The frameworks I reach for most, grouped by the job you’re doing, with credit to the people who made them. Start with the order of work.
The order of work
For a message:
- Audience – decide who you’re moving, and aim at the persuadable middle.
- Value – choose the shared value you’ll open on.
- Frame – pick yours deliberately; never argue inside theirs.
- Messenger – find who this audience trusts.
- Message – the value, then what’s in the way and who benefits from it, then the vision and what to do.
- Test – before launch and during it, not after.
- Repeat – until it’s common sense, with as many aligned voices as you can brief.
For culture change:
- Notice what’s in circulation – the stories and assumptions people actually live by, and how they’re moving.
- Find where change is possible – the belief that unlocks others, and the people who could move.
- Choose your footprint – which values your work will feed, before choosing tactics.
- Pair stories with practice – relationships, ways of living, and institutional change, not stories alone.
- Use carriers – pop culture, and the institutions people pass through every day.
- Stay for the long haul – networks, repetition, and funding that matches the timescale.
- Measure – see How you’ll know.
Questions for any brief
Put these to a brief, a plan or a funding decision before it goes ahead.
- What’s the diagnosis, and what would someone who reads the situation differently say about it?
- Which of the six roles is this, and who’s holding the others?
- What is the story tied to: a practice people can join, a material change, or organised people who can act on it?
- Where are the people you want to reach now, and what’s the one step you’re asking them to take?
- What does it say yes to, and can people live a piece of it now?
- Who wrote it, who decides, who bears the cost, and who could say no?
- Whose platform does it run on, and what’s the fallback if that channel is cut?
- How will you know it’s failing, and what would make you stop?
Understand the audience
| Framework | From | In short |
|---|---|---|
| The seven segments | More in Common; applied to climate in Climate Outreach’s Britain Talks Climate & Nature (2025) | The UK public sorted by values rather than demographics, and what each group responds to |
| Six Americas | Yale Program on Climate Change Communication | The US public, from the Alarmed to the Dismissive |
| Spectrum of Allies | via the Commons Library | Map your audience from active allies to active opponents, and move each group one step closer rather than converting the far end |
| An approach to climate psychology | Climate Psychology Alliance (UK) | Recognise our part in the problem, hold the tension between hope and despair, bring feelings, values and justice back to the centre |
Build the message
| Framework | From | In short |
|---|---|---|
| Race Class Narrative | Demos and ASO Communications (2018) | Open on a value that crosses race and class, name who’s causing the harm and how, then offer a vision people can win together |
| Hope-based communication | Thomas Coombes, developed at Amnesty International from 2017 | Five shifts: fear to hope, problem to solution, against to for, threat to opportunity, victim to human – without ever ignoring the problem |
| Story of Self, Us and Now | Marshall Ganz | Tell your own story, then the story you share with your audience, then why it has to be now |
| Five shifts | Potential Energy Coalition (2026) | Morality to materiality, luxury to affordability, banning to building, global to local, massive to manageable |
| Eight principles for climate communication | Rare, the Behavioural Insights Team and Potential Energy Coalition (c. 2022) | Make it personal, accessible, empowering, doable, collective, normal, trustworthy and for everyone |
| Climate stories that work | Nicky Hawkins, with FrameWorks (2020) | Show it’s doable, focus on the big things, normalise action, connect the planet’s health with ours, shared duty to future generations, keep it down to earth |
| Values and the perception gap | Common Cause Foundation | Root communication in compassionate values, and show people that most others share them |
| Don’t Even Think About It | George Marshall (2014) | Never accept the opponent’s frames, speak to sacred values, build a story of cooperation, restore what’s been lost, drop the eco-stuff |
| Five ways to climate action | Per Espen Stoknes, What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming (2015) | Make it social, supportive, simple, a story, and signal progress |
| Seven principles for climate imagery | Climate Visuals: Corner, Webster and Teriete, Climate Outreach (2015) | Real people, new stories, causes at scale, impacts paired with action, local but serious, care with protest images, know your audience |
