete and going through a design-to-implementation phase with several international NGO’s in the UK.  (More on this in the coming months!)

Alongside this “big picture” project, we also started offering workshops on political frames and values-based communication.  Topics covered so far include accountability in education, building a sustainable economy, and advocating for universal health care. Techniques that have emerged through this process include:

• Frame Breaking to jam problematic frames;
• Frame Shifting to draw the discourse back to your point of view;
• Values-Based Communication for authentically expressing your views in order to build trust with an audience;
• Polarity Management for recognizing different points of view and building relationships in the midst of potential conflict.

As we went about the difficult work of figuring out how to teach these key concepts and techniques, it became clear that people could benefit from having practical examples and ongoing opportunities to practice what they were learning.  This is why we are now developing our first framing workbook on universal health care to distill what we’ve learned so far into teachable practices and techniques.  Our first workbook is almost finished and will be made available soon.  Alongside its release, we will also unveil a series of online discussion forums and virtual “workplaces” where our students can work in groups to practice applying these techniques to real-world political and social challenges.

Building A Network, Building A Movement

Recognizing the limitations of traditional non-profits and businesses, we have worked to build a strong network of partners who share our vision of a better world.  One organization cannot bring about the scale of change that is needed on its own.  This is why we are forging partnerships – like the one mentioned above with WWF-UK – where visions are deeply aligned.

The most exciting example is Seattle Innovators, a project to catalyze the creative scene in Seattle and build a multi-decade campaign around the vision of becoming a carbon neutral city.  (Read the full story here)  This project is leading to a massive coalition among non-profits, social businesses, government agencies, and research institutions.

CPW is growing as a network hub for a global movement.  It won’t be the central piece, but neither will any other organization.  Yet it can be an important point of intersection for bringing people together around shared themes.  To get a sense of how this works, consider an example:

Finding Common Ground in a Mine Field

We are currently in conversations with six other organizations (Re-Vision Labs is a noteworthy co-creator in the process) around a framework that takes George Lakoff’s discovery of “biconceptualism” and creates a communication/outreach/community-building strategy for engaging communities with a history of conflict.  This framework is being developed with representatives of three key client bases – advocates for local food systems; social service professionals seeking to bring the marginalized into local political processes; and public relations firms encouraging local businesses to invest in transparent relationships with the communities they impact.

Such a framework could not come into being contained within the walls of a single organization.  It will take considerable amounts of trust and open sharing among service providers and potential clients to ensure that the framework is useful and effective by the time it is field tested in an advocacy campaign.

This is but one example of the kinds of collaborations we are setting in motion as a core tenet of our business paradigm.

Where We Are Now

Even though it’s been more than one and a half years since we began this journey, CPW is still in its start-up phase and is only now becoming operational (with its first newsletter and a coherent set of procedures for doing its work).  The systems we are building take a considerable amount of time to get up and running, so things may seem slow from the outside.

Hopefully by now it is clear that we are actually moving quite quickly.  It’s just that our vision is so big that our strides may seem small in the flurry of change happening in the larger world.

CPW working with many groups and growing a powerful network for bringing about social change.  In addition to the activities mentioned so far, we are also:

• Helping the Post Carbon Institute train their fellows (Joe Brewer – January, 2010)
• Advising the Center for Ecoliteracy on strategic communications (Joe Brewer – February 2010)
• Training the Alberta Teachers Association in educational reform (Eric Haas, March 2010)
• Introducing employees at the Environmental Protection Agency Region 10 to the power of values-based communication (Joe Brewer – April 2010)
• Building new tools for regional planning with Seattle Innovators (March 2010)

There’s a lot going on!

In Closing

I hope this story starts to bring clarity to our work at CPW.  We have been extremely busy these last few months and look forward to working with you in the days ahead.  We have now launched our monthly newsletter (if you haven’t done so, sign up here) and will be sharing more tools and techniques, educational resources, and new frameworks for social change in the days ahead.

In Solidarity

Joe Brewer
Founder and Director, Cognitive Policy Works

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The Science (Fiction) of Embodied Cognition – Very insightful breakdown of the movie Avatar through the lens of cognitive science.

Loss Aversion – Fascinating, accurate summary about recent developments in neuroscience and decision-making.

