How we will bring a Billion Acts of Courage to life

Stories hold incredible power because they shape how we understand “reality” and our place within it. Stories have the power to influence how we think, what we believe to be true and

possible, and how we act.

STORIES HAVE THE POWER TO LITERALLY CHANGE THE WORLD.

The Story Team have been working with brilliant people inside and outside of the organisation, from all corners of the globe, to shape a new story for Greenpeace that is

grounded in our past successes, and designed to spark an even more spectacular future.

AS OUR ORGANISATIONAL STORY EVOLVES, WE TOO, AS AN ORGANISATION

MUST EVOLVEThe story that Greenpeace tells is that a better world is possible, and that brave individual

and collective action can make that world a reality. Our creed is people are the most powerful force for change on the planet. Empowering, enabling, co-creating with them isn’t just the

obvious, smart and right thing to do in this work of beautiful world-making. It has to become instinct, because our mission can’t succeed without them.

IT MEANS THAT WE SEE, VALUE, AND EMBRACE PEOPLE IN ALL THE WAYS WE ARE GLORIOUSLY UNIQUE

We understand unconscious biases and unseen power dynamics play a role in if, how and when some among us are heard, seen and included, and we must strive to alchemise that

richness into the unimaginably powerful force that it could be, inside and outside our walls.

We can collect win after win for a greener planet. But if divides, dichotomies and inequalities still run deep, those victories can’t be complete, because we won’t have peace.

WE MUST WALK OUR TALKNo matter how compelling a story we tell externally, it will be hollow and ultimately unconvincing unless we live it and the values that we baked into its foundations.

For us to succeed in creating a collective story that promotes courage and hope, a recognition of humanity’s intrinsic interconnectivity, a celebration of diversity, one grounded in empathy

and inclusiveness, we must embody it. To help us to do this, we’ve derived the following Seven Shifts:

Seven things that we must move away from, and seven things that we must move towards.

 THEY ARE DIRECTIONS RATHER THAN DESTINATIONSDifferent offices and different projects will be at different stages of living these.

 They are intended to be aids to decision making and evaluation. Does this new project or piece of work further one or more of these transitions? If not, how can we make it do so?

 We are on a journey together to be the organisation that the world needs, and to drive the

world towards the more beautiful future that we know is possible. 

 

FROM SYMPTOMS TO ROOT CAUSES

SHIFT 1

One of the twelve tasks of Hercules was to kill the Hydra, a mythical, multi-headed beast. His task was “Herculean” because when he cut one head of the Hydra off, two more grew in its place.

When we campaign largely on the symptoms of larger problems, we risk our success stories reincarnating as horror shows elsewhere. A material example: in the 1980s, we successfully reduced toxic waste dumping in European rivers thanks, in part, to stricter regulations in the European Union. But rather than ending the practice of toxic dumping completely, the problem re-emerged elsewhere (China, Indonesia, Mexico, etc.) as manufacturers relocated to places with weaker regulations. Without a more systemic approach (which the Detox campaign is now taking), we risk chasing the pollution around the globe forever.

More broadly, a world where social injustice, economic inequality, racism, sexism, class divides, restrictions on civil society, and deep power imbalances thrive is one where a green and peaceful world for all will remain a dream on the horizon. We must be courageous in unveiling and tackling these complex, interconnected problems in the systems our civilisation has built, and be fearless about shining a light on those relationships if we hope to disrupt the power at their core.

If we had infinite time we could continue tackling symptoms one by one.

But time is short. Shining a spotlight on environmental symptoms can help make abstract problems real and tangible for people, but it means we don't always get to rearranging the power dynamics at the heart of the issue.

Capitalism gone amok, inequality, corruption, consumerism, short-termism, corporate-collusion, xenophobia, patriarchy: these are a few of the over-arching and intersecting issues that lie behind environmental destruction and many of the campaigns we run. We need to unmask them, and figure out how to face them. We can tackle them directly or indirectly; either way we must do so in full knowledge of the real beast we are fighting.

