Still Thinking
This blog post originally appeared on LinkedIn.
By Sean Gibbons
How Communication Actually Works
Before you can help ideas travel, you need to understand what makes them land — and what makes them fail. Start here.
Drive — Daniel Pink Why traditional incentives — rewards, punishments, pressure — are less effective than we assume, and what actually motivates people to act: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Directly applicable to anyone designing campaigns or calls to action that need to move people beyond passive agreement.
Made to Stick — Chip Heath and Dan Heath Why some ideas take hold and others disappear. Introduces shared vocabulary that shows up constantly across the field.
Contagious — Jonah Berger How ideas spread socially — through word of mouth, influence, and cultural transmission. Where Made to Stick focuses on message design, this one focuses on movement. If you're building a campaign and not thinking about how people share it with each other, you're missing the most important question.
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman How people actually make decisions — through shortcuts, intuition, and bias. Communications strategies that ignore these realities tend to fail. Most do.
The Influential Mind — Tali Sharot A neuroscientist's explanation of why facts alone don't change minds — and what actually does. Emotion, prior belief, and social cues drive belief change far more than evidence. Read this before your next campaign launch.
Influence — Robert Cialdini The classic on persuasion. The principles — social proof, authority, reciprocity, scarcity — show up constantly in real-world communications. Worth revisiting even if you've read it.
Supercommunicators — Charles Duhigg How trust is built or lost through conversation. Connects behavioral science to everyday practice in ways that are immediately useful.
"Communication in a New Era of Social Change" — Trabian Shorters, Daphne Davis Moore, Anusha Alikhan, and others (SSIR, ssir.org/communications-social-change) Yes, this series was produced in partnership with us — The Communications Network, the same organization that built this list. We're aware of how that looks. We're including it anyway because the argument it makes is one we don't think gets made clearly enough elsewhere: that the broadcast model — craft message, push it out, measure reach — is fundamentally inadequate for the moment we're in. The organizations doing the most interesting work right now are building communities, not audiences. Read it skeptically if you like. We'd just rather you read it.
Strategic Leadership
Smart communicators who can't lead change through complexity and resistance don't get very far. These two books are the most useful frameworks we know for that challenge.
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership — Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow The most rigorous leadership framework built specifically for the social sector. Heifetz distinguishes between technical problems — where the solution is known and just needs executing — and adaptive challenges, where the work requires people to change their beliefs, behaviors, and values. Most hard problems in communications and social change are adaptive. Most organizations try to solve them technically. That gap is where change efforts die.
New Power — Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans Old power hoards and pushes down. New power distributes and invites participation. Timms and Heimans explain why some movements explode and others stall — and what it means to lead organizations and campaigns in a world where participation isn't just nice to have, it's the whole point.
How Meaning Is Made
Framing, narrative, meaning-making. This is where most of the sector's hardest work happens — and where most of its biggest mistakes often get made.
FrameWorks Institute — frameworksinstitute.org More rigorous work on how people interpret social issues than almost any other organization in the sector. The concepts — mental models, values framing, explanatory narratives — are essential vocabulary. If you read nothing else in this section, read FrameWorks.
Don't Think of an Elephant — George Lakoff How moral frameworks shape the reception of political and social issues. Even when communicators try to avoid ideology, moral narratives still shape how audiences receive messages.
The Righteous Mind — Jonathan Haidt The underlying moral architecture that determines why certain frames resonate with certain audiences and not others. One of the most useful lenses available for communicators working across political and cultural difference.
Asset Framing — Trabian Shorters Shifting communications from leading with deficits to leading with people's aspirations, contributions, and humanity. Search his talks and interviews — the ideas are everywhere and they stick.
The Danger of a Single Story — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (TED Talk) One of the most watched explorations of narrative, representation, and power ever recorded. Essential viewing for anyone thinking about whose stories get told — and who gets to tell them.
Hidden Tribes / The Perception Gap — More in Common (moreincommon.com) Among the most important empirical research on polarization available. The findings on how badly people misunderstand each other's actual views are worth sitting with — preferably before you design your next campaign.
"Aspirational Communication" — Doug Hattaway (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2020) Not a book — a single, essential article. Hattaway's six-step framework for driving durable attitude change, built from two of the most successful social change campaigns in recent memory: marriage equality and youth anti-smoking. The core insight: connect your cause to who your audience wants to be, not just what they think. Available free at ssir.org and in our Storytelling for Good archive.
Breaking the Social Media Prism — Chris Bail Exposure to opposing views on social media can actually increase polarization rather than reduce it. Exactly the kind of uncomfortable finding every serious communicator needs to know.