In Defense of Distraction – Exploration of attention in our information-saturated world and how to promote creativity.

Psychological Flow and the Plastic Rock – Intriguing discussion of being “in the zone” and lateral problem-solving.

Think ‘Network Structure’ not Networking -A powerful shift in thinking about how to use social networks to leverage power.

Easy = True – How ‘Cognitive Fluency’ Shapes What We Believe – Deep insights into how our brains make simple ideas appear to be true.

Does Gaming Have a Place in Government? – Exploration of how video games pave the way to massive-scale collaboration in a democracy.

Made to Stick: Jared, The Power of Story – Discussion of marketing, stories, and how to make an idea “sticky”.

Abstract Thoughts? The Body Makes Them Literal – A high-profile discussion of embodied metaphor in the New York Times.

Movement as Network – An oldy-but goodey, this article lays out how to think about social movements as networks.

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When I arrived in Seattle 18 months ago, I quickly realized two things.  First, this city is bustling with so much creativity that it is on the verge of becoming the next Silicon Valley.  Seattle has the cultural capacity to become a leading innovation center for the world, especially around participatory government and social technologies as they play out in a burgeoning green economy.  And we’re on the verge of taking things to an entirely new level.

The second thing I noticed was that I kept meeting people who should already know each other, but didn’t.  I’d sit down with Sarah Jaynes of the Washington Progress Alliance – an organization dedicated to building infrastructure for the progressive movement – and have a chat a few days later with Jeni Krencicki Barcelos at the Three Degrees Project only to learn that she had helped build the Progressive Ideas Network – another organization dedicated to building infrastructure for progressives.  Yet, they hadn’t met each other.  I found dozens of people like this with a wide range of backgrounds and interests.

So much potential collaboration untapped.

Some might think of this as a problem.  I saw it as an incredible opportunity.  The prospect that we could unleash the talents, insights, and experiences of the Seattle scene riveted me.  How could we effectively bring people together and catalyze this awesome creative scene?

Then, in early November, Alex Steffen of Worldchanging gave a two-part lecture series at Town Hall Seattle.  He galvanized a room full of innovators with his call to make Seattle the first carbon neutral city in North America by 2030.  The buzz was so intense that you had to lean close and yell to be heard 10 inches away.  The hair stands up on my arms when I think about the enthusiasm in that room!

During the same week, I was thrown into a slurry of amazing conversations because the Sightline Institute and Climate Solutions had brought me in to give a workshop to environmental communicators throughout the region about framing and values-based communication.  In the span of four days I met 70 talented innovators who could leverage a substantial amount of change in the world.

Conversations percolated about idea incubators for social entrepreneurship, investments in communications infrastructure, and the fervor we all felt about Alex’s call-to-action.  Without hesitation, I went to work turning this energy into momentum.  During the months of November and December, I had four or five meetings a day with people who could take our city and the region to the next level.  These conversations created a lot of great ideas, some of which were captured in a prospectus we wrote to build an innovation engine for Seattle. (download the PDF!)

What is an innovation engine?  Here’s our working definition:

A set of social practices and organizational structures that promote ongoing stimulation of new ideas, combined with mechanisms that can reliably and effectively channel those ideas into a flourishing network of collaborative projects.

We talked about mapping out our movement and developing tools for community engagement.  We considered other models for innovation that had worked successfully in the past.  And we pulled together a set of functional elements that, if combined thoughtfully, could change the world:

• The cultural values so pervasive in the Pacific Northwest (free thinking, pragmatic, down-to-earth, explorers who are comfortable taking risks);
• A sense of our shared identity as “Seattle Creatives”;
• A shared vision that organizes us into a coherent movement across time;
• A powerfully structured collaboration network built on an open architecture that encourages us to see what others in our community are doing and combine our efforts;
• An open architecture that allows us to work in parallel, find synergies, and share our practices with others around the world;
• A movement map that identifies who the movers and shakers are in all the important roles of a social movement;
• A pressure cooker for applying leadership through collective action that pressures our local officials to act boldly around our vision;
• The creation of world-class idea incubators to hatch new ideas and implement them (artistic communities, research centers, social entrepreneur labs, etc.);
• And a comprehensive planning process that creates neutral ground across governmental, business, and non-profit sectors to (a) bring convergence to our  strategies around regional efforts and (b) provide consistency across sectors with our long-term vision of becoming a carbon neutral city.