Because face them we must.

FROM SYMPTOMS TO ROOT CAUSES

SHIFT 1

• We have clearly articulated, compelling theories of change for tackling big, interconnected systemic issues that galvanise people into action both internally and externally

• We spend more than half of our time on proactive work, setting the agenda, rather than reacting to the symptoms of the problem

• We commit to addressing and correcting power imbalances within our own ranks, so everyone feels empowered and enabled to contribute their best to Greenpeace

• We have a new set of metrics that measure system change (e.g. global opinion on issue X, international regulation on behaviour Y, buying patterns and demand in sector Z)

• The solutions we champion match the scale of the root causes we unearth

FROM SYMPTOMS TO ROOT CAUSES

WHAT WOULD THIS LOOK LIKE IF WE LIVED IT?

SHIFT 1

FROM REINFORCING OLD STORIES TO BUILDING NEW ONES

SHIFT 2

FROM REINFORCING OLD STORIES TO BUILDING NEW ONESThe stories that hold back the world we wish to create are strengthened every time they’re retold.

Every makeup ad tells us that the value of women lie in her physical attributes and her youth. Every article on a mass shooting, a new war and suicide bomber reinforces dualistic, simplistic notions of “Good versus Bad”, “Right versus Wrong” and “Us versus Them”. Every article headline, “Look what humans have done to the planet” reinforces that people are unworthy and irredeemable. Every traditional super-hero movie from Superman to Captain America reinforces the idea that most of us are mere cheerleaders, awaiting an anointed one who will save us from ourselves, and some are more special than others.

Anita Roddick said, “Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking”. We too can fall into the trap of reinforcing the stories we seek to rewrite or replace.

For example, every time we put a price on a rainforest, we reinforce the idea that everything on this planet can be reduced to money. While this story might help us to engage with an economist in the short-term, in the long-term it further cements a broken myth, and makes it harder for us to amplify the idea that some things in this world are simply priceless.

To truly debunk these broken myths we need to stop inadvertently reinforcing them and start creating new ones. Stories of hope, empathy, courage and connectedness to each other and nature. Stories that reinforce our individual and collective agency. Stories that celebrate the power of participation, the strength of diversity and the value of community. Stories that we live in the way we organise ourselves, how we design our workspaces, how we treat each other, and the internal culture we create.

We have a responsibility to tell bold new stories that show a different kind of future is possible. And to shine a light on and amplify the efforts of others doing the same.

The power of these stories grows exponentially with every telling and with every single person that believes them to be true. When these stories start to take root, they will begin to inspire new ways of seeing, acting, and being that will help propel the more beautiful world we imagine into existence.

SHIFT 2

• A profusion of stories rooted in a Billion Acts of Courage is spilling forth from our campaigns, actions and communication channels

• We are using our voice and global reach to add weight to and amplify the courageous stories of others

• More organisations and individuals are parodying, pilfering, pivoting off and pushing back on our story-making and tactics, and vice versa

• We embody the story of A Billion Acts of Courage in everything we do -- from our meetings and our office spaces, to our internal communications and our hiring practices.

WHAT WOULD THIS LOOK LIKE IF WE LIVED IT?

FROM REINFORCING OLD STORIES TO BUILDING NEW ONES

SHIFT 2

FROM SECRETIVE TO OPEN SOURCE

SHIFT 3

We will always have secrets: what time we launch the boarding party, where we gather to go over the fence, our supporters’ credit card numbers. But the organisation’s default value for all of its plans should be transparency.

People-powered strategies are designed to unleash collaboration: but nobody can collaborate if they can’t see the plan.

Taking an ‘open source’ approach means more unsolicited help and more people working toward the same goal, in creative and ingenious ways, all while we sleep.

It says to people, ‘you are powerful, and we believe in you’. Being open invites trust and connection.

