The Culture Hack Method

Introduction

We open by exploring the metacrisis and its cultural roots. You will delve into the transformative power of narratives and their role in shaping systems and actions in the world. We share the Culture Hack Labs approach to Narrative-Led Systems Change: Justice plus Onto-Shift, which emphasizes that demands for justice must be paired with a deeper shift in ontologies—the fundamental ways we perceive, relate to, and engage with the world.
Step 1: Ask

Learn to craft a Point of View statement, a crucial step that outlines your narrative intervention’s context, goals, and guides your journey through key questions about identity, motivation, desired outcomes, and methods of change.
Step 2: Listen

Transform your Point of View (POV) into a Listening Model, enabling you to identify Narrative Communities in narrative space. You will learn about big and small listening techniques, collect relevant data and sort your data into Narrative Communities.
Step 3: Understand

First you will analyse the Attention, Network and Power, as well as the Language of your Narrative Communities. You will then Map the Communities using Justice-Ontology axes to reveal key patterns and positions - building on the “Justice plus onto-shift” approach introduced in the Introduction. Finally, you will identify where the Window of Discourse sits and where we want to shift it. This is the foundation for your narrative intervention strategy.
Step 4: Recode

Here you’ll develop a Narrative Strategy: choose your Audiences, set your Narrative Objectives, and learn to reframe.
Step 5: Hack

The first step is choosing the right medium to bring your message to life in the eyes of your audience In the previous step, we developed a message: the translation of your new frames into words. Every choice of word matters: the verbs, adjectives and subjects all shape what your audience sees and feels. A …

Step 5: Hack

Logistics of your Hack

Congrats! You’ve completed the Hacking Tree – now you have a creative hack to seed your reframe and rewild the public conversation with narratives that move us towards justice plus onto-shift.

But how does a seed grow? To help it take root and flourish, we need to tend to the logistics:

Timeline: what are the most important milestones of your project’s growth?
Budget: what resources are needed and where will they come from?
Plan: how will the different organisations collaborate to nurture the seed’s growth?

Once you’ve made a plan, let’s move to the final step in the Hack section: Iteration & Evaluation.

Next Step: Iterate

The Culture Hack Method

The Culture Hack Method

Introduction

Step 1: Ask

Step 2: Listen

Step 3: Understand

Step 4: Recode

Step 5: Hack

Logistics of your Hack