Equity, Justice, and Power
This isn't a standalone section. It's a lens that runs through everything else on this list — framing, storytelling, trust, whose voices get amplified and whose don't. We put it here so it doesn't get skipped.
The Sum of Us — Heather McGhee How narratives about race have undermined investment in shared public goods — and what it costs everyone.
Emergent Strategy — adrienne maree brown Widely influential in movement communications and organizational culture. Draws on complexity science to articulate a vision of change that is adaptive, relational, and grounded in justice.
Decolonizing Wealth — Edgar Villanueva An honest reckoning with how funding structures can reinforce the inequities they claim to address.
Merchants of Doubt — Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway How a small group of scientists deliberately manufactured uncertainty about settled science — on tobacco, climate change, and more. The most important book available on how misinformation gets built and deployed against good-faith communicators.
Race Forward — Racial Equity Communications Guide — raceforward.org Practical, concrete, directly usable. Language choices, framing, visual representation.
Othering and Belonging Institute — belonging.berkeley.edu Deep resources on bridging, targeted universalism, and structural change communications from John A. Powell and his team at Berkeley.
The Science and Craft of Storytelling
"Tell stories" is the most overused and least understood piece of communications advice in the sector. This section goes deeper — into why story works, what the brain actually does with it, and how to get genuinely better at it.
Wired for Story — Lisa Cron The brain is wired to seek story — not as cultural preference but as cognitive necessity. A story is not a sequence of events. It's a character who wants something and faces obstacles. Without want and obstacle, you have information. Not story.
Science of Story Building — University of Florida Center for Public Interest Communications (scienceofstories.org) The most rigorous synthesis available of what behavioral, cognitive, and social science actually tells us about why stories work. Ann Christiano, Annie Neimand, and their colleagues at UF's Center for Public Interest Communications spent years translating scholarship across disciplines into something practitioners can actually use. Their core argument — that public interest communications requires moving past awareness-raising toward the specific belief and behavior change that creates lasting difference — should reshape how you think about your theory of change. Free, online, and worth your time.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers — Katherine Boo Narrative nonfiction at its highest level. Boo spent years inside a Mumbai slum and wrote about poverty, aspiration, and injustice entirely through the lives of the people who lived there — no deficit framing, no author as savior, no reduction of complex human beings to their circumstances. A masterclass in what it looks like to tell a hard story with full humanity. Every communicator working on issues of inequity should read this.
The Unwinding — George Packer A portrait of American economic and social unraveling told through braided individual lives — not data, not argument, not policy analysis. Story. It shows what systemic change looks like from the inside, and how to make an abstract structural story feel viscerally human. Read it to understand what narrative journalism can do that no white paper ever will.
Building a StoryBrand — Donald Miller The audience should be the hero of the story — not the organization. One of the most common and consequential mistakes in nonprofit communications, named plainly.
The Revolution Will Be Hilarious — Caty Borum Comedy is not the opposite of seriousness. It is, in the right hands, one of the most powerful tools for narrative change available — disarming audiences, dissolving barriers, and making people lean in rather than tune out. Borum, who directs the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University, makes the evidence-based case for why communicators and advocates should take humor as seriously as any other strategic tool.
Writing for Busy Readers — Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink Most communications fail not because the message is wrong but because it's too long, too complex, and too poorly structured for how real people actually read. Cut it. Move the ask up. This book shows you how.
Bird by Bird — Anne Lamott Ostensibly about writing, but really about the discipline of paying close attention and telling the truth about what you see. The most honest book on the creative process available — and a useful corrective to every communicator who waits for the perfect draft before starting.
On Writing Well — William Zinsser The classic. Clutter is the enemy of communication. The discipline of cutting is the discipline of thinking clearly.
Messages Don't Travel Through a Vacuum
They travel through relationships — in an environment where institutional trust is fragile, attention is scarce, and platforms are not neutral. Understanding this environment isn't optional.
Stolen Focus — Johann Hari The most important book on the attention crisis for communicators. Hari's argument isn't that people are lazy or distracted — it's that attention itself has been systematically dismantled by platform design and business models largely outside individual control. Understanding this structurally changes how you think about reaching any audience. It should make you a little angry.
The Shallows — Nicholas Carr Where Hari is broad and accessible, Carr is rigorous and unsettling. His argument — that the internet is physically reshaping how the brain processes information, trading depth for speed — is one every communicator needs to wrestle with. Read alongside Stolen Focus.
Trust Playbook — trustplaybook.org Practical strategies for building trust through communications and engagement. Start here.
