Disrupting Assumptions For Good

It has been a full month! 

Both the day I made up (Canadian Viral Hepatitis Elimination Day) and the week I made up (YIMBY Week) are in May (a bit of poor planning there, perhaps). But it means that this month I spent a day in Ottawa with some of my favourite colleagues, releasing a new report I led and meeting with policymakers, and then a week touring Simcoe County, doing flag-raisings and spreading YIMBY cheer. 

And of course, in between I was reading and having conversations, and the sun is finally out, so I was enjoying lunch on patios discussing life and work with friends. So today’s offering is a mix of my current thoughts on what I’m finding interesting in my work, along with experiments and reflections on how I work. 

The role of narrative in systems
Often, when we talk about narrative, we keep it in the box of awareness-raising or “changing hearts and minds” so that we can build support for systems change. We treat it as a communications tool for persuasion, education, brand positioning, or stigma reduction. 

But I am coming to see a broader role of narrative as key systems infrastructure: shaping the logic of the systems and sometimes propping up systems that do not serve us. If we ignore the narrative element in a given system we want to change, we can end up talking right past our audience. 

Narrative as systems infrastructure
A system isn’t just the funding, policies, institutions, programs, incentives, and regulations. It is also the assumptions, causal stories, categories, moral hierarchies, and emotional interpretations of risk, responsibility, and safety, to name a few. These narratives can determine what actions feel “common sense,” which harms become visible, which metrics matter, which populations get prioritized, and which futures people can imagine. 

Narrative doesn’t just influence systems from the outside. It is part of the system itself. It shapes how problems are understood and what solutions feel logical.

For example, we can advocate for housing-focused solutions to encampments, but if our municipal government interprets homelessness as a crime problem, our housing-based solutions are illogical. 

Or in my hepatitis C work, we can advocate for treatment barriers to be removed, but if the doctors are operating from a narrative that the drugs are too expensive to prescribe to marginalized people, the policy changes won’t matter, because the narratives are part of the system, not outside of it. 

The policy changes, but the system behaviour does not. Because that narrative architecture remains intact. In other words, systems are cultural and psychological, not just administrative.

This has never been more evident to me than in a current discussion we are having with Correctional Service Canada (CSC) about their recent change to the harm reduction policy across all federal prisons. The disagreement isn't really about the facts themselves. It's about what those facts mean, how safety is defined, what risks matter most, and what responsibilities institutions have toward people in their care. I can tell that bringing more evidence to the table is not going to make any difference. It is so clear in this instance that evidence enters systems through narrative filters, and we are literally looking at the same evidence and arriving at opposite policy conclusions. 

So then my work moves beyond simply translating evidence into plain language and improving messaging to asking how systems are shaping collective sense-making: what assumptions are silently structuring this work? What narratives are embedded in these systems? What emotional logic is sustaining current practices? 

I'm increasingly convinced that systems change requires working on both levels at once: changing policies and changing the stories that make those policies make sense.

This type of systems change work doesn’t lend itself to days of back-to-back Zoom meetings and checked-off to-do lists, which brings me to how I have been transitioning the way I work. Or, one could even say, how I am rethinking the narratives I hold about work and how those stories shape my assumptions about productivity and value… ;)

Making room for deep work
As I have mentioned, I decided last fall not to renew one of my contracts so I could put my whole brain on narrative work for homelessness and hepatitis (these two fields of policy advocacy are actually very overlapping, and the narrative change work is extremely similar). 

That third contract ended April 30, which means May has been an important transition month for me as I try to answer the question: how do I structure my day to support deep work sessions rather than structuring it around meeting requests and a to-do list? 

I mean, isn’t that the dream? Built in time to read, think my thinky thoughts, and read some more? 

It turns out this question is partly about logistics and scheduling, but it’s actually mainly a psychological shift: 

How do I define a successful day if I’m not checking off tasks like a boss? 

Who even is this Enneagram 3 girly if she’s not being super productive? 

Deep reframing work requires synthesis, pattern recognition, considering ideas from different angles, writing half-formed ideas, revisiting the same concept multiple times, and (maybe the hardest part) not rushing to closure. 

When I hold a completed report in my hand that took three months of deep work, that feels good, but as a daily practice, it feels unproductive. I mean, invisible, iterative, and non-linear? Three of my least favourite work words. Ugh. 

All my instincts are that this is the kind of thing I can spend time on AFTER I FINISH MY VERY IMPORTANT EMAILS.

If you can’t tell, I’m not exactly nailing it yet. I may still be hooking my worth as a human a tiny bit on my productivity. It is a work in progress, but I'm discovering that deep work isn't just about protecting time. It's about learning to trust that thinking is work, you guys, even when there's nothing obvious to show for it immediately.

If you have also learned to make space for deep work in your work life, I’d love to hear about it! And if I crack it, don't worry, I'll report back.