What the evidence shows

The evidence suggests that “public narrative” functions as an effective leadership practice for mobilizing collective action by translating personal and shared values into motivation to act. It shows that narratives structured around moments of both vulnerability (“why I care”) and agency (“why I can act”) can generate what the authors describe as a “moral battery,” linking emotional experience to readiness for action.

The detailed case study presented offers illustrative evidence that this tripartite structure can be applied in practice to organize and inspire collective engagement.

The evidence also points to specific pedagogical conditions that support the acquisition of this narrative craft. In particular, teaching approaches that align method with message, rely on relational and peer-based coaching, and cultivate “brave spaces” for emotionally engaged storytelling appear to strengthen participants’ capacity to develop and deliver public narratives.

Key Findings

• Hurt/hope as the engine of motivation. Public narrative is theorized to work by combining a narrative moment of "hurt" (injury to something valued, which produces moral outrage) with a moment of "hope" (a credible sense that change is possible) — the tension between the two is proposed as what energizes action.

• The self/us/now structure. An effective collective-action narrative is theorized to require three linked elements: a personal story that lets an audience relate to the speaker, a shared story that lets the audience relate to each other, and a present-moment story that converts that shared identity into an urgent, specific choice to act now.

• Pedagogy requires "brave," not "safe," space. The authors argue that teaching people to do this kind of values-disclosure work requires an environment that asks for emotional risk-taking and accountability, rather than one that promises comfort.

Stand-out data points

• Qualitative — naming over aggregating: the case example names three specific young people who died by suicide rather than citing a suicide-rate statistic, which the authors hold up as the mechanism by which narrative resists becoming "just data points."

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Hope Doom balance Distinguishes hope (self-efficacy + pathway) from blank optimism, and anger (approach-motivated) from fear (avoidance-motivated) — gives a finer-grained vocabulary than a single "hope vs. doom" ratio.

• Personal relevance The "experiential us" concept (shared lived experience, not shared demographic category) suggests messages built on concrete shared experience generalize relevance better than identity-based appeals alone.

• Autonomy Public narrative is presented as an explicit, reproducible structure (self/us/now; hurt/hope) that a speaker authors themselves, rather than a black-box persuasion technique applied to them — well aligned with traceable, advocate-controlled recommendations.

— non-exhaustive.

Key quote

"Our cultures are major repositories of stories; stories about challenges we have faced, how we stood up to them, and how we survived are woven into the very fabric of our political culture, faith traditions, and so forth."

© 2026 Marshall Ganz (Harvard Kennedy School), Julia Lee Cunningham (University of Michigan, Ross School of Business).

Last update: 20 August 2026

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