Leadership inevitable,” said Flothmann. “We need to embrace constant change because that’s the only way to stay responsive in a very fast-moving external environment.” Others had different concerns. What Mindworks was proposing would require additional work — not, as many hoped, quick methods to campaign faster. To address this, Mindworks shifted how they conducted trainings. Whereas initial workshops took a traditional approach, focusing on lectures or seminars where trainers spoke to audiences, current trainings are entirely different. “Our first trainings were largely presentations about all the great knowledge that we had discovered,” said Flothmann.” Now, we purely work through experiences and tasks that we actually give people and then reflection periods…working within the principles that we’re trying to preach.” Mindworks workshop Moreover, they work with specific country offices one at a time, and let national staff take the lead. For example, when preparing to work with Greenpeace India, Mindworks recruited local staff several weeks in advance of the workshops to prepare their own presentations on various topics. This allowed for both more local buy-in and local relevance. “A month before this training, we were given the materials, books, and asked to prepare by ourselves,” said Ali Abbas, a campaigner with Greenpeace India. “No certain method or form given to us.” For Abbas, Mindworks has provided a pathway for Greenpeace India to deal with the severe external challenges of the past few years. They’ve had their accounts frozen multiple times, and are facing active attempts by the Indian government to paint them as a foreign NGO that is trying to prevent India’s development. He saw a connection between how opponents attack Greenpeace India and the knowledge about cognitive science that Mindworks was sharing. “Corporations and the government are investing in psychology and mindsets of the people, and we are missing on that,” said Abbas. “That’s why it’s important to understand the learnings from the mind. Otherwise we’ll keep on doing the same public engagement activities, but we won’t achieve success until we are being impactful and considering narratives and how social norms are impacting people.” Mindworks is not alone in this. Other organisations, from WWF to Oxfam, have similar initiatives. There are also outside efforts such as Common Cause and the Narrative Initiative. While they all take slightly different approaches, they all see the need to think more deeply about the role of the mind and narratives. For Abbas, Mindworks has provided a framework for Greenpeace India to consider how it recovers and reframes campaigns to have a larger impact in an increasingly challenging environment. “My personal take away from the whole exercise was, maybe by campaigning we may achieve small changes or small successes, but to achieve long-standing changes we need to foundationmag.ca
work on mindset shift,” said Abbas. “Unless we do a mindset shift, it’s hard to achieve long-standing change.”
Part 2: How Greenpeace is using psychological approaches to build more effective climate campaigns
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he internal cognitive science lab Mindworks is helping the organisation design initiatives that give audiences the courage to take action. The traditional model to run a digital campaign follows a fairly straightforward, if adaptable, structure. Develop campaign messages, test those messages for effectiveness with each target audience, usually focusing on response metrics, and then launch the campaign. But what if the goal is not petition signatures, shares or even responses? What if we aimed for something that’s deeper and tougher to measure: a shift in people’s mindsets, resulting in more meaningful, long-lasting change? “The concept of psychological approaches in our campaigning was so alien to people,” said Stefan Flothmann, a longtime staffer with Greenpeace, who launched Mindworks as an internal start-up within Greenpeace to explore applying cognitive science to create more effective campaigns. Since then, they’ve done research, created new models, and run workshops with Greenpeace and non-Greenpeace staff around the world to train them to both think about and integrate psychology and cognitive science into their campaigns. Their core recommendations range from clear tactics — such as putting the climate emergency at the centre of communication — to ones that will require campaigners to adapt their models — such as developing new audience research methodologies to identify emotional barriers when it comes to climate. They also urge caution when using frames that involve fear or guilt, as they can turn people off. According to their findings, campaigners should always provide assistance so that audiences resolve those negative feelings, and never communicate timelines that indicate a moment when it might be too late November/December 2019
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