The easy-to-think ideas right now, according to Nall Bales and Kendall-Taylor, include:
- Self-Makingness. Our successes and failures are primarily dictated by our individual choices and effort. This model makes it harder to see the context and systems that shape the choices and outcomes that are available to an individual.
- Separate Fates. What happens to an individual affects that individual and their immediate circle, but has no impact on the health and well-being of the broader community. It’s hard to engage people when they do not see how a particular challenge connects to their own lives.
- Business Knows Best. This model assumes that business practices are superior to those of government, and should therefore be widely adopted by the government. This pushes into the background the different goals of the two sectors, and makes it harder to activate support for a robust civic role in fostering the well-being of our nation’s communities.
In the article, FrameWorks recommends that nonprofits “interrupt” the public’s quick reliance on these unhelpful models by “being ready to tell better explanatory stories that link values to solutions and use the power of metaphor to explain how the world actually works.” As Kendall-Taylor and Nall Bales put it:
