Tapping into cultural power
Expanding our imagination about ways to intervene for social change
By Jeff Barnum and Mille Bøjer, July 2021
For many, the words “art” or “culture” conjure associations with entertainment and hobbies, or at best education and heritage. In this article, we want to illuminate another possibility: that art and culture are, when wisely utilized, among the most effective, least expensive, and most powerful tools for social renewal.
When Antanas Mockus became mayor of Bogotá in 1995, he assumed leadership of one of the world’s most problematic cities. “Violence, narcotics, lawless traffic, extreme poverty, street gangs, and other social ills plagued Bogotá’s 6.5 million citizens, so much so that many children had bodyguards to go to school.” According to Harvard’s Doris Sommer, “[Bogotá] was the most chaotic, violent, corrupt city in the Americas”. Under Mockus’s leadership, Bogotá’s “water usage dropped 40%, 7,000 community security groups were formed, the homicide rate fell 70%, traffic fatalities dropped by over 50%, drinking water was provided to all homes (up from 79% in 1993), and sewerage was provided to 95% of homes (up from 71%). When he asked residents to pay a voluntary extra 10% in taxes, 63,000 people did so.”
How did he do it? Key to his approach was that he saw Colombia’s problems as outcomes of citizens’ behaviors, which were in turn expressions of people’s thoughts and feelings. In other words, he looked for the roots of dysfunction in the realm of culture, and used artistic methods to galvanize the minds, souls, and hearts of millions of people into new expressions of civic participation.
Mockus began his work with the decision to address the city’s unusually high traffic fatalities. He saw the deaths as a symptom of apathy, a lack of civic conscience. Instead of increasing fines or police presence (which, he said, would have only reinforced the issue), he brought in a large number of mimes to shame bad driving and praise good driving. The “game” turned civic behavior into a public spectacle, and the effect was instant. “Soon the grid of urban space became a massive stage for daily fun poked at offenders of rules about red lights and crosswalks. The spectacle created a public from discreet and defensive residents who during years of lawlessness had been avoiding eye contact with one another.”(Sommer, 2014) By activating people’s fear of humiliation as well as their sense of civic duty, the game changed driving behaviors across the city.
In the coming years, subsequent artistic and playful “interventions” changed other civic behaviors across Bogotá. According to Manuela Restrepo, a Bogotá resident, “he took a complex city where the motto had been survival of the fittest, and started to teach people to think as a community.” Mockus carefully and methodically planned each intervention to enable his fellow citizens to recognise and then realize their aspirations and needs for a healthier society. In this way, he strategically and systematically tapped into what has been called “cultural agency” or “cultural power” — the ability for a social system to transform itself from within.[1]
Social Engineering or Social Sculpture?
Over the past two decades, we[2] have supported dozens of multi-stakeholder collaborations for social change in areas such as education, health, justice, conservation, peace, and many others. In that work, we help leaders to form a systemic understanding of their common challenges, identify leverage points for change, and design prototype solutions. Typically, their solutions have taken the form of new services and methodologies, new business models, delivery mechanisms, and scaling approaches for existing services, new policies and regulations, new educational programmes, new measurements and reporting channels, and new networks, cooperatives, and alliances. Many of these solutions have been and continue to be effective. But we’ve also noticed that the groups we support often overlook or underestimate the power of culture in their situation as well as the strategies that can harness this power for positive change.
Culture is the source of the foundational ideas that shape our social systems. In her seminal piece on leverage points “Places to Intervene in a System,” systems thinker Donella Meadows identifies mindsets, paradigms, and the power to transcend paradigms as the most effective and impactful areas of leverage in a social system. In his 1830 lecture “War,” Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed to “the master ideas reigning in the minds of many persons” as the origins of war and similar social ills. Even the Buddha said “What you think, you become. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you create.” The insight that mindsets and culture shape reality is not new — but the possibility to leverage cultural shifts for generative social renewal is frequently missed.
More often, culture is manipulated for strategic or commercial gain. World War I saw the first industrial-scale use of culture to drive citizen behaviors at scale. Governments around the world used posters and film to both demonize the enemy and rally their citizens to the cause of the war. One of the masterminds of this effort in the United States was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud.
When Bernays wrote Propaganda in 1928, he transparently insisted that the only ethical way to avoid social chaos was for the elite to guide the masses with systematic but invisible control of ideas, narratives, and public discourse. Leaders across government and business listened: “propaganda” became “public relations,” and Bernays’ playbook helped business and politicians sell everything from bacon and cigarettes to war. To be fair, Bernays was by all accounts an ethical individual. A man of his time, he considered humans to be “higher animals” whose “herd instincts” would lead to anarchy and social breakdown if left to themselves. So in his view, society had to be engineered (by a small elite) if civilization was to continue and develop.