Bowling Alone / The Upswing — Robert Putnam Long-term changes in civic life, community, and social capital. Essential context for understanding why trust-building work is both urgent and difficult right now.
Strangers in Their Own Land — Arlie Hochschild An ethnographic account of how people develop deeply held social and political identities. Builds the kind of empathy that makes for better communicators — and better humans.
Crucial Conversations — Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler Practical tools for high-stakes dialogue. Useful for anyone facilitating difficult conversations across difference.
Community, Brand, and Belonging
The most effective organizations in our field aren't just good at messaging. They build communities people want to belong to. These books explain how that actually happens.
The Art of Community — Charles Vogl One of the most practical frameworks for understanding how communities form, sustain themselves, and grow. Should change how you think about every gathering — not just as an event but as a community-building act.
Get Together — Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto A practical, people-first guide to building communities that actually stick. The question it keeps asking — how do you hand ownership to the community itself? — is the right one. Most organizations never get there.
The Brand IDEA — Nathalie Kylander and Christopher Stone Brand isn't a logo or a tagline. It's an expression of identity, values, and trust — something the whole organization lives, not just the communications team. The most useful framework for thinking about brand in the social sector.
The Art of Gathering — Priya Parker Most gatherings fail because organizers never clearly answer: what is this actually for? Her principles apply to everything from large conferences to small conversations. Read it before you plan your next event. Any event.
The Power of Moments — Chip Heath and Dan Heath How memorable experiences are deliberately designed. Directly applicable to anyone planning programs, convenings, and learning events.
Viewpoint Diversity and Intellectual Challenge
The greatest risk to any learning community is the comfort of consensus. Easy to say. Hard to actually build against. These resources name the forces working against it — and what to do instead.
The Coddling of the American Mind — Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff What conditions allow genuine learning to occur — and what conditions shut it down. Not a political book. A book about what it actually takes to challenge people's thinking rather than just confirm it.
Heterodox Academy — heterodox.academy Resources on how to design conversations that surface genuine disagreement and make space for dissenting views. More useful than most facilitation guides.
Love Your Enemies — Arthur Brooks On productive disagreement across ideological lines. Directly relevant to the bridge-building work the sector says it values. Whether it actually practices that is a different question.
Worth Watching
A short list of talks that have shaped how the field thinks. Most are already widely known. That's not the same as actually watched.
The Danger of a Single Story — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Already on this list. Still the one to start with.
The Power of Vulnerability — Brené Brown Forty-plus million views for a reason. If you haven't watched it, watch it. If you have, watch it again and pay attention to the structure.
How Great Leaders Inspire Action — Simon Sinek The "Start With Why" talk. So embedded in sector vocabulary that people quote it without knowing the source. Worth going back to the original.
The Moral Molecule — Paul Zak The neuroscience of story, oxytocin, and why narrative produces trust in ways data cannot. Short, accessible, and directly applicable.
How Language Shapes the Way We Think — Lera Boroditsky The least-known talk on this list and possibly the most useful for communicators. Boroditsky shows that the words we choose don't just describe reality — they shape how people perceive and remember it. Directly relevant to every framing conversation you'll ever have.
The Revolutionary Power of Diverse Thought — Elif Shafak On intellectual monoculture, the stories we tell about places and people, and why homogeneous communities — including progressive ones — produce narrower thinking than they realize. A useful provocation.
The Social Sector
Communications strategies are shaped by organizational realities. Know the ecosystem you're operating in.
Forces for Good — Crutchfield and Grant How successful nonprofits create impact at scale. A useful overview of organizational strategy and the conditions under which change actually happens — including why most organizations plateau before they get there.
How We Give Now — Lucy Bernholz A Stanford researcher's argument that philanthropy is far bigger than check-writing — it includes time, data, consumer choices, and mutual aid. Reframes what "giving" means in ways that matter for anyone helping organizations talk about impact and participation.
Decolonizing Wealth — Edgar Villanueva Already listed above in Equity. Worth reading twice.
The Generosity Network — Jennett and Lawson Insight into how philanthropy works, how funders think, and what motivates generous behavior. Essential for working with organizations navigating funder relationships.
Stanford Social Innovation Review — ssir.org Essential ongoing reading. The field's best journal. If you're not reading it regularly, start.
AI and the Changing Media Environment
The environment communicators are navigating is changing faster than any previous generation has experienced. This section is a starting point, not a destination — we aim to update it more often than the rest.
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI — Ethan Mollick The most practically useful book on AI for knowledge workers right now. Mollick doesn't traffic in hype or doom — he focuses on how to actually work alongside AI without losing your judgment or your voice. Read the book, then follow his Substack (One Useful Thing) to stay current.
