FAQs

A: Zero sum thinking is about scarcity, meaning the focus is on what is not there or what is missing. Sometimes called deficit framing, this scarcity mentality limits the ability to think innovatively. The opposite framing is abundance: a focus on possibilities and the belief that there is enough for everyone to thrive. Zero sum narratives exist as a way for people in power to keep control. By perpetuating inaccuracies - like “immigrants take our jobs” - the dominating class and/or race pits the rest of the population against one another especially where common interest resides.

As with all narrative and behavior change efforts, do not do this work alone—find a group or some people to explore together. Identify what zero-sum thinking is getting in the way of and what new realities might exist without it.

• Zero sum thinking is a tenet of white supremacy based on fear of losing or missing out and so priority is put on the individual and individual gain.

• If people with this mentality can invite a new way of thinking where there’s room for multiple people to thrive, how much more joy might they get out of their work? How much safer might they feel if they believed -- and the organization proved -- that the genius and risk needed to thrive rests on the shoulders of many collaborative partners and not them alone?

As you and your group articulate these alternate realities for your workplace environment, start to try on associated behaviors in your interactions with each other and with others. For example, you might start leaving some of your work open-sourced as a way to grow the entire field as opposed to keeping it proprietary. Or start mentoring others by sharing your knowledge and experience freely and, in turn, you also get to learn from them.

Begin to name these behaviors as a way to demonstrate a value of solidarity versus individualism and see if others have examples of behaviors that demonstrate the same. You can also point to other case studies that show how zero sum thinking hurts us all and/or how abundance thinking benefits us all.

• See this article on “Heather McGee’s Quest to End America’s Zero-sum Thinking on Race”, particularly the fourth paragraph around her public pools example.

• See this Stanford Social Innovation Review on “The Curb Cut Effect”.

• Rinku Sen offered another zero sum observation. Birth outcomes for Black women and children in the U.S. have and remain exponentially lower than White women and children for a variety of reasons linked to structural racism. What’s less known is the fact that this disparity translates into lower expectations for healthy birth outcomes across women of all races in the U.S. In other words, the birth outcomes for Black women and children are the “floor”. Outcomes -- and treatment of -- White women and children are better but the “ceiling expectation” is still far lower than other countries because, collectively, U.S. dominant culture is “OK” with the “floor”.

As interest within your organization grows around these new ways of thinking and being, start to weave collectivism, collaboration, solidarity, and abundance thinking into your organization’s core values, principles/ways of working, shared agreements, etc. As these values are codified in writing, use them as talking tools to call out when opposite behaviors happen. Then put an emphasis on accountability so that those who can’t align themselves with these values, see themselves out of your organization and those who do align have opportunities to grow and thrive.

This answer is over simplified and pathways to shifting narratives and behaviors are different in every context but hopefully this provides some ideas to get you started.

In the convening where this question was first asked, another person shared a great response. She suggested organizations that are ready for deeper conversation have mini groups talk about the fears that are at play when zero sum thinking emerges. Even those of us who espouse to not sink into this deficit thinking can fall into these deeply illicit “fear traps”. Start by naming your own fears to get the conversation rolling and commend those who start to share more freely.

Another person brought up how zero sum fears are often around whiteness, especially in the years since George Floyd and others’ murders. Shadiin Garcia on our team provides an antidote when she sees it alive in conversations and interactions. She says: “There is no blame or shame in people who are in white bodies. Racism hurts them too. This issue is with the dominance and oppression that has been long associated with that skin color”. This notion can disarm white team members and move away from a defensive into a “reflensive” state (also coined by the team behind the Beyond the Hero Initiative, which includes Shadiin: “reflensive” is when you start moving from defensive to reflective as this disarming happens).

Here is one approach that can hopefully spark some ideas. We, Metropolitan Group (MG) and the Leadership for Better Health theme at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF LBH) are happy to chat about your specific circumstances if that would be helpful.

• Start by modeling collective leadership by gathering a core team of a few people who understand the importance of this shift and want to make it happen.

• First, your team will have to define what you mean by collective leadership. Use the broadened narrative as a resource.

• Think of a subgroup or taskforce within your organization and describe how its work might be different if its members shared leadership collectively. Ask that team to try out your ideas and document their reactions.

• Slowly ask more teams to try on the collective leadership approach.

• Work with your core group to find inroads and brief the people positioned at the “top” of your organization. Share what your core team is learning and how people are experiencing the shift (e.g., more people feeling valued and psychologically safe). To help people take their own unique paths to understanding the broadened narrative and its potential, have a variety of materials and information ready to share (e.g., data from your pilots; the broadened narrative tools; examples of similar organizations making shifts; at least two ways your organization can start to align operationally).