Mockus and leaders like him have demonstrated another option, one perhaps best formulated by the German artist Joseph Beuys in the 1960s. Beuys promoted the idea of the “social sculpture,” the society we all create together.
Between 1982 and 1986, Beuys and his team planted approximately 7,000 trees, each next to a large column of basalt, in the city of Kassel, Germany. The tree and stone pairs comprise a city-sized sculpture designed to remind citizens of the death that is part of Germany’s past, while the trees gradually reforest the city, reminding people of the ever-renewing life of culture, art, history, and spiritual life. The trees have grown from saplings to maturity in the last 40 years, and, being oaks, many may live hundreds of years. This sculpture was designed to subtly influence the culture in favorable ways over long periods of time. He called the sculpture a “time machine” insofar as he anticipated that it would gradually change the city’s culture over the lifespan of the trees, some 300 or more years.
In Bueys’ view, culture stands alongside economics and governance[3] as a distinct and third sphere of social life. All three of these spheres are key to human advancement. One sphere should not be allowed to dominate the others. And just as a flawed or weak economic or political system deforms and unbalances society, a compromised cultural sphere will also compromise the whole.
Culture as a Source of Change
In the late 90s, we worked closely with Miha Pogačnik, the Ambassador of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, a concert violinist, and an early pioneer in using cultural strategies for large-scale social change with his organization IDRIART (the Institute for Intercultural Relations through the Arts). For decades, Pogačnik organized live concerts and secret festivals in conflict areas where diverse people — from countries and communities previously at war — could meet across political and ideological divides in an atmosphere of the arts.
During the mid-1990’s, Pogačnik established a center for this work at a Slovenian castle named Borl. Between 1995 and 2006, many thousands of people from all walks of life, from teachers and artists to diplomats and CEOs, met at Borl to make peace, experience art, share meals, and build new friendships, partnerships, initiatives, schools, and collaborations across sectors. A key ingredient of the Castle Borl experience was Pogačnik’s interactive violin concerts, through which he would dialogue with his audience, playing a phrase, drawing a glyph on a flipchart, and asking questions. He would typically leave center stage to play for one audience member, standing and playing within their personal space, drawing the audience into a more intimate moment of meeting, listening, and interaction.
Everything at Borl was designed to be experienced “in the present.” This nuance had its pros and cons: on the downside, it would take a good deal of research to prove the extent and reach of Borl’s impact. On the upside, however, it was a reminder that culture is alive, that relationships can drive significant change, and that small actions can provide space and time for significant impulses to incubate that lead people to enact new realities. As leadership author Margaret Wheatley (who attended Borl in those years) astutely observed, most social change initiates or is shaped by a single traceable conversation. Everything at Borl was designed to spark such conversations.
In our later work with Reos Partners, a social enterprise specialised in multi-stakeholder dialogue and collaboration, such generative conversation has remained central, but we have experimented with more intentionality and structure. We have been more explicit about supporting people to work together to deliberately change their shared reality. In this work, we have witnessed many collective insights, personal transformations and ah-hah experiences.
One approach that we have found particularly powerful for challenging mindsets and illuminating blindspots is the Transformative Scenarios Process (TSP), coined by Adam Kahane.[4] In a TSP, a diverse group of stakeholders come together as a “microcosm” that is representative of the wider system to develop a set of narratives that reimagine the future in provocative ways. These future narratives are then widely shared and publicized with the intent to stimulate dialogue among leaders and the public and to help a system or society collectively avoid undesirable futures and steer in the direction of desired ones.
At their essence, scenarios are stories, and human beings have always used stories to enable conversation about things that are difficult, complex, or taboo. Through crafting stories of the future, we can more freely describe how societal mindsets relate to structures, patterns, and events that concern us and how these dynamics could potentially change. For example, in 2012–13, Reos Partners facilitated a scenarios process about the future of the drug problem in the Americas.[5] Forty-six diverse and influential leaders from across the Americas, including Antanas Mockus, worked together to articulate four different stories about how the situation might develop in the near future. When the narratives were released, two former Presidents credited them for “breaking a taboo” around decriminalisation of drugs, and the Secretary General of the Organization of American States said the work had “set a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in our way of addressing the drug phenomenon, by breaking down the barriers to transparent dialogue and paving the way toward a debate without blinders or false prejudices.”