It gives us greater access to the wisdom of crowds, the ability to get stuff done that we don’t have in-house capacity for, and the opportunity to attract unusual expertise and partners. Being open allows skills, experience and knowledge that we may lack to surface, and to strengthen our work. It means we could engage on aspects of an issue we may not have before without hesitation, knowing there is an abundance of intelligence to tap into. Being open forces us to write our own strategies for the audiences they are intended to engage: in plain terms, in clear, compelling language.

Being open reinforces our call upon governments and corporations to be more transparent, modeling this behaviour and enabling us to speak from a place of authenticity and power.

Being open means there are no more excuses: we can be, do and have what we need. Being open means we must walk our talk and our allies will help push us to be our best, all the time.

FROM SECRETIVE TO OPEN SOURCE

SHIFT 3

• We give speeches and trainings on kick-ass open source campaigning

• We win awards for solving time-heavy or data-heavy problems by utilizing crowd-power

• We open up a new volunteer wing of community moderators, harnessing their skills to run more content-creation/curation projects [in a similar vein to how Wikipedia harness volunteers to update and moderate pages]

• When asked, “who’s on the design team?”, the answer is “anyone who wants to be.”

• Our working groups are populated by peers from a spectrum of roles, thinking styles, skills, experience and geographies, not only ‘the experts’.

• Our internal documents are inspiring, informative, and joyous to read.

WHAT WOULD THIS LOOK LIKE IF WE LIVED IT?

FROM SECRETIVE TO OPEN SOURCE

SHIFT 3

FROM FEARING FAILURE TO FEARLESS INNOVATORS

SHIFT 4

Improvisational theatre pioneer, Keith Johnstone said, “There are people who prefer to say ‘yes’ and there are people who prefer to say ‘no’. Those who say ‘yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘no’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”

Changing the course the world is charting will require audacity, daring and creativity. We don’t have time to play it safe.

And yet all too often, we do.

We play a safe game when we recycle what’s worked in the past, even though we know it won’t have transformational effects. We play a safe game when we give too many people the chance to say “no” to an idea that's new or unfamiliar. We play a safe game when we don't fail quickly and then reallocate resources to other innovative projects. We play a safe game when we call upon only the ‘usual suspects’ for expertise and guidance, instead of inviting those with different perspectives, life experiences, roles, and values to challenge and enhance our ideas. We play a safe game when we let the voice of fear, doubt, discomfort, and inadequacy grow louder than the voice that asks what is right, true and just, what would be in the highest service of the best idea.

Our playing small will not serve the world.

To inspire A Billion Acts of Courage in others we need to consistently operate at the edge of our own comfort zones. We have to  be willing to illuminate our own fears, biases and unhelpful assumptions and get out of our own way.

We need to reframe the conversation from one that starts with ‘we CAN’T do that BECAUSE’ to one that leads with ‘we CAN do that IF’.

We need to recognise that creativity is key to an underdog’s success, and to make sure we nurture and encourage it through everything we do.

Because the only way we’ll win against opponents with more money and more resources is by thinking BIG.

FROM FEARING FAILURE TO FEARLESS INNOVATORS

SHIFT 4

• More insanely successful innovations: Greenpeace is associated with creative and collaborative solutions

• We ask, “does this give us goosebumps?” before we land on an idea to activate. If the answer is “no”, we keep going until one does.

• We deliberately cast our net wider: we consciously seek out and design for enabling big ideas from innovators across a kaleidoscope of national geographies, cultures, languages, genders, generations, ethnicities, education levels, income, values, beliefs and lifestyles.

• More rapid-fire flops from which we learn, iterate, and improve

• Widespread respect for Greenpeace as a courageous brand that dares to innovate and dares to fail

• More ideas that genuinely scare and excite us

WHAT WOULD THIS LOOK LIKE IF WE LIVED IT?

FROM FEARING FAILURE TO FEARLESS INNOVATORS

SHIFT 4

FROM LONE HERO TO HERO AMONG HEROES

SHIFT 5

FROM LONE HERO TO HERO AMONG HEROES

Imagine what is possible if all of us understood and claimed our power.

