Role and Purpose

The role of the Resilience Frontiers Impact Advisory Group is to provide high level independent advice to the Resilience Frontiers Initiative on how behavioral and communication tools can be positioned to support a global transition towards permanent resilience over the next decade.

The advisory group will identify leverage points in the global communications system, and analyse the relevant ways to help bring into existence new, widely held values about our relationship with nature and with each other that enable the paradigm shift towards a sustainable and resilient world.

The advisory board members may also play a role in supporting the work of the RF pathways through providing advice on storylines, pooling actions related to communication, and dissemination.

Members

The Resilience Frontiers Impact Advisory Group is comprised of executive-level behavioral change and communications professionals from a range of disciplines (film production and distribution, mass communication, data science, behavioral science, social norms). This breadth of expertise offers depth of insight (theory, story structure, narrative transport, dissemination across branches of communication, data analytics) to the Resilience Frontiers Initiative. Members with additional complementary expertise from the public sector and civil society with depth of experience in decision making and collective human behavior may also be added.

The members biographies and headshots can be found here.

Intended Results

• Strategy and guidance about how to use evolving global communication infrastructure for resilience, including how to use communications to create an enabling environment for a resilient future, including prioritization and sequencing.
• Prioritized advice on the best use of communications and behavioral tools for emergence of outlier developments that facilitate permanent shifts towards resilience. The impact advisory group could comment on scientific, artistic, and major ideas and social trends with the potential to bend the course of history towards resilience (identified by the methodology group).
• Identification of concrete communications products to that end. Guidance to help devise a concrete workplan for disseminating the results of the RF roadmapping in a way that ensures the highest possible impact.

Tasks and Timelines

The advisory group will provide advice in the first half of 2021, in parallel to the Resilience Frontiers roadmapping process:

1. Analyze how to leverage narrative structure and the factors that shape collective human behavior for resilience (February 2021 — mid-March 2021).

Discuss major elements of narrative and of collective human behavior. Identify levers of change in the structure of story, and the structure of collective human behavior and tools to analyse and influence these that can create change for good.

Building on expert input and foresight thinking, discuss how the (global) communications structure can be used to create change for good, and what steps would be needed to create a concerted “method” to move towards desired, resilient futures (described in the 8 resilience frontiers pathways).

The result: Strategy and guidance that builds on this information, including how to use communications to create an enabling environment for work that evokes global change for good/ towards a resilient future, including prioritization and sequencing.

2. Provide communications guidance (mid-March 2021 – May 2021) that can be used in the work of the pathway groups, as they develop and prioritize high-potential upstream actions (“blue swans”) to catalyze the pathway visions towards realization.

Social norms drive collective behaviors that affect how people interact and how people interact with nature. These collective behaviors build or undermine resilient futures.

The impact advisory group will:

• help identify changes in social norms and collective behaviors which could reframe current ways that people relate to nature and
• contribute to social norms and collective behavior which would build Resilience Frontiers pathways (“blue swans”):

1. How people interface with nature, values;
2. How people learn to take care of the environment;
3. How people interact with data and information;
4. How people take care of water and other natural resources;
5. How people affect and are affected by transboundary issues;
6. How people manage health and wellbeing;
7. How people manage food production and interact with the food production methods;
8. How people interact with and view the evolution of finance, prosperity and growth.

The impact advisory group will provide advice that pathway groups can use to assess the extent to which these collective behaviors are “independent” or socially conditioned. This will reveal levers of potential change.

The result: Guidance which can be utilized by the pathway teams on how best to integrate communications and behavioral change tools in the RF roadmapping methodology; as well as identification of concrete actions that can already be implemented in advance of the completion of the roadmapping.

3. Provide advice on the dissemination process to socialize the priority actions articulated out of the roadmapping phase (May 2021 – summer 2021)

Building on the outcomes of the two clusters above, provide guidance on how to deploy narratives surrounding the outcomes of the roadmapping process, using the insights articulated on how to best employ the global communications infrastructure towards global transformation.

The result: Guidance the pathway groups can use to help devise a concrete workplan for disseminating the results of the RF roadmapping in a way that ensures the highest possible impact.