Guiding Principles
Attune
Build listening into your strategy. Go beyond values and beliefs to the feelings. Research the messy and complicated conflicts, dilemmas. Show up where people feel stalled out, unsure, or overwhelmed.
Understand & tune into your people.
Watch Video
What does it mean to attune?
Attunement is the building block, key ingredient, magic superpower, and capability on which much of our work rests. Attunement is when we experience mutual understanding on a very deep level. We feel it in our bodies and nervous system before we are consciously aware of it.
We just know, or rather feel—when we are understood, and when we are not. This is a practice that goes to the heart of how well we understand our stakeholders and how we demonstrate that understanding.
If we applied attunement to how we communicate the need for change with our communities, we’d achieve a lot more success. We’d find traction. We’d be able to engage. Motivation for change only exists in the context of safe and empathetic relationships: with ourselves, each other, and our world.
This is based on decades of empirical research into the mechanisms of change—not only behavior change but real transformation.
Attunement is a verb, a lifelong practice, a radical reframe for being changemakers.
But, how exactly do we do this?
This all sounds good if we have the opportunity to work with people one-on-one. We don’t have time for in-depth, heart-felt conversations with tens, hundreds, thousands of people.
How do we leverage these insights when working at scale, under huge constraints, with actual urgency and high stakes?
Here are five steps to start
getting attuned:
Start by tuning in and bringing compassion to the full range of your own experience.
This starts with taking stock of your own feelings about the issues. How are you? Are you feeling anxious? Scared? Angry? Inspired? Overwhelmed? All of these feelings inform and influence how we show up with our stakeholders and communities. Becoming aware of your starting place is vital for effective tuning in.
How are you feeling about the people you seek to engage? Frustrated? Impatient? Curious? Respectful? Be honest. How do you really feel as we confront our global emergencies? This is important to check in on, because when we have high stakes, our urgency can come out in a variety of ways—and not always leading to desired outcomes. This level of tuning into yourself is the basic first step.
This worksheet can be used by individuals or in a paired check-in as a foundation for attuning with others.
GO TO DOCUMENT
Individual Activity
Paired Activity
Activities
.
Learn more about your people’s anxieties, ambivalence, and aspirations. Often, our own mandates for change, awareness of the stakes, and our own inspirations can blind us to the messy and complicated dilemmas in which others find themselves. However, understanding our people, communities, stakeholders, and users enables us to design effective campaigns and influence change.
Tuning into others means designing lots of ways to listen. This may be skillful survey design, listening circles, focus groups, interviews, ethnography, and social media analysis. The key thing is that we listen, pay attention, and open our ears and minds and hearts to what is there. We go beyond values, aspirations, and beliefs and pay attention to The Three As: Anxieties, Ambivalence and Aspirations. (And Anger, too.)
Use this activity with your team to practice a deeper form of attunement to your audience, starting with their core needs and desires.
GO TO DOCUMENT
Group Activity
Activities
Putting this into practice involves what the rest of our Guiding Principles are about.
We start with doing an assessment of how tuned in your current communications are. Are you moralizing, educating, inspiring, righting? Or are you guiding, inviting questions, and mirroring back the messy and complicated authentic experiences of your people?
If your people are feeling conflicted about giving up meat, doing less flying, more political action, and so on, can you ensure they know you get these conflicts, as well as their anxieties and aspirations? If you can do this you are onto something big. You need to know what these Three As are as a basic foundation of all of your work.
What are your stakeholders experiencing? Tune into anxieties, ambivalence, and aspirations of those you seek to engage.
GO TO DOCUMENT
Individual Activity
Group Activity
Activities
Stay tuned to how well you’re connecting with your people, and correct course in real time, if possible.
Check in with your people often. How are they doing? What would they like to see more? What do they need to see less? Keep this channel open. Design interactive means of staying tuned in and engaged: groups, interactive platforms, invitations for feedback, regular stakeholder listening sessions or surveys. Ideally, design into your plans throughout your work. Ensure that your teams are internally aligned, sharing insights and staying fresh.
Being attuned is fundamentally about how we show up as guides. Are we revealing, being honest and authentic? We have a tendency to feel like we’ve got to keep our work and messaging upbeat, positive, and sunny.
While being aspirational and positive is a true motivator for change, so is feeling deeply attuned. Many of us criticize our own or others experiences unintentionally through our work. We imply that others shouldn’t be feeling what they do, that they are too negative, that they need to stay strong and positive. We often police what others should be feeling and thinking, telling them they are too hopeful, not hopeful enough, too optimistic, not optimistic enough, and so on. This is understandable but not helpful. Create mechanisms to hold yourself and your team accountable for how tuned in you are, and do the work necessary to keep practicing an attuned organizational culture.