Given the power of scenarios to shift the “master ideas” in the minds of leaders, we’ve often wondered how we might further engage productively with beliefs and mindsets at a societal scale, not just through disseminating knowledge products, hosting conversational events or trainings, and engaging in social media platforms or campaigns. Mockus was working on a whole other level of cultural activation, and we see an opportunity there. We believe cultural agency can help many people collectively unlock their creativity, build new relationships, make sense of their challenges, and co-create their shared future. In the language of “Theory U,” we see the potential to transparently and gently activate a society’s “presence” and help it move away from collective “absence.”
Seeing and Valuing Culture
Part of the challenge is that culture is invisible and, at least at first glance, intangible or immeasurable. We have repeatedly seen teams struggle to make sense of or achieve their goals because they lacked a clear concept of the cultural sphere. They may know that mindsets are at the heart of the issue, but when it comes to designing solutions, they revert to a focus on the more familiar structures and instruments of the governance and economic spheres alone. By helping them clearly identify, articulate, and develop a detailed understanding of the cultural sphere, they’re sometimes able to see how they might utilize not only art but also new language and new stories to imagine and share new mindsets with “the minds of many persons” — to make possible, in other words, social developments that were previously impossible.
In 2018, we supported a team of leaders in Zimbabwe who had the distinct insight that their fellow citizens needed to rebuild the idea of society in their minds and hearts before they could hope to pilot new economic or governance innovations. We began to test the “cultural power” idea, suggesting that the “inner life of the human being exists at all scales,” and that specific shifts could occur within this inner life, even at large scales, that could drive significant positive change.
The team focused on trauma, to begin with, with the recognition that decades of structural violence had rendered many people’s voices practically mute — especially those of women, children, and the elderly. They developed detailed systems maps that touched on the “collective interior.” Where Mockus had provoked shame and conscience in his citizens, the Zimbabwean team sought to rekindle their communities’ voices, connections, and creative agency. They began with small prototypes, tracing a line from traumatized silence to co-creative citizen, and found that, lo and behold, the prototypes worked. The project (called Gateway Zimbabwe) reached what Harvard professor Doris Sommer calls “cultural agency” — the healing, renewing, and creative work that arises when the sphere of culture is fruitfully activated and nourished.
Stories like this one are inspiring, but unfortunately they often struggle to sustain donor funding, gain recognition for their results, and motivate leaders to explore the implications of cultural agency. There is a lack of language, tools, and resources to make the invisible palpable, “sculptural,” and measurable. In the following, we turn to the question of practice: how can we understand, activate, and measure the power of cultural agency for meaningful social change?
The Three Spheres of Social Life
To understand how to activate and measure the impact of cultural agency, it’s helpful to draw from Joseph Beuys’ notion of social sculpture and its roots in the subject of “social threefolding.”[6] Society is “threefold” in the sense that everyone participates in three distinct areas of social life: in culture, the domain of values, ideas, norms, myths, symbols, meaning, habits, and beliefs; in rights, the domain of governance, laws, mutual obligations, contracts, agreements, and policy; and in economy, the sphere of producing, consuming, transacting, and exchanging.
While individuals and organizations might focus in one sphere or another, all three spheres are always present and active. For example, a church, a medical scientist, and a museum all operate primarily in the sphere of culture, while a shoe manufacturer or tomato farmer focuses primarily in the economic sphere and a lawyer spends her days in the sphere of rights and law. That said, a lawyer relies on her intelligence, creativity and education, and charges for her services. The farmer innovates his methods with creativity and science while adhering to food safety regulations. And the church collects donations while operating as a non-profit organization. All three spheres are always at play, even when one is professionally more focused in one than the others.
This idea of three omnipresent and interacting “spheres” goes much further than the ordinary division of the three sectors of civil society, business, and government. All three spheres are present as a dimension within each sector. At the same time, the sectors do at a societal level have a role to play in asserting a particular sphere and holding greater responsibility for balancing its imperatives with those of the other spheres. In his book Shaping Globalization: Civil Society, Cultural Power and Threefolding, Nicanor Perlas, a Philippino activist and winner of the Right Livelihood Award, frames civil society as a cultural institution with primarily cultural power. Perlas emphasises the importance of civil society’s building a clear and deeper understanding of this cultural identity in order to be able to activate its cultural power and balance the power of the other sectors. In turn, this requires the other sectors to acknowledge the contribution of culture and to enable civic space and participation.