Don't Make Me Think — Steve Krug The classic on web usability — and more broadly, on designing anything people have to navigate. The title is the argument: good design doesn't make people work. Every communicator who puts content into the world should read this.
Comm4Good AI Resources — comnetworkai.org Start here. The field has already done significant thinking on AI and communications — no need to reinvent the wheel.
Reuters Institute Digital News Report — reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk Annual research on how news and media consumption vary across 40+ countries. A useful corrective to the assumption that the US media environment is everyone's media environment.
Tactical Tech — tacticaltech.org A non-US, civil society perspective on AI, data, and digital rights. Starts from different assumptions than most resources in this space — which is exactly the point.
People Worth Following
Thinkers, researchers, and practitioners whose work is worth tracking — across disciplines, ideologies, and geographies.
Behavioral Science and Communications
Doug Hattaway — Founder of Hattaway Communications; creator of the Aspirational Communication framework; one of the most rigorous practitioners working at the intersection of social science and social change communications
Tali Sharot — Neuroscientist and author of The Influential Mind; studies how emotion and expectation shape what people believe
Jay Van Bavel & Dominic Packer — Social psychologists whose Substack The Power of Us (powerofus.substack.com) is among the most useful ongoing reads in the field; their work on identity, group dynamics, and collective behavior is directly applicable to anyone trying to understand why people believe what they believe
Jonathan Haidt — Social psychologist at NYU Stern; his moral foundations theory explains why people with different values literally interpret the same facts differently
Linguistics and Language
Deborah Tannen — Georgetown University linguist; her work on conversational style and miscommunication is foundational and underused in the sector
Lera Boroditsky — Stanford cognitive scientist studying how language shapes thought; her research on metaphor and framing has direct implications for how communicators choose words
George Lakoff — UC Berkeley cognitive linguist; the intellectual father of framing theory in political communications
John McWhorter — Columbia University linguist; writes accessibly on language evolution, race, and rhetoric from a perspective worth engaging seriously
Equity and Justice in Communications
Trabian Shorters — Creator of asset framing; essential voice in dignity-centered communications
Manuel Pastor — USC researcher on equity, narrative, and social change communications
Heather McGhee — Author of The Sum of Us; powerful voice on race, narrative, and shared prosperity
Race Forward — Field-tested practitioners in equity communications; their guides are among the most practically useful in the sector
Perception Institute — Bridges social psychology and communications practice; their research on narrative and identity threat is particularly strong
Philanthropy and the Social Sector
Raj Shah — President of the Rockefeller Foundation and author of Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens; a clear-eyed voice on what it actually takes to move the needle at scale — not incrementally, but transformationally
Edgar Villanueva — Author of Decolonizing Wealth; important perspective on power and money in the sector
Phil Buchanan — President of the Center for Effective Philanthropy; rigorous, evidence-based, and willing to challenge sector orthodoxy
Vu Le — Author of the Nonprofit AF blog and Substack; irreverent, funny, and consistently right about what's broken in the sector
Media and Culture
Derek Thompson — Staff writer at The Atlantic; writes clearly and often on attention, culture, and how ideas spread
Nikole Hannah-Jones — Journalist and creator of the 1619 Project; important voice on narrative, history, and how journalism shapes public understanding of race
Kara Swisher — Technology and media; sharp on how platforms are reshaping public discourse
David Remnick — Editor of The New Yorker and one of the great practitioners of narrative journalism; his thinking about editorial judgment, long-form storytelling, and what serious writing owes its readers is worth studying closely
Global Voices
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Nigerian author and essayist; her work on narrative, representation, and the danger of a single story is essential for any communicator thinking across cultures
Ory Okolloh — Kenyan lawyer, activist, and technology strategist; important voice on technology, civic communications, and African civil society
Geert Hofstede — His cultural dimensions framework remains one of the most useful tools for understanding how communication norms vary across countries; explore hofstede-insights.com
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism — Oxford-based; publishes the most comprehensive annual research on how news and media consumption vary globally
Tactical Tech — Berlin-based organization working on data, technology, and communications in global civil society contexts
This list was developed by The Communications Network as part of our commitment to field-building.
We believe communicators deserve a rigorous, honest, and expansive intellectual foundation — one that challenges as much as it confirms.
It's incomplete. Deliberately so. No list like this ever captures everything — and the moment it stops changing, it stops being useful. If you see a gap — a book we missed, a thinker we overlooked, a perspective that's absent — tell us!