We've built our reputation on a story in which we are the hero. And that ‘hero’ image and brand of ‘heroism’ has had a quite specific look and feel - it was a product of its time: often white, often male, ‘Western’ in bias, values, ideals, and perspective, with a particular style and brand of ‘activism’ which has become our calling card and a key part of our identity. And while these have served the organisation in driving us to accomplish all we have today, the world in which we operate has changed. The broadcast era is gone; the digital era has ushered in and tapped our human need to create, self express and drive our own stories. We’re living a growing revolution for rights and recognition that swung into motion around the middle of the last century, and we are co-creating a world where more people get to experience greater agency, dignity, respect and freedoms. We need to reimagine ourselves as a “hero among heroes”, the kind that champions a more inclusive notion of what ‘activism’ could look like, who can play and how.

Besides, today's Goliaths are too big to be taken down by a lone David. The world needs a billion Davids picking up their own version of a slingshot– whether it be a pen, a paintbrush, a guitar, a recipe, a spray can, a climbing harness, or a dance move. We need everyone down in the arena causing beautiful mischief from their line of sight, creative impulse, passions, and sense of purpose.

All that we’ve learned over 40+ years of campaigning and non-violent direct action, we need to share, codify, and spread. When we are heroic and take the kind of action that nobody else can, we need to find ways to empower others too, and not allow ourselves to be put on the hero’s pedestal all by ourselves. Our acts of courage are crucial, but not enough, and so we must take the time to talk about that which gives us the courage to take action in the hope that it might inspire it in others. We must take an active role in celebrating a rich diversity of courageous actions, and simultaneously call people to the adventures that await them at the edge of their comfort zones.

This is the difference between an egocentric organisation and a network-centric one: we put the best solutions to the crisis ahead of our need for institutional recognition. This means that we are brave enough to champion the actions of others if it better serves the cause. That we empower, amplify, enable, supercharge, and electrify all the people working for change. And that we measure our success not in the quantity of followers, but the quality of the acts of courage we unleash. SHIFT 5

FROM LONE HERO TO HERO AMONG HEROES

• Half of our communications celebrate the courage of others

• We celebrate a rich diversity of courageous actions in the service of a brighter tomorrow, whether it be from a student in the nocturnal glow of a computer screen under a repressive regime; a girl determined to go to school, or a CEO daring to change the accepted business model

• We go beyond celebrating diversity as an asset and develop the skills, tools, and systems to ensure we represent and develop peers from a variety of values and belief systems, age groups, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, religions, physical abilities and sexual orientations, roles, socioeconomic backgrounds, personality types, professional experience, and work style.

• We harness the talent and power of culture-makers and cultural-curators as partners in leading strategy development

WHAT WOULD THIS LOOK LIKE IF WE LIVED IT?

SHIFT 5

FROM SUPPORTERS TO CHANGE AGENTS

SHIFT 6

Climate Change. Ocean Acidification. Deforestation.

These are not a single hero’s problems.

These are not “Greenpeace’s problems”. These are everybody’s problems, and they won’t be addressed if we continue to treat people as “Supporters”.

“Supporters” stand below something, holding it up.

“Supporters” sit in the stands, cheering from the sidelines.

The future of this planet demands a more active relationship. It demands that we see and believe in everyone as an agent of change.

It demands more people who see their own actions as actively shaping the future. More people applying their skills and passions to the challenge of human flourishing. More people involved in discussions and debates about the future of our planet and species. More people operating at the edge of their comfort zones and in doing so igniting a spark in others.

Holding “people power” as our ethos means we deeply value, cherish and try to understand the needs of our allies and change agents. It means we recognise they’re working for a more beautiful world too, and we support their participation in the game however we can. It means we ask them how they could and would like to play; we listen, we do our level best to enable their contributions, and we contribute our best to their world-changing efforts, too. It means we collaborate and cooperate on the outstanding ideas of others. We look to the abundance that lives in our networks when we’re stuck, and we seek collaboration as a default, instead of as a transaction.