In our multi-stakeholder processes, we have noticed that including civil society actors is not in itself sufficient to activate the kind of cultural power we describe here. This is not only because civil society is not always in touch with its cultural power as Perlas indicates, but also because civil society organisations are often more focused on compensating for the insufficiencies of the governance and economic spheres. They may for example be representing the rights and economic needs of populations whose needs are unmet by liberal capitalism rather than on giving full expression to the cultural sphere. To activate the cultural sphere in the sense we are describing is therefore not merely to include civil society at the table; it is to rebalance and transform the values that shape the other two spheres.
Thinking in terms of three spheres of society is especially fruitful when understanding and influencing a social system. We find that stakeholders intuitively know what’s happening in each sphere, and to delineate them clearly gives them options and angles that they might not otherwise discern. When we supported a project in the US youth justice system, for example, we mapped the cultural sphere, the economic sphere, and the rights sphere at all scales, from the single individual and family to the institutional and societal. This afforded participants a broad and detailed view of the systemic challenge, and based on this view, they then elaborated possible strategies in the areas of law (policy, rights, governance, policing, jurisdiction, etc), business (investment, money flows, poverty, opportunity, workforce training, etc), and education (voice, arts, self-expression, journalism, etc.).
Key activations in the sphere of culture can also invigorate the other spheres. Cultural strategies can effectively activate the willingness, the motivation, the agreements, and other changes within and between the people that then go on to change the spheres of rights and money. Edi Rama, once mayor of the capital Tirana and now prime minister of Albania, began his public service by painting buildings. By the early 90s, Albania had become Europe’s poorest country. Tirana’s urban center was riddled with problems of criminal activity, street garbage, illegal buildings, and poor sanitation. Rama’s decision to paint dozens of buildings first confused inhabitants, and then sparked a broad dialogue about the country’s future. Spirits rose, people activated from within, and the uptick in civic sensibilities eventually translated to broader change in the form of new infrastructure investments, clean-up initiatives, new citizen behaviors, international investments, and other forms of social renewal that helped Albania take a giant step forward.
At one point in the process, Rama surveyed city residents, asking them if they liked the colors and if the painting should continue. Some people liked the colors, but far more wanted the painting to continue. The effects of the action, in other words, were more important to residents than the action itself. This gave Rama the confidence he needed to continue: by understanding, measuring, and validating the cultural strategy he used, Rama ensured its relevance for everyday people and the momentum of the movement he’d begun.
The failure to understand and cultivate the cultural sphere, on the other hand, often leads to breakdown. Cultural issues are then addressed (unsuccessfully) through policy or finance. One reason Albania was in such a mess, according to Rama, was because communist rulers had declared the death of God and destroyed 2,400 churches and forbidden music, art, and festivals.[7] Today, governments or business interests may control media outlets. Big tech companies may disallow certain conversations on their platforms. Such suppression or censorship may serve a function but it doesn’t nourish the cultural sphere. The human spirit can’t be programmed or legislated, and the attempt to do so undermines and compromises cultural diversity, dialogue, and vitality.
Principles for Activating Cultural Power
Culture is a product of human minds and souls, the expression of the inner life writ large. In other words, sense-making, perception, belief, questioning, and other mental and feeling activities occur wherever humans are, at all points and at all scales. To activate the “cultural sphere” is, in this sense, to activate the inner lives of individuals, families, organizations, communities and society.
This has both ethical and practical implications. It is therefore helpful to set out some guiding principles to orient such work. There is no single recipe for activating cultural power, but in asking with wonder what Mockus, Rama, Bueys, Pogačnik, and others are doing, we can extract some principles that characterise this domain.
What follows are seven “design principles” that we believe can help guide a cultural strategy for large-scale social change.
1. Leave people free in the cultural sphere
For intervention in cultures to be ethical, it needs to recognize the autonomy and sanctity of the human individual and the human spirit. The guiding principle here is “freedom from compulsion.” Mockus recognized that Bogotá’s citizens were compelled by authority from without and fear and trauma from within, neither of which allowed for civic engagement and dialogue. He needed to reach them in a free space, and crafted a philosophical and practical framework to do so.
Freedom, moreover, was part of the intervention design: citizens were invited to participate, but not forced or compelled, for example, by government authorities. They were offered an experience on the basis of which they made choices. When considering cultural agency, it is essential to nurture peoples’ choices, their power to change their own behaviors.
It would be less helpful to creatively shame people for following rules they cannot change, or rules on which their safety or their living depends. In those cases, it may be the rules, rather than the behavior, that needs to change. While cultural interventions can shift mindsets, connect people to their agency, and make visible the need for change, it’s no substitute for changing the formal rules, when needed. That is rather a task for the governance sphere and requires democratic instruments like voting or policy proposals.