• Look at how your organization names, talks about, supports, and rewards leadership—both internally and externally. Do you tend to support and call out individuals (staff, grantees, and others) in a “hero” frame? Do you reward individual “above and beyond” behavior? Where could you imbue your stories about progress, impact, and leadership with a collective tone? (See our field guide for tips on approemail usaching and talking about leadership through a broadened narrative).

Check out the tools section of this site. Also, consider joining the We Wonder community for support, tools, and inspiration. Please email us if you’d like more information or would like us to send you related updates, including roll-out of organizational readiness assessment and asset-based language tools.

At the outset of client engagements, we (MG) often tell clients how important it is to get clear on vision, mission, and values and to make sure that all aspects of the organization—and all its people!—are aligned. Most people value and embrace this proposal. We often begin that process with an assessment/discovery phase that allows us to identify places in an organization that may not be aligned. In that context, it is appropriate and helpful to name the places where you see incongruencies among an organization’s stated mission, vision, values, and actions.

As part of an assessment/discovery phase, or separately, you can ask a lot of questions. See some examples below. While it’s best to ask these at the outset of an engagement, you can also use different milestones as opportunities to suggest stepping back to ensure that all internal systems are aligned with what the client wants to do externally.

• Before we begin this new phase, are your core values clearly articulated? Can everyone in the organization—including the interns, office manager, etc.—recall them and say how their work is guided by them?

• Does everyone at the organization know where it’s headed and how their role contributes? Is this clearly written into (or can it be added to) everyone’s job description/workload/current portfolio?

• Is the process for making decisions clearly articulated and understood by all?

• What is the process for setting priorities?

• What does internal communication look like? What does external communications look like?

• Externally, are you telling a story consistent with your practices, culture, and behaviors? Are you “walking the talk?” Many organizations fall out of alignment when their expressed vision is more aspirational than their internal reality. Can we begin to identify some of those places and get curious about why there might be a disconnect?

If the answer is no to any of these, suggest the team takes a strategic pause to get to greater clarity and alignment. Check out the tools section of this site and/or email us at MG if you would like help thinking through an approach or which tool might be helpful.

If the client is reluctant in taking a strategic pause to assess their organizational alignment, recommend a survey or interviews with employees and partners to understand the current environment and sentiment, and where they should dig in first. If your client is hesitant to conduct a survey, ask what they do when they’re curious about what’s going on with the organization and follow that approach. If there is still push back, evaluate whether it’s the right relationship for you.

Stay tuned for a Readiness Assessment Tool MG is developing. Sharing a third-party resource might help persuade the team to embark on this reflection.

Narratives are the aggregation of stories and experiences that build up over time to help people make sense of why things are the way they are. “Climate change is caused by humans” is one narrative; “climate change is a hoax” is another.

Mindsets are the deep patterns of thinking, informed by values, that people use to filter and understand information. They influence whether and how narratives get accepted or rejected—and they are influenced by the narratives people are exposed to. For example, individual hero narratives—a person overcoming the odds—are likely to activate individualistic mindsets rather than systems thinking mindsets.

As we continue building shared understanding alongside many of you, we often turn to the works of the Frameworks Institute and the Narrative Initiative.

Participants across RWJF’s leadership programs and initiatives have contributed many of the inputs that led to RWJF rethinking—and ultimately expanding—its leadership development portfolio. Here is an overview of some of what the Leadership for Better Health (LBH) theme learned from participants:

• Following a fixed curriculum can miss the nuances of participants’ own leadership journeys and the different contexts in which they live and work. It is important for programs to build on participants’ wealth of knowledge and experience.

• By focusing on helping individuals develop a core set of skills, LBH programs have, at times:

  • Played into an “individual hero” narrative about leadership, inadvertently elevating individualism/meritocracy over solidarity and reinforcing the deeply rooted notion that leaders are exceptional, charismatic individuals who lead in a singular way.

  • Presumed to know which skills participants need to be successful.

  • Failed to address the inherently unjust systems where people were working to create change, leaving them feeling isolated and alone.

• Other grantees that were a part of an exploration around supporting community-centered and -led leadership shared five requests for ensuring that funders “turn lessons learned into lessons practiced” (shortened summaries below):

  • Typical leadership development and funding perpetuate a singular way of being and doing, and uphold oppressive systems, including but not limited to white supremacy, patriarchy, economic oppression, and colonization.

  • To achieve social, economic, racial, environmental justice, and equity, philanthropy must follow the lead of those impacted by seeing, supporting, and valuing leadership as defined by grassroots, community organizations.

  • More flexible funding, with parameters set by grantees, is critically needed to ensure reporting requirements are right-sized based on the project, the people closest to the work are establishing the success measures and allocations of resources in their community, and to honor the time it takes for movements to get to the change they seek.

