‘A narrative reflects a shared interpretation of how the world works. Who holds power and how they use it is both embedded in and supported by dominant narratives…. ’
‘The economy is this big engine that runs the country. We’re all like ‘ahhhh’, nothing to do with me. It’s like a whip that gets cracked down over us and it gets used as a weapon.’
Mariane, For the Love of Scrubs, a collective of ordinary people providing masks for the NHS
How can we change the world?
To change anything - or everything - we need to change our personal and collective mental models of the economy.
Our personal and collective mental models of the economy can trap us in vagueness and scarcity, when we need clarity and abundance feeling to address the climate crisis, invent new ways of daily doing and being, and actually do design on the inequalities which sap so much human potential.
‘The economy’ is the deep narrative of our time. A ‘deep’ narrative is ‘a foundational framework for understanding both history and current events.’
The story of what is good for ‘the economy’ is the organising narrative of our time. ‘The economy’ is ever present in political storytelling, so our understanding of what the economy is and how it stays ‘strong’ permeates our democracy. The phrase appeared 74 times in the winning election manifesto of 2016, where Brexit appeared only 16 times.
People lack frameworks to understand Economics with agency. There is a huge poverty around Economics in our public and personal imaginations.
My research shows that most people feel the economy is something big and important that happens elsewhere.
Overall, we say things like: ‘I imagine a big important circle, but I don’t know what’s in that circle’. One person responded with ‘The economy? Isn’t that a blob somewhere in Westminster?’
People thought about the economy as if it could only move in one dimension: up or down (‘I know if the economy is good, it’s good, but I know if the economy goes down, that’s really bad’). How much complexity and opportunity does this miss?
Economics is best understood as a ‘rich science of human action’. But Economics is seen as the opposite of our personal relationships.
Strikingly, people felt that the last thing to do with Economics is people and their loving relationships.
In fact, it’s a threat to them. We concentrate on living our lives, while ‘the economy’ happens elsewhere.
Most media and political stories and narratives about ‘the economy’ speak about it as if it is a distinct entity. We think and talk as if it is a line graph, a ship on a sea, or a weather system. It ‘goes up and down’; it ‘plunges’ or is ‘on the edge’; there are ‘waves’, ‘tides’ and ‘storms’. This ‘deep narrative’ of the economy as something physical and mysterious places the economy outside of human control.
But the economy is designed by humans. We need interaction design for Economics.
I can imagine a ‘rich’ public debate on the economy where we currently have a poor one. There is a different language of talking about the economy.
What if when we discussed the economy we were discussing a rich, highly populated image in people’s minds — full of and contributed to by the people we care about.
If you have a better mental model of something, you can see more levers to pull on it. We need to redesign Economics as a public discussion (and social design language) for justice, accessibility, and learnability. What if we were all economic learners, learning consciously and contributing to our knowledge about how best to distribute resources?
So, I think behaviour-changing learning design for Economics recentres it on relationships, and can teach us how to co-create new ones.
My practice has been deeply inspired by my experience of economic scarcity and mental health.
I use a relational, co-created and peer-led learning design approach to help people change their agency around economics and experience a sense of being seen, having connectedness, and feeling freer to take action.
You can read about this approach in Huddlecraft by Enrol Yourself, and at The Relationships Project.