2. Be transparent — and design for transparency
Understanding and utilizing the “cultural potential” in a society (or for that matter, a company) is tricky precisely because it can be manipulated in the form of propaganda or social engineering as described earlier in this article. When someone asked Mockus about the difference between his “games” and social engineering, he answered, “My hands are on the table.” Everything he was doing was by invitation and in plain sight.
In the complex and conflictual multi-stakeholder work in which we engage, transparency is key. We draw inspiration from Andre Gide who said “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” For systems to change from within, such consent needs to be voluntary, and it depends on trust in the convenors, the organisers, the facilitators, and the funders of an initiative. We often host a role-playing exercise early on in a process whereby participants take on the role of the “cynics” and the role of the “believers” in relation to the work they will be doing together. This brings the “elephants” into the room early on, surfacing suspicions and concerns, and allowing the facilitators to put their “hands on the table” in relation to these issues.
Concerns about hidden agendas and social engineering are often legitimate and should be treated as such. In Winning the Story Wars, Jonah Sachs highlights as a key message: “Tell the truth. And if you can’t tell the truth, change what you’re doing so you can. In other words, live the truth.” If we find ourselves in situations where we cannot be transparent around the motives, interests, or needs behind an initiative, we probably need to change these underlying issues so we can live the truth.
3. What’s your motive? Serve others, not yourself
This leads us to the ethical implication of motive. One may exercise limitless creativity, but motive, while invisible, is the currency of trust-building.
When one’s motive is love, pathways can open that otherwise seem impassable. In 1999, Sierra Leone’s civil war saw Operation No Living Thing, an attack upon Freetown that has since been called a war crime. One of the survivors, Haja Kassim found herself volunteering to support religious leaders calling for peace. Part of this support involved a meeting with an ostracized band of child soldiers. During that meeting, some of the soldiers seemed at the edge of hurting or killing their visitors, when Kassim spontaneously pleaded for them to come home on behalf of their mothers. The tension disappeared as the soldiers, touched, put down their weapons, gathered to her side, shed tears, and told their stories. They soon asked her to take messages back to their families, which she broadcast on the radio. And while she was stigmatised and called a traitor and rebel, she continued building trust between sides, so much so that the rebels eventually agreed to join peace talks, beginning the long process towards formal peace accords.[8]
Mockus devised tactics that prompted shame, but his motive was not to cast others down. Rather, it was to lift them out of apathy and into connection, and he was transparent about this. Rama used joy; Beuys used the metaphors of life and death; Pogačnik used music; Kassim used the radio. If you boil it down, what makes their work effective is not only the medium but also the motive with which they work: love and action in service. What we are exploring here is not art and culture for their own sake; this art is conceived and completed in service to humanity, community, and others. It’s the application of creative and artistic know — how to activate and nourish the best in humanity — while it is also strategic and precise.
Freedom, transparency, and motive are foundations on which clear strategies can come to life. The strategic element, then, makes it possible to conceive and activate cultural strategies alongside parallel interventions in governance and economy. The remaining principles on the list point to strategic parameters for those interested in designing and running cultural interventions for positive change.
4. Focus on participation, experience, and engagement
Clearly, culture is not only about art in a museum or a documentary on TV. These have value and can impact mindsets, but the practice of cultural agency entails social interventions that allow people to engage. People engage with embodied experience, not just watching or clicking on a screen. Mockus handed out 350,000 cards to bystanders, one side of which showed a thumbs up and the other, a thumbs down, and bystanders had to choose which sign to hold up. Beuys and Rama engaged citizens in dialogue. Kassim broke a taboo and forced society to reimagine its values. None of these were theoretical; none were injunctions. They were catalytic actions that invited engagement. In Benjamin Franklin’s words, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” Participation equals stickiness, buy-in, momentum, and effectiveness.
One of the most well-known examples of using experiential art for transformation is the work of the Brazilian award-winning dramaturg and cultural activist Augusto Boal. Boal saw traditional theatre as oppressive because the audience is in a passive role without a voice. He developed the concept of “spect-actors”, transforming spectators into active participants in the theatre. He said “theatre is the art of looking at ourselves” and he thought of theatre as a mirror “in which one can reach in to change reality, to transform it.”
During the time of the military regime of the 1960’s and 70’s in Brazil, Boal developed the Theatre of the Oppressed, drawing inspiration from Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. He developed a very clear body of theatrical techniques (primarily “Forum theatre”, “Invisible theatre” and “Image theatre”) first applied in popular education movements in Brazil, but which has since spread to be used in communities across the world. One of Boal’s techniques, invisible theatre, is enacted unexpectedly in public spaces. Those who participate and engage in it are unaware that it is a staged event and that they are an audience watching actors. The actors create situations that raise awareness about inequality and oppression and that engage the bystanders.