At this point in the story, we’re turning momentum into action.  The list of collaborators continues to grow as emails are passed around and social events are staged to bring us together.  We are setting about the exciting work of building a dynamic, engaged, and ever-expanding community to envision our collective future and bring about the best of possible worlds. Potential partners include Sustainable Seattle, Re-Vision Labs, Sustainable Wallingford, SCALLOPS, ICLE, Seattle’s Climate Partnership, Great City, Cascade Land Conservancy, Undriving, Front Seat, Guenther Media, Groundwire and many more.

At the same time, we are reaching out to others around the world who are doing similar work.  Natural allies include Post Carbon Institute, Transition Towns, Common Current, Identity Campaigning, Carbon Neutral Stirling, and many others both locally and dispersed through our social networks.

Soon we will have our first strategic planning session (March 13th) and really get to work.  Things are just getting started, yet the profound feeling of history is upon us.  This project is growing organically throughout the community.  It is fundamentally empowering and exciting.  And it asserts itself into the world as an example of change arising through local networks and accomplishing big things in the spirit of openness and collaboration.

And the story isn’t finished.  In fact, it’s just beginning… now is your chance to help build the future.  Join us and help tell the story of change.  Make yourself a central character in this unfolding drama of creation.  Be the change you wish to see in the world.

We don’t have a website up for the project yet, so Cognitive Policy Works is providing a temporary forum for discussions as we continue the birthing process.  Please add comments, pose questions, offer ideas, and let us know who else should be involved.

Working with you for the common good,

Joe Brewer

Project Coordinator, Seattle’s Innovation Engine

(Write me a note if you want to speak directly about this exciting movement)

Update 2-9-10: Stay connected to this project as it unfolds.  Follow us on Twitter.  We’ll have a website up soon too!

Update 2-11-10: Sign up here to receive announcements, event invitations, and opportunities to collaborate with other Seattle innovators!

• Saddam Hussein is linked to the 9/11 attacks.
• Environmental action destroys jobs.
• Regulations hurt markets.
• Government is wasteful.

Each of these claims is based on an underlying belief about the world.  In the case of Saddam Hussein, most Fox News viewers consider the linkage to 9/11 as incontrovertible regardless of the evidence presented to the contrary.  Similarly, economists from the most prestigious universities have ardently declared that markets should be “free” from intrusion by government in order to create wealth and prosperity.  This implies that regulations are harmful and restrictive to the workings of markets.  It further inculcates the implicit belief that markets are inherently good and will always behave in the interest of public welfare, even in the face of a mountain of hard facts that contradict this view.

Why do I begin presentations with this strange assertion?  Because it tells us something very important about how our minds work.

Many of us were taught that there is a single objective reality.  We take as given the notion that our thoughts correspond with the external world in a straightforward manner, what mathematicians call a one-to-one correspondence.  This is sometimes called the Literal Correspondence Theory because it asserts that all of our thoughts are literal and that they are true only if they accurately map onto the world.

Research conducted back in the 1970’s abolished the Literal Correspondence Theory, as documented in the groundbreaking book Metaphors We Live By (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.  They turned 2500 years of philosophy on its head by demonstrating the widespread and pervasive role of metaphors in everyday conceptual thought.  (For another read on this fascinating topic, check out Raymond Gibbs’ The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding published in 1994)

Here are two examples:

More is Up

It is quite common to conceptualize quantity as a vertical level, with sayings like “housing prices dropped” and”watch the stock market rise.”  This metaphor provides a logic to the concept for magnitude that is intuitive and easy to grasp.  It arises through the experience of stacking things such that a greater magnitude results in a higher level of the stack – be it a stack of books or the level of a liquid in a glass.

Knowing is Seeing

We often conceptualize the acquisition of knowledge as a visioning act, with sayings like “I see what you mean” and “that idea is a little unclear.”  This metaphor arises through the experience of coming to know things when they appear in our line of sight.

