From the Margins to the Mainstream
The power of a strong visionary brand is that it both serves your business' bottom line and it helps shape the stories we live by for the better. When those two things come together - the financial resources to lead and serve without being mired in the struggle to be viable as a business, and the ability to shape culture - that's when we get to see the real potential of our work play out in our communities and fields.
What are the most culture-shaping ideas living in your business? The ones that are different from the dominant culture’s ways and stories, but serve a more beautiful, just, or healing story?
And are those most important ideas at the heart of your business - even the ones that seem "out there" - tangible to people who happen across your brand?
Big changes in society and culture - changes for the better - usually start at the margins. They usually start with ideas that seem almost unthinkable. Or impossible. Or outrageous. Then some brave people (sometimes individuals, often communities) start carving out more space, way out there in the margins, for the idea to take a bit of space. Sometimes they fight for the idea. Sometimes they die for it. They find ways to inoculate the culture to the idea, letting it breathe in slightly larger and larger spaces, creating safety for the idea.
And so the idea is carried, gaining support, as it makes its way to the middle. If the idea is a truly liberating one, it will find moments when something happens in the larger culture that allows the idea to take hold really fast. When some piece of "normal" reality falls away, a previously marginal idea can activate people’s consciousness - about the nature of "normal" itself, about possible alternative realities.
When it happens suddenly like this, the distance between impossible and inevitable gets shorter. Think about the concept of the 1% and a critique of capitalism - many of us thought there was no room in mainstream culture for that conversation - and then Occupy Wall Street happened after people carried those ideas for decades in from the margins. Another example is gay marriage, something many thought we would never see in our lifetimes. But when the tide turned, it was just a matter of a few years for it to become widespread. We are seeing a similar moment now with Black Lives Matter and the concept of defunding the police. A once-unthinkable idea (in the mainstream) is now a topic of the national conversation.
Most folks I know in the small business space have some ideas about how the world should be or could be. How people should relate, or could relate - to each other, to the culture, to objects, to the land, to healing, to justice. We are culture shapers, bringing those ideas, even the ones that seem most preposterous, or radical, or "woo," closer to more people, through the vehicles of our businesses and brands.
In your own small way, with your brand, you are bringing something precious in from the margins. You are prototyping the world to come, either in the work you do or the way you do it or both.
It may not be dramatic. It may not be something someone looks at and thinks “activist” or “rebel.” But nevertheless, you are carrying your small piece towards the center where we can all be served by it, participate in it, be changed by it, and use it for change.
What is the idea or perspective you carry that is part of your prototype of the future?
In the huge upheavals and disruptions that are happening right now, is more space opening for you to bring these ideas forward in bolder ways NOW? How are the big cultural shifts happening now creating more opportunities for your work to shape culture, along with the rest of us?
Sometimes, it's the most unusual, or unconventional idea or method in your work that will do the most to differentiate you in your field, to attract the people who are most meant to work with you, and unlock a path forward in business that is unmistakable, effective, and heads you towards that beautiful combination of financially resourced and culturally relevant.
If a thought pops into your head about one of the ideas or perspectives you carry, take note of it. Soon you’ll find ways for your brand to be a beautiful vehicle for the ideas that matter to you most.
This was originally published (September 25, 2020) for the Bureau of Tactical Imagination's email subscribers. To receive our weekly free education and inspiration for your business and brand building efforts, sign up here.