In 1992, Boal was elected city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, and in this role he developed “legislative theatre” turning voters — including the most marginalised people — temporarily into legislators. Thirteen new laws drew from legislative theatre acts during his time in office.
5. Shift physical space and artefacts
Physical actions in real spaces afford physical face to face, embodied engagement and interaction. When the first few oak and basalt pairs were placed in Kassel as part of Bueys’ artwork, local hooligans and naysayers broke the saplings and tipped over stones. The planting continued, and today, the trees are three stories tall and, according to one resident, “No one touches a Beuys tree.”[9]
Physical spaces shape the mind and soul. “We shape our buildings, and thereafter, they shape us,” said Winston Churchill. Perhaps this is why, for example, the USA has seen such heated debate about monuments and statues, from the initial controversy surrounding Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial to the more recent outcry over statues of Civil War heroes from the American South. As far as we know, nothing close to the scope of Beuys’ piece exists in America. But one may well wonder what kind of constructive and creative interventions might openly acknowledge America’s long and dark shadows, in the way the oaks and stones do Germany’s.
It’s also important to recognize that shifting physical space is inherently disruptive. Public outcry will accompany the outdoor installation of a Richard Serra sculpture for the simple reason that many find it inconvenient or even ugly or pointless. And before placing them, Beuys piled his 7,000 stones in the exact position and site where bodies were placed after the city’s bombing in 1943. These provocations are part of the process, and instigators must have good reasons for them.
6. Include artists and artful practice in social change processes
Just as athletics are the concentration, so to speak, of physical exercise, art is the concentration of culture. Artists live and breathe in the realm of ideas, interaction, engagement, dialogue, spirit, meaning, truth, and debate. They also understand creative process, iteration, and finding what works through prototyping. Beuys himself was an artist, as are Pogačnik and Rama; Mockus hired and paid professional mimes to work in the intersections. What if more decision makers hired artists, partnered with them, and engaged them in designing and prototyping cultural interventions?
Artists are often trained to pursue their careers not in public life as change agents, but as celebrities in the art world. In the last six decades, “art as social practice” has become increasingly established in higher arts education and the art world. But there is generally no market for artworks that disappear into the public domain, and there is not yet a robust bridge between policy-makers, problem-owners, and artists. Moreover, artists still have to make a living, and as long as they’re not part of larger change projects, they will continue to serve the collectors.
Furthermore, while artists can create beauty, engagement, and opportunities for making new meaning, most have insufficient training and experience in collaborating with policy-makers, authorities, foundations, and other leaders. Designing cultural interventions outside the art world requires such experience: Mockus was a teacher and politician who in his words “thought like an artist”; Rama is both painter and statesman; Pogačnik is both violinist and diplomat; Boal was both dramaturg and legislator. This hybridity is a precondition, for in order to support cultural strategies effectively, artists must also learn how to integrate into the workings of political and social power.
7. Create new meaning and new stories
Finally, culture strategies are designed to enable many people to co-create new meanings and to tell themselves new stories. In this co-creation, healing can occur. Forgiveness and understanding can be built. Making new meaning together is the essence, from one point of view, of community building, and in our experience, is essential to outgrowing the malaise and conflicts that keep people stuck.
Mockus helped Bogotá to shift from the story of survival of the fittest to a story of community and interdependence. The Drugs scenarios helped leaders to shift from the story of the war on drugs to a more people- and health-centred approach to the drug problem. Rama helped Albania to shift from a story of apathy to a story of creativity and social renewal.
To enable new meaning, there must be a gap — a gap between the established meaning and the newly emerging meaning that is not clear yet. This is an uncomfortable gap for many. The poet John Keats referred to this in a letter he wrote his cousin, using the term “negative capability” to define great thinkers who are ”capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” — to endure uncertainty indefinitely, in other words.
As powerful as this is, it can also be perilous. As Mockus and his team prepared for the first mimes to interact at Bogotá’s busiest intersections, one of the team members asked Mockus what they would do when the first mime was shot. The team took a breath and decided to take the risk. It was, however, a calculated risk, based on the confidence that if the space were opened, if the invitation were clear, citizens would rise to the occasion. The calculation was: if we provide the catalyst, civility and care can emerge.
