My little series on the turn of the decade (which started last week) was originally conceived as a two-parter: a look back to the past, and a look ahead to the future.
That changed a bit this week, when the present rose up and made itself known in a very big way.
American history has a rhythm to it: years of calm punctuated by seasons of astonishing upheaval. Sometimes, the long quiet spells — like the long intervals between earthquakes in places like Haiti — can go on for so long that we forget that life could ever be different, or that History, writ large, can possibly happen to us at all. All the really heinous, traumatic stuff — war, famine, economic panic — happened in somebody else’s past. The sweet prosperity we have now is what forever looks like. Continue reading →
Jan 20th, 2010
by Joe Brewer.
Comments are off for this post
For all you Democratic Party strategists, Jon Stewart sees what’s going on. So do millions of young people who watch his show. We’re building the future political system to remedy this abysmal failure of leadership and tactics.
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. Continue reading →
This article is republished from Campaign for America’s Future.
It’s the New Year, and I’m celebrating by coming back to work after a three-month sabbatical from CAF. After four years of pretty consistent blogging, I needed some distance, some time to pursue a few errant passions, and the chance to recover my focus. As of this week, I’m back on the job with a fistful of new insights and research, and a head full of fresh things to blog about. It’s genuinely good to be back, which is a clear sign that the break was a) needed and b) long enough.
For the last couple of weeks, the blogs and papers have been full of pieces about the turn of the decade, with due regard to signs and portents for what the last decade’s disasters all meant, and what glories and horrors await us in the one now ahead. Since this kind of navel-gazing about change and meaning and the future are what I do, I suppose it’s incumbent on me to devote my first couple of homecoming posts to this topic. Given that it’s now January 13 and the prognostication rush is mostly over, I might even claim to be the final word on the subject.
So, here it is, in two parts. This week: A look back. Next week: A look ahead. Continue reading →
Dec 21st, 2009
by Joe Brewer.
Comments are off for this post
This presentation provides a clear and comprehensive account of how the human mind works and why it is so vital for our politics.
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.
——–
Enjoy this article? Perhaps you’d like to sign up for our newsletter.
I was honored and delighted to be interviewed on the Jeff Farias Show earlier this week, where we spent an hour talking about building trust in politics and how the workings of the political mind can shed light on the great challenges we face as a society.
Here is the podcast for you to listen to and share with your friends.
Nov 21st, 2009
by Joe Brewer.
Comments are off for this post
This TED Talk by Dan Pink lays it out beautifully. Extrinsic rewards (as presumed by the theory of self-interest) lead to poor performance in every situation except where (a) the rules are clearly defined and (b) the outcome is known in advance. The challenges we face are NOT this kind of problem.
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.
Copenhagen’s still three weeks away, but climate activists are already voicing their enormous disappointment about everything that’s not going to get done there. The heat is rising, and we’re all feeling the overwhelming urgency to get a strong global agreement that will get the laggards off their butts and launch the structural reformations most of us know we need to fix the problem. A lot of us, it seems, loaded all our highest hopes onto this one conference, wanting desperately to believe that this would finally be the moment the long-awaited Grand Transformation would occur.
But the hard truth of the matter is this: change of this magnitude never happens with a single conference, a single treaty, or even a single disaster. Continue reading →
This video was released as part of Bill McKibben’s global awareness-building exercise last week for 350.org, an organization promoting the idea that carbon emission levels above 350 parts per million are dangerous:
I’d like to treat this as a case study in visual metaphors and conceptual frames to show how insights into human cognition are vital for effective climate action.
As part of our effort to help grassroots activists become more effective, we have contracted with the Empathy Surplus Campaign to offer strategic frame advice about the role of local organizations in politics.
It is with pleasure that we share with you a strategy brief that came out of this work:
We also encourage you to check out our collection of strategy memos and reports. This is just one way that we’re working to apply insights about the political mind where they are needed most… in the daily struggles of social change advocates everywhere.