| Words for the right | Frank Luntz, US Senate testimony (July 2019) | Consequences rather than threats, new careers rather than new jobs, cleaner, safer and healthier rather than “sustainability” |
Read the culture
| Framework | From | In short |
|---|---|---|
| Three levels of narrative | Liz Manne and colleagues, Narrative Strategy: The Basics (2022) | Narratives live in individuals, in the culture around them, and in institutions’ rules – each shapes the others, and each needs its own measures |
| Four baskets | Narrative Initiative (2019) | The capacities narrative change needs: create, translate, deploy, and observe together – use them to spot what a project is missing |
| Deep dispositions | Ella Saltmarshe, Ruth Taylor and me, Getting Deep (2026) | Five coordinates for working with the assumptions that lie beneath conscious belief |
Plan the strategy
| Framework | From | In short |
|---|---|---|
| Movement Ecology | Ayni Institute, as adapted for the UK by NEON | Movements need three jobs done – healing, building alternatives, changing the big institutions – so know which one you’re doing |
| Six roles | My synthesis of the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops, Joanna Macy’s Great Turning, the Ayni Institute’s Movement Ecology and Julia Roig’s Block, Bridge, Build (Horizons Project, 2025) | Resist, hospice, build, bridge, narrate, tend – pick yours, know who’s holding the others, and watch for the way each one fails |
| Two Loops | The Berkana Institute and the Berkana Exchange | A dominant system peaks and declines while a new one grows from pioneers who connect and nourish each other – so there’s work at both ends: easing the old one out and building the new |
| Four games | Liz Manne and colleagues, Narrative Strategy: The Basics (2022) | Air (communications), ground (organising), inside (policy and legal work) and heart (culture and storytelling) – most advocacy plays the first three and forgets the fourth |
| Three zones | Brett Davidson, In The Zones (of Narrative Change Work) | Politics, culture and social connection, each on its own clock, from weeks to decades. Name the zone each effort sits in, so the zones reinforce each other, or at least don’t work against each other |
| Three faces of power | Grassroots Power Project | Organising people, building lasting infrastructure, and shaping how people make meaning – movements tend to neglect the last two |
| Places to intervene in a system | Donella Meadows | Twelve places to push on a system, from numbers and rules up to goals and paradigms; the deepest shifts happen at the top |
| The Water of Systems Change | John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, FSG (2018) | Six conditions hold a problem in place: policies, practices and resource flows; relationships and power; and mental models. The least visible are the most powerful to shift |
| Three Horizons | Bill Sharpe, Anthony Hodgson and colleagues (from 2006) | Three overlapping patterns of change: the current way losing its fit, innovations that either prop it up or point beyond it, and the future that’s emerging. Place your project on the map, and check which way it points |
| Cynefin | Dave Snowden; with Mary Boone in Harvard Business Review (2007) | Sort the situation – clear, complicated, complex or chaotic – and match the method: plan where cause and effect can be known in advance, and run small experiments where they can’t |
| How new ways spread | Frank Geels; Systems Sanctuary (Tatiana Fraser and Juniper Glass) | New practices grow in protected niches until the dominant way of doing things weakens enough for them to take its place – with deep roots feeding both |
| Planet Repairs | Esther Stanford-Xosei and the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE) | Treats repair for enslavement and colonisation, environmental justice, and justice for suppressed knowledge as one project – a counterweight to the Western frameworks on this page |
Handle opposition and hard conversations
| Framework | From | In short |
|---|---|---|
| Discourses of climate delay | William Lamb, Giulio Mattioli and colleagues (2020) | Twelve ways of delaying action, in four families: shifting responsibility, pushing solutions that change nothing, dwelling on the downsides, giving up |
| Fact, myth, fallacy | John Cook | Lead with the fact, mention the myth once with a warning, then explain the trick it plays |
| The four Ds and the firehose | Ben Nimmo (2015); Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, RAND (2016) | Dismiss, distort, distract, dismay – delivered high-volume, fast and repetitive. You don’t beat it by building a bigger one: honest, coordinated volume decides what gets seen, and trust and relationships decide what’s believed |
| REAL TALK | Climate Outreach, The TalkingClimate Handbook | Respect, enjoy, ask, listen, tell your story, keep going |
| VERA | as taught on the Resist + Renew podcast | Validate, explain, reframe, ask – for a view you disagree with |