There are also, of course, ways of designing for emergence with lower risk. In his performances, Miha Pogačnik helps his audience experience music as a gradual unfolding of uncertainty and anticipation, encouraging them to reframe uncertainty as a journey to be embraced with courage. At Castle Borl, moreover, the “gap of uncertainty” was a working principle: there was no signage, no menus, no agendas, no tours upon arrival. Everyday necessities like washrooms and kitchens were difficult to find. But this wasn’t torture; it was a creative principle. You had to ask people; you had to find; you had to outgrow your habits and shift inwardly. A visitor’s initial frustration gradually gave way to a sense of eager exploration, play, and engagement. Again and again over the years, fragile people became antifragile and “uncreative” people became creative and developed new stories.
Building Capacities for Leading Culture Shifts
The above is not an exhaustive list of possible design principles. Furthermore, for those wanting to lead impactful cultural agency projects, principles are not enough. In order to co-create, we need to engage and build specific capacities. One cannot design for creativity and inner agency if one has not developed these capacities in oneself. Developing these capacities, in turn, begins with a worldview shift. One who firmly holds a worldview that recognizes no inner life or agency will have a hard time perceiving and activating it at any scale.
This is the difference between theory and practice — between studying great artworks and actually painting them. We find the name “Social Sculpture,” with reference to Bueys’ legacy, helpful to name the practice space, to signal its co-creative dimension. We’re learning to co-create society, not re-engineering it. The difference is vital, especially today.
A practical step towards using cultural power for large-scale change is to cultivate greater familiarity with the traditional expressions of culture. The artists and leaders we’ve mentioned had years of preparation, either formal or informal, behind them, and they were willing, moreover, to hone their craft in public. Usually, artists embrace the risks of uncertainty, surprise, and failure in the studio. But activating the cultural sphere for large-scale change abandons the safety of the studio and the art world for the higher stakes of the public eye. While this translocation is fraught with risk, it is needed as an antidote to the absence of cultural richness from public institutions and social innovation.
Importantly, the “co” in co-creation matters. Whereas traditional arts are dialogues between creators and viewers, the examples we’ve mentioned here unfold and emerge in dialogue. Had Rama’s survey shown anger and apathy among residents, he might have changed tactics. Creating the social sculpture is inherently co-creative, just as the sphere of culture inherently includes diverse individuals and subcultures.
Finally, truly transforming society for the better depends on protecting, activating, and nourishing freedom in the sphere of culture. But where do we learn this practice and capacity of freedom? We are not taught it in the vast majority of today’s schools, which are rather characterised by predefined curricula, standard tests, and hierarchies of success based on intellectual achievement. Freedom must be experienced and this requires a developmental path that deliberately integrates creative process and allows for experimentation and even rebelliousness.
Activating cultural agency
“We have collectively learned to admire the values of the arts (which can be summed up as a devotion to truth, beauty, and goodness) in the special arena of galleries. But their more important application is in the general, daily fabric of our lives — the area that’s currently dominated by an often depleted vision of commerce. It’s a tragic polarization: we encounter the values we need, but only in a rarefied setting, while we regard these values as alien to the circumstances in which we most need to meet them… The large-scale projects have been given over wholesale to business and governments… We’re so familiar with this polarization, we regard it as if it were an inevitable fact of nature, rather than what it really is: a cultural and commercial failing.”
— Alain de Botton, the School of Life
The dimension of “cultural agency” or “culture power” can be a game changer, giving us a much bigger picture of social change and new ways of understanding and addressing our toughest challenges. As leaders and facilitators of social change, we need to put culture back on the map to widen the possibilities and expand the imagination around ways to intervene for social change. In evaluating, learning from, and advancing our work, we also need to attend more to cultural sources and aspects of impact.
The task is to overcome the cultural and commercial failing described by Alain de Botton above. This is not about making the economic and political spheres secondary to the cultural sphere or to encroach on their roles. Rather it is about restoring balance and allowing the cultural sphere to make its full contribution to the threefold society, complementing equally necessary changes and work in the currently dominant governance and economic spheres.
To be clear, Beuys’ idea of “social sculpture” is not, strictly speaking, just the use of arts in a new way. That is important as an effective strategy. But more broadly, it is about reimagining society as the sculpture that we are all continually creating together. The society we create is the social sculpture. It’s a living, ongoing, constant metamorphosis. In our scenario work, we say “the future is not given; it is created.” This may seem obvious, yet much of society’s energy is spent on pre-empting, projecting, planning, adapting to, and fearing the future, rather than on imagining, sculpting, and creating it.
Without this co-creative impulse at the heart of an active, vitally alive cultural sphere, society will not be co-created. Instead it will be shaped by technology, political power, wealth, competition and other forms of compulsion. The sphere of culture and cultural agency — the influx of new ideas, the striving for truth, beauty, and goodness, the transformation and nourishment of minds and souls — is the source of those factors that can rebalance political and economic systems.