  • Program officers must be equipped with ideas, best practices, language, and case studies to disband practices and policies that promote white supremacy culture in philanthropic giving.

  • Philanthropic foundations should focus on cultivating deep and trust-based relationships with the communities they fund by holding difficult, transformative conversations.

This kind of feedback catalyzed the broadened narrative effort.

Participants also weighed in on the articulated narrative once it was drafted. They were the first to point out that this effort cannot be a simple, binary shift from one narrative (about individual leadership) to another (about collective leadership), and that it has to embrace a more expansive, abundant view of leadership. White supremacy culture has created a system that defines who can lead and who has power. People of color have navigated that system successfully. If we are now “out with that model” and in with a new idea, where does that leave people?

One shift we’ve made is to talk consistently about leadership as a practice—a verb, not a noun. We are checking ourselves on the use of the term “leader,” and exploring ways to talk about the roles a person has played in creating change in collaboration with others.

When we learn something new, we are sometimes tempted to get rid of everything old, throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. The MG and RWJF LBH teams are exploring how to change that habit, recognizing that we can keep some familiar aspects while also expanding the idea and language. This is about broadening the narrative and broadening access to and approaches to leadership, not replacing one singular model of leadership with another. We believe the larger solution is not about finding a perfect word. The solution requires the three levels of narrative change.

There are three tools to help you assess alignment with the three levels of narrative. They include:

1. Language/Stories: A field guide for telling stories that escape the individual hero model and showcase collective leadership that is anchored in the strength and wisdom of communities, including an asset-based language tool.

2. Policies/Practices: A lens for examining your organization’s policies and practices for alignment with the leadership narrative.

3. Culture/Behavior: A tool for translating values into leadership behaviors that authentically live out the narrative and create the environment for greater equity and inclusion in organizations.

There are other tools on the site, including the Head Heart Hands worksheet, that you can use after any session you conduct as a way to gather feedback and help participants commit to action as a result of the engagement.

Coming soon is a Readiness Assessment Tool.

A failure or resistance to understanding narrative change as behavior change—across practices, cultures, and words—stems from a belief that communications is separate from what an organization is and does. If an organization says one thing but does another, that is the perfect recipe for trust erosion and harm.

• Start by finding some internal partners who are ready to explore this effort with you (the key is not thinking you have to do this alone).

• Think about your on-ramp to understanding that narrative must be aligned along the three dimensions: 1) language & stories, 2) systems and policies, and 3) culture and behavior.

• Convene a small group of five to six people, share with them your “a-ha” moment, and then ask each person in the group what their “a-ha” moment was regarding ANY narrative, and ask if they see that alive across all three elements of narrative change.

• Outline a narrative that is close to your organization (or use the Broadened Leadership Narrative!) and assess where the organization is and is not aligned (and in this part, a gentle invitation to remember this is not an indictment but rather a way to find a place to start). What are small and large shifts that can lead to greater alignment?

• With your group, brainstorm different pathways to bring this thinking to broader swaths of your organization. Who might lean in easily? Who is going to resist and why?

Narrative efforts can take decades to lead to real, systemic change. And our (MG and RWJF LBH teams’) experience is that, if people don’t name an intention to shift, and then take steps toward change, it will never happen. The first step is to name the intention out loud, then to get curious about what’s happening and where there might be an opportunity to shift, align, or broaden language, policies, practices, and culture to advance a comprehensive, authentic narrative. It requires taking a long view approach while taking action now.

There are two levels of effort at play.

• The first is focused on amplifying the narrative that leadership is as broad and complex as the situations that call it into action; that there’s no one way to practice leadership. So, yes, there is more emphasis on this broadened narrative because dominant culture has focused on individual leadership for so long. But it’s not out with the old and in with the new; it’s a process of expanding and broadening, while holding both.

• The second level of effort is focused on ensuring that decision-making and policy setting processes include people who represent many forms of leadership as well as multiple ways of knowing and being.

Always use the terms people prefer to be referred to. In other circles, you might share why the term “unhoused people” is now in the advocacy world’s vernacular because it names that the folks you work with do have a home, just not a house. Reiterate that, while language is important and the words we use to describe people matter, we should, in the end, always refer to people in the way they ask to be.

Start by using the language people are used to. Then, when you have a moment, share that, while using “ELL” attempted to move past the very deficit-based frame of Limited English Proficiency (LEP), there's an opportunity to be more strengths-based by using “Emerging Multilingual Learners”. This term honors their native language and doesn’t center English as the preferred way. Another option would be to use strength-based terms and using a footnote/asterisk to note the legally-required terms. Hopefully, this amendment will spark discussion and can eventually lead to more strengths-based language in the law.