Sometimes it's good to drop out of school

This isn't Animal Kingdom. To succeed in advocacy, you need a little fringe-living.

New urbanism advocates have a communications problem. So do architects, planners, and engineers who design and build new urbanism. We get the messaging process wrong, or the mindset wrong, or both. 

✔ The mindset is thinking about who you're trying to reach and the outcome you want.

✔ The process is telling stories with a classic structure of hero > conflict > resolution. 

Hardly any of us working in the infrastructure industry were trained to be storytellers. We were led to believe facts, logic, and reasoning are the key to persuasion. Meanwhile, psychologists and sociologists have known forever that we’re barely rational. (Here’s a worthy sidebar: Jonathan Haidt explaining his elephant & rider metaphor.)

As advocates, our messaging deficiency is understandable (even expected) when you consider how modern humans go through school. Schooling as we know it today was designed to create soldiers and factory workers. It rewards conformity. 

Storytelling goes against our school training. Storytelling is designed to make someone stop and notice.

Humans aren’t the only ones that struggle with the instinct to blend in and go with the flow. There are plenty of examples in nature of how being in the center of a group is safe, while being on the edge is dangerous. 

A school of fish looks like a giant shimmery blob in the eyes of a predator. The strong fish stay in center and the fringe is bait. 

You’re not a fish. Embrace your non-fishiness and practice doing something at the fringe. Sometimes it’s good to drop out of the school.

Storytelling mindset + storytelling process = better built environment.