The values we need are available to us. The stories and examples are there. But what we appreciate in the art museums must flow into life: the deliberate cultivation of our creative potentials. From there arises the possibility to create new relationships, new ideas, and new meaning. This is firstly an individual step, the inner determination to activate one’s own mind and soul in the direction of freedom and creation. Little by little, however, that activation multiplies, building creative and co-creative momentum needed for the social future.
To meet our many challenges head on and to reach deep into their root causes, we can look to each other with courage and care. Mockus and the many leaders we’ve mentioned here organized and designed around a nascent possibility and potential. Their interventions and actions relied upon this potential — creative, spontaneous, moral, decisive — to reveal itself. They had faith in humanity, in other words — and we can too. That which connects us can be stronger than that which divides us.
About the authors
Jeff Barnum and Mille Bojer have been friends and colleagues for many years. They have worked together within the Pioneers of Change network, Generon Consulting, Reos Partners, and in ongoing collaborations between Reos Partners and Magenta Studios.
Jeff is an artist, process facilitator, and teacher who specializes in the use of human creativity for social renewal. He co-founded a social innovation incubator at Castle Borl, Slovenia, in 1996 and has been working in social innovation ever since. From 2007 to 2014, he was part of the founding and leadership team at Reos Partners, where he served in a variety of leadership roles and worked on large-scale multi-stakeholder projects around the world at community, regional, national, and international levels. Today, he co-leads Magenta Studios, a training and consulting organization that specializes in teaching and doing Social Sculpture. In these roles, he has worked on a wide diversity of issues such as energy, peace, child protection, democracy, justice, race, cultural renewal, and others. At Magenta, he produces the curriculum for the School for the Social Future, a global community of next paradigm leaders. Jeff has made more than a thousand works of art from which the School draws ongoing inspiration and content for its members. He’s also founder of the Apocalypse Art Club, which sells art in the form of rare digital collectibles (NFTs).
Mille is a highly experienced facilitator and team leader in the space of social transformation and systems change. She is a Director of Reos Partners, a social enterprise specialized in multi-stakeholder collaboration addressing complex social challenges. She co-founded the Reos Partners offices in both Johannesburg and São Paulo, and most recently established the Geneva office. Mille has worked for over 15 years on large-scale multi-stakeholder projects for systems change at community, national, regional and global levels. She has led Transformative Scenarios Processes around the world on topics including justice transformation, education, democracy, civil society, and regional economic transitions. She is the author of the chapter “Transformative Scenarios Process: How stories of the future help to transform conflict in the present” in the Berghof Handbook on Conflict Transformation and co-author of the book “Mapping Dialogue: Essential Tools for Social Change”, which outlines a variety of transformative dialogue tools and change processes.
Endnotes
[1] Given the recent eruptions of violence in Colombia, one may reasonably ask whether these interventions “worked” to help the country rebalance after decades of civil war. The short answer is yes — but culture must be continually nourished such that it can help counter the reappearance of destructive patterns. Equally important, of course, are corresponding advances in the rights and economic spheres (see “The Three Spheres of Social Life,” below).
[2] For the purposes of this article, the authors use the pronoun “we” with reference to work that we have done either together, separately, or with other colleagues through our two organisations, Reos Partners and Magenta Studios and previously through the Pioneers of Change network and IDRIART.
[3] In this article, we refer to this sphere as that of “governance” instead of “politics;” one could also call it the sphere of “rights.”
[4] Transformative Scenarios Process has been developed by Reos Partners and is described in the book Transformative Scenario Planning by Adam Kahane
[5] The scenarios were convened by the Organization of American States; Reos Partners facilitated the process and wrote the scenarios under the leadership of Adam Kahane and Betty Sue Flowers
[6] The first modern articulation of social threefolding occurred during World War I in the lectures and books of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner.
[7] Based on a Harvard lecture by Rama and Mockus, no longer online.
[8] This story of Haja Kassim is told in Lederach, John Paul and Lederach, Angela Jill. 2010. When Blood and Bones Cry Out. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 150–153.
[9] Statement from a Kassel resident, on film at the 7,000 Oaks Archive in Kassel, Germany.
References
Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. Ig Publishing, 1955, pp. 9–33
Wheatley, Margaret J. 2002. Turning to One Another. San Francisco, CA: Barrett-Koehler
Organization of American States: The OAS Drug Report: 16 Months of Debates and Consensus. 2014
Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon Books, New York, 2002
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2007
