Measuring which stories circulate

Research in the UK Ministry of Defence examined attitudes to emissions reduction and the challenge of incorporating climate concern into an institutional culture organised historically around operational effectiveness. It was submitted as evidence to the UK Parliament's Environmental Audit Committee.

The design combined a quantitative survey establishing the distribution of attitudes with forty interviews built around the storytelling halo: rituals, rites, legends, myths, sagas, heroes and villains, jargon, jokes, norms, and what is sacred or taboo.

It is the practical methodology behind the site's Narrative Landscape Mapper. The survey establishes the surface; the halo reaches the mechanisms by which positions are sustained and transmitted.

Four connected discourses emerged: a long-term/short-term discourse about time horizons, a trade-offs discourse framing climate action as competing with capability, a win-win discourse positioning sustainability and effectiveness as complementary, and a discourse of exceptionalism presenting defence as a special case. Each is a story about identity, not a position on a factual question.

Alongside them sat the cultural forms no survey reaches: legends about a named figure who had championed targets, jokes that mark the limits of what can be said seriously, sagas of three-year struggles for small savings — and a piece of shorthand, mouth music, for enthusiastic verbal commitment unaccompanied by action. An institution that has coined a term for something does it often enough to need one.

The practical implication is direct: changing culture means changing which stories circulate, and a discourse that helps can be deliberately seeded and amplified. But you cannot design new stories until you know what the current ones are.

Method · Application

1. What are the jokes here, and what do they make it impossible to say seriously?
2. Who are the legends, and what does the organisation authorise by retelling them?
3. What shorthand exists for a problem — and what does its existence tell you?
4. Which of your circulating discourses could be amplified rather than argued with?

Chapter Five: Method — the chapter carries the evidence and the close reading this page only points at.

Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required · no case facts introduced from outside the manuscript