More than 200 conceptual metaphors like these have been documented so far.  (A sample can be found here.)  The existence of conceptual metaphors tells us that our understandings are not tied directly to the world in a one-to-one fashion.  We can reason with more than one metaphor about the same topic.  So it is possible that we may think of a market as a tool  – the Markets as Tools metaphor – when discussing how to “create a market” that reduces air pollution.  At the same time, another person may think about a market as a self-directed person – the Market as Autonomous Agent metaphor – when suggesting that we should “let the market decide” how best to increase human well-being.

What’s a Worldview?  Look for a System of Metaphors

The tendency to reason with a particular set of conceptual metaphors is indicative of a particular mental model for how the world works, sometimes referred to as a worldview.  George Lakoff, in his effort to discover how political thought works, revealed that a specific metaphor is commonplace in political discourse.  The Nation as Family metaphor – with examples like “founding fathers” and “send our sons and daughters off to war” – plays an essential role in organizing progressive and conservative political thought around coherent moral worldviews.

This metaphor arises with one of two idealized models for the family.  For conservative thought it is the Strict Father Family with its authoritarian structure and an emphasis on discipline and order.  Progressive thought arises through the Nurturant Parent Family with its egalitarian structure and an emphasis on empathy and shared responsibility.  Each of these models brings with it a moral lens for understanding right and wrong, good and bad.  (Get the full-blown coverage of this discovery in Lakoff’s book Moral Politics published in 1996 and 2002)

Each conceptual model represents a set of beliefs and understandings that is often contradictory with the other.  Conservatives tend to believe markets can fix any problem.  Progressives generally believe markets are capable of doing harm as well as good.  While conservatives believe that nature is separate from and competes with the economy, progressives believe a fundamental interdependence exists.  A long list of discrepancies like these are discussed in Moral Politics and its smaller companion Don’t Think of an Elephant!.

Our beliefs arise through coherent worldviews that differ from one another.

Beyond “Only the Facts” Strategies

A common mistake in political strategy is the notion that people are motivated by the facts of a situation.  Any social scientist worth their salt will tell you that what a person knows in any particular context is grounded in a mesh of beliefs, value-judgments, and information that supports a particular viewpoint.  It’s not simply a matter of getting the facts straight.

People are actually motivated by core beliefs about the world, deeply felt concerns they have, aspirations that call upon them to grow and thrive, and the connection of personal identity with people who share their values.  Political strategists ignore these motivations at their peril, as has occurred over and over again in failed campaigns to elect candidates (John Kerry come to mind?), pass key legislation (Will we ever get universal health care?), and cultural change agendas (How do we nip rampant consumerism in the bud?).

Unfortunately, advocates of progressive social change are all-too-often not aware of conceptual metaphor and worldview as influences on social behavior.  Perhaps this isn’t surprising.  Few among us keep up with the latest research in human semantics.  Yet, discoveries like these will be vital for practitioners in the advocacy world to understand and incorporate into their practices if they are to engage their audiences at the deepest levels – where behaviors emerge from.  It will be vital that we recognize the role of beliefs and worldviews in political thought in order to engage the populace in meaningful ways.

At Cognitive Policy Works, we’re dedicated to converting discoveries like these into learnable practices so that it becomes possible to communicate effectively in our rapidly changing world.

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My hope is that advocates for progressive social change will learn how to do this successfully.  We have to change the stories of our culture in order to make headway on the great challenges confronting us.

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We saw what happened when John Kerry refused to fight for what he believed in during the 2004 election, instead opting to follow the latest poll conducted by an “approved” consultant on the insider list of the party leadership.  We observed the tactics of the status quo in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, including the adoption of Rovian attacks in the infamous “3 AM Ad” that used fear to discourage voters from caring about Barack Obama as a way to undermine his electability (and throw the entire progressive agenda under the bus at the same time).  Most recently, we’ve stood by as a “super majority” which has more representational leadership in the federal government than any party in our lifetimes, waffled and caved in to a non-existent opposition in the debacle called health care reform throughout the last year.