The era of the lone hero is over. Command and control is dead. Participation is a pre-requisite for building power. It’s time to unleash.

FROM SUPPORTERS TO CHANGE AGENTS

SHIFT 6

FROM SUPPORTERS TO CHANGE AGENTS

• We regularly win campaigns we don’t know we were engaged in

• Our toolkits and trainings are completely over-subscribed

• We gain genuine value from unexpected and unsolicited external sources

• There is no one ‘face of Greenpeace’. They are just too many and too varied to count or classify.

• More of our work is accessible through translation into more languages

• We explore and employ tools and processes from other disciplines like design and user experience etc. that help us co-create with and for change agents and allies.

• Our online organising spaces draw more traffic than our news websites

• More people join autonomous units of volunteers who share our values and objectives, who know our story, and who are applying their creativity and passionate energy independently of us

• We offer a unique and expanding menu of participation options sourced from our change agents designed around what feels good, meaningful and enjoyable to them

WHAT WOULD THIS LOOK LIKE IF WE LIVED IT?

SHIFT 6

FROM DOGMATIC DEFENDER TO CHAMPIONS OF THE “IMPOSSIBLE”

SHIFT 7

“It always seems impossible until it is done,” said Nelson Mandela

“Stop, Wait, and No” are the words of the Dogmatic Defender.

They reinforce the perception of Greenpeace as being anti-people, anti-jobs, anti-progress, anti-everything. It paints a character that offers doom, not innovative solutions.

It’s a persona that people love to see tripped up by hypocrisy. The type of organisation the mainstream media loves exposing when it fails to live up to its own exacting standards; an inevitable consequence of trying to create a new world while simultaneously needing to operate in the old.

Defining ourselves by what we oppose will never be as inspiring as setting impossible goals and achieving them. The former models a civilisation that needs constant policing; the latter reminds us that the human journey is a tale of relentless ambition, ingenuity and complexity, and leaders can come from anywhere. We must model the alternative futures we see in our very acts of opposing the current system.

This isn’t about having all of the answers. This isn’t about not being against certain things, nor is it about ignoring the problems, or refusing to talk about the broken world -- a crucial story ingredient in order to create a trigger for action. This is about how we frame challenges, the tone we take when we work on campaigns, and seeing ourselves anew. Alex Steffen, author of WorldChanging, said in one of our workshops that Greenpeace has the potential to become “the most credible voice on the planet for a radically positive vision of Earth’s future.”

We can still be disruptive, playful and provocative while pointing to what could be. Amidst all the pessimism and doom, surrounded by all of the data and charts pointing to imminent collapse, painting a radically positive vision of the world that could be might just be our most courageous act yet.

FROM DOGMATIC DEFENDER TO CHAMPIONS OF THE “IMPOSSIBLE”

SHIFT 7

FROM DOGMATIC DEFENDER TO CHAMPIONS OF THE “IMPOSSIBLE”

• It’s inconceivable that anyone would credibly attack us as anti-progress

• The words “Stop” and “No” do not appear on a single Greenpeace banner for 12 months in a row

• Every story we tell leads with the vision of the world we want, not with the problem

• We create, incubate or support more game-changing projects that spark debate and that catalyse system change

• Any ‘supporter’, unprompted, can tell the story of who we are, what we stand for, and describe the world we want to create -- not just what we oppose.

WHAT WOULD THIS LOOK LIKE IF WE LIVED IT?

SHIFT 7

The Seven Shifts were originally conceived and created by Tommy Crawford & Brian Fitzgerald with Amrekha Sharma and Lucy Taylor in collaboration with external and internal

troublemakers.

Thank you to everyone involved for your brilliant input, insights and guidance.

If you would like to provide further input or feedback on the content, please get in touch with Amrekha Sharma or Mike Townsley at Greenpeace International.

If you would like to share your appreciation for the illustrations then please direct your love bombs to Iris Maertens