Every engagement starts the same way: with the right questions, asked by the right people.
FIELD GUIDE
Field guide · Message and narrative strategy
Narrative Under Pressure
A message can be polished and still be strategically weak.
Twenty-eight pages treating narrative strategy as a live operating cycle rather than a document: ground the claims, frame the issue, build the account, test whether people understand it, move it as a system, and adapt when the environment answers back.
It separates the four jobs teams usually collapse into one word — message, frame, narrative and environment — and includes a pressure test for what happens when the environment pushes back.
Get the field guideWhat it is — and is not
An operating cycle
Six steps run live, not a messaging document approved once and filed.
A comprehension discipline
It tests whether people understood what you think you wrote, using methods matched to the decision.
Not spin
Proof architecture means every important claim knows what is holding it up, and says so.
Not manipulation
The guardrails are explicit: a narrative system should make manipulation harder, not easier.
What is inside
Start with language
Message, frame, narrative and environment are four different jobs.
Ground
What is true before we decide what to say, and what the communication must make possible.
Frame
What the issue is actually about, and which frames are competing for it.
Build
The account before the copy: narrative spine, proof architecture, message stack.
Test
Do people understand what you think you wrote? Methods matched to the decision.
Pressure test
What happens when the environment pushes back, including hard questions.
Move
Deploy the narrative as a system, with voice and validators, not a press release.
Adapt
What would make us change the narrative, agreed before we need to.
Information threats
Correct false claims without making the falsehood the main story. Prebunking where it fits.
Measurement + guardrails
Did it change understanding, or only generate attention — and where the line is.
Templates built to be used in the room
Ground sheet
What is verified, what is assumed, and what the communication must make possible.
Frame card
The frame you are using, the frame you are competing with, and why.
Narrative spine
The account in its shortest defensible form.
Proof card
One claim, and what is holding it up.
Message stack
One idea at several lengths, for several audiences.
Pressure test
The hardest questions and the answers you can actually give.
Frame competition map
What story the environment is offering instead.
Narrative change log
What changed, when, and what it changes about the strategy.
The templates are compact by design. Copy them into your own workspace and pre-fill everything that can be known in advance.
What it is built on
Framing research, comprehension testing, behaviour-change guidance and the correction and prebunking literature are established fields with published evidence. The six-step cycle, the proof architecture and the pressure test are Artefact91 synthesis: working structures rather than validated instruments, and the guide marks which is which.
- CDC — Clear Communication Index and Testing Messages and Materials
- Entman (1993) — framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm
- UK Government Communication Service — OASIS and the Principles of Behaviour Change
- Lewandowsky et al. (2012) — misinformation and its correction
- National Academies (2017) — Communicating Science Effectively
- National Academies (2025) — understanding and addressing misinformation
- Nyhan (2021) — why the backfire effect does not explain durable misperceptions
- Roozenbeek et al. (2022) — psychological inoculation and prebunking
- Walter, Murphy & Gillig (2020) — long-term persuasive effects in narrative communication
- WHO Europe (2024) — infodemic management and managing false information
A useful narrative does more than give everyone the same words. It gives the organization a common account it can defend, shorten, update and be questioned on. If you want that account stress-tested against a live situation, the campaign simulator is the fastest way in. Or bring us the situation you are facing.
