Part 4 in a series on meaning-making
This is the final post in my four-part series on meaning-making. In the first one, I walked through how to figure out whether you are ready to meaning-make. Then I explored the phases you’ll likely go through, from the focus of your meaning-making to meanings catching on. In the third one, I offered meaning-making approaches to play with. That brings us to the fourth and final post where I offer a live example that we can watch play out.
This piece from The Atlantic, “The Texas-Flood Blame Game Is a Distraction,” gives a good test case, and you can see meaning-making in action. Some are focused on who or what is to blame for this flood. This is a good strategy if the meaning-making is meant to hold someone or something responsible. But if the meaning-making is meant to get strong systems in place to make floods less deadly in the future, assigning blame doesn’t necessarily do that. Meaning-making efforts would be more strategic if they used the tragedy to point out what would have saved lives and what is needed to get that in place. Last, some are using this as an opportunity to talk about the federal government’s role in disasters and conduct meaning-making around the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency that’s on the chopping block.
For the last one, to do meaning-making successfully around the importance of FEMA, strategists need to disrupt how some people currently think about the agency. This might include that states shouldn’t be responsible for handling disasters. For others, they may consider FEMA inefficient and ineffective. In both cases, meaning-makers will need to disrupt current thinking and get clear that instead of people thinking X, they need to think Y.
Ralph Nader did this effectively when he did meaning-making around people who called out bad behavior in companies or the government. At the time he was doing this, these folks were known as “informants” or “snitches.” He popularized the term “whistleblowers,” and this did several smart, strategic things. First, it shifted the sentiment about them from something negative — i.e., snitches aren’t people to respect — to something brave and admirable. Second, by tying these individuals to someone who calls out rule breakers in sports, it tapped into a social norm that people need to play by the rules.
Sometimes, meaning-makers need to start making sense of what’s happening when there isn’t perfect clarity. It will take a minute to sort through what happened around the flood and, just as importantly, what needs to happen to prevent this level of devastation from happening again. In these conditions, meaning-makers need to focus on turning on a light that brings hope in dark times. When meaning-making, focus on getting a small light on, guiding people to where you want them to come, and then you can make the light bigger and brighter.
We are seeing this happen now on immigration. With many sides trying to do meaning-making around immigration, there is a steady drumbeat that immigration is good for the U.S. Many people are making this case, and it is sticking. A Gallup poll over the last week found that a record-high 79% of Americans consider immigration good for the country. Despite significant headwinds with powerful people questioning immigration’s value and criminalizing immigrants, positive forces are succeeding in defining what immigration means to this country.
Meaning-making is never one and done. What people think, how they think about it and what they are willing to do to defend their beliefs is a dynamic that’s always in motion. But meaning-making is something we can and should do well to create the world we want to live in.