Our current political system is taking us to the brink of collapse.  It brought us the financial meltdown and massive bail outs to the super rich, while leaving the economy in tatters.  It denies the urgency of our faltering global ecological commons, putting all of humanity at risk of extinction.  And it is poisoned by the moneyed interests of health insurance companies, oil and coal companies, financial institutions, and bloated defense contractors.  These entities are part of the problem.  They will go down when the structure topples, like a neglected bridge in rush hour traffic or the unmaintained levies of a coastal city in the eye of a hurricane.  It is clear to anyone who cares about the environment, universal health care, livable wages, and fair taxation that our current political infrastructure is broken.  It’s time for an upgrade.

Our job is to be sure that new and better systems arise to take it’s place.

There are many of us working day and night to build the new models for politics based on civic engagement, social technologies, the needs of real people, and an earnest desire to solve problems instead of cater to bullies from decades past.  We’re applying microcredit lending strategies to help those in need to help themselves, starting social businesses that earn a profit while doing good, organizing communities of empowerment to meet each other and share ideas, starting our own media centers to bypass the corporate filtered “mainstream media” (the one that manipulated the populace into a war in Iraq) and so much more.

The political establishment isn’t going to know what hit them.  They didn’t recognize our tactics when Howard Dean asserted that we’ll only win if we engage as many people as possible (through his 50 State Strategy).  The conservative “wisdom” of Democratic leadership was that the only way to win is to turn off as many people as possible while still securing a 50+1 percent of the vote. This may be the case if winning means preserving the status quo.  But 50+1 doesn’t stave off the climate crisis.  It doesn’t remove entrenched interests either.

We’ve entered the second decade of the new millennium.  The digital natives among us, those who cut their teeth in an internet world, are wired for collaboration and thinking in terms of systems.  And they are starting to come of age.  The politics of tomorrow is upon us.  Let’s go about the work of creating it.  This will require a re-tooling just like any system replacement.  During the 20th Century most of the standard tools came from the fields of law, economics, marketing, and accounting.  In the 21st Century, our tool set will include computer programmers who design “civic software”, adaptive management experts who can navigate through ongoing periods of significant change by creating learning organizations that nurture people, eco-design architects who shape public spaces that encourage meaningful interactions in our built environment, and much more.

For my part, I am focusing on the insights coming from cutting-edge research in human cognition and social behavior.  My operating premise is that the institutions of society need to be built on solid understandings of how people actually work.  We don’t learn like widgets in a factory.  Nor do we conduct cost-benefit calculations in order to reason and act in social settings.  Instead, we learn by growing through our experiences and our actions reflect emotional drives and core beliefs that vary from one culture to another with a plurality of means for valuing something.  I’ve already written about my vision for politics in the 21st Century, the need to build trust in politics, and the importance of thriving through times of immense change.  This is my way of helping to lay the foundations for where we’re heading.

There’s plenty of room for you too.  It is literally going to require billions of people collectively building solutions that don’t currently exist.  What do you bring to the table that can help increase trust, stimulate creativity, promote interaction, or improve upon existing designs?  You can carve your own niche in this new world by looking into the future with an eye to the possible.

The time for the politics of tomorrow is today.

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George and I developed the framework for cognitive policy together that we see as absolutely vital for addressing the great challenges of our time.  Tom Crompton and I are designing methods for identity campaigns that put these insights into practice for promoting positive social change.

The crew at CPW launched this company to deliver powerful techniques and emerging new practices based on what we know about the political mind so that practitioners in the advocacy, policy-making, business, and education worlds can learn to apply these insights as techniques for the effective management of social change.

Together we are laying the foundations for thriving in a changing world.

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Here is the podcast for you to listen to and share with your friends.

(Download it here.)

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The science is clear. Extrinsic motivation kills creativity and perpetuates practices that are only suited to problems that have already been solved.

The alternative is also clear. Engage people at the level of personal identity and build social systems around what science tells us is the true nature of human behavior and you get surprisingly positive outcomes. Intrinsic motivation not only delivers pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, it also delivers solutions to previously intractable problems.

Now and into the future, we must build our organizations around real human nature that arises through research in the cognitive and behavioral sciences.  This is exactly what we are doing at Cognitive Policy Works.

Want to work with us as we lay the foundations for 21st Century institutions?  Send us a note.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Check out this phenomenal talk by Matthew Taylor speaking at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce:

Discuss below the fold…