The power of collective emotion: How stories move people.
Beyond noise and algorithms, the human pulse that still drives change.
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect suggests that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can ultimately influence a storm elsewhere.
We’ve all heard of MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or more recently, the case of Gisèle Pelicot, moments when silence broke, shame shifted sides, and the collective voice of many carried the pain of a few. These are stories no one should ever have had to live, and yet they’ve taught us something profound about what happens when emotion becomes collective.
At their core, these movements remind us that empathy is contagious. They often begin with one person sharing a truth as an act of survival. And when that truth is spoken, others see themselves in it, one story becomes the story of hundreds and hundreds, becomes millions.
When emotion becomes movement
Movements like these spread not through perfection or coordination, but through honesty. A tweet, a post, a video recorded in someone’s living room. The mechanism is simple but powerful: emotion creates connection, connection creates belonging, and belonging creates momentum.
When people feel part of something larger and recognise their own values reflected back at them, they move together. That’s the power of collective emotion. It doesn’t just make us feel, but it makes us act.
And while none of these movements should ever have been necessary, their existence holds lessons far beyond activism. Lessons about truth, empathy, and what it means to be human in public.
Stories that build action
To understand this kind of collective movement, I often come back to Marshall Ganz, a civil rights organiser who worked alongside César Chávez before becoming a lecturer at Harvard. Ganz devoted his life to understanding how people turn values into action through stories.
He called his framework the Public Narrative, and it rests on three interwoven stories:
The story of self: why you care, your personal experience of purpose.
The story of us: the shared values that connect you to others.
The story of now: the urgent challenge that calls for collective action.
Ganz teaches this framework to activists, organizers, and leaders who want to move people toward collective action. His idea is that change doesn’t start with strategy; it starts with emotion and meaning. When individuals share their story of self, they invite empathy. When they connect those personal stories into a story of us, they build community and shared purpose. And when they frame an urgent story of now, they turn that shared purpose into action. Ganz uses this process to help people transform emotion into organized energy.
Emotion is the bridge between belief and action; logic can inform, but emotion transforms. Movements grow when people don’t just understand what’s at stake, but when they feel it, together. And while Ganz built his work to empower communities, his insight applies anywhere humans gather to create meaning: teams, organisations, brands, even cultures.
It’s all the same question: how do we turn shared values into shared action?
Truth in the age of noise
We live in a world flooded with voices, feeds full of urgency, perfection, and persuasion. Millions of people are selling, posting, and proving, the volume goes up, while the meaning thins out.
In this kind of world, people no longer crave more information; they crave authenticity, they’re drawn to what feels real, even if it’s raw and flawed. That’s why some movements, and even some modern companies, stand out.
Not because they say the “right” thing, but because their conviction is lived, not branded, the name for its opposite, “woke-washing”, when organisations borrow the language of justice without the action to match. You can’t fake collective emotion, people feel when a message is lived and when it’s performed.
Conviction over communication
A well-known example from the business world is Patagonia’s pledge to donate its profits to fight the climate crisis, it wasn’t a PR stunt; it was a continuation of decades of action.
From sourcing sustainable materials to repairing old gear to discouraging overconsumption, the brand’s belief in protecting the planet runs through everything it does.
That authenticity resonates not because it’s loud, but because it’s consistent. Patagonia doesn’t shout about values; it lives them. And that’s the real difference between communication and conviction.
Responsibility in a shared system
We’re the most connected society in history, every story documented, every opinion amplified. But this interconnectedness also means we shape the emotional atmosphere we live in. The narratives we share, online, in our work, in our companies, become part of what the world learns from, what future generations inherit, what algorithms train on.
Emotion still drives meaning, even in a digital world, but the responsibility that comes with that is collective, too. We can choose to flood the system with noise, or to fill it with truth.
Presence over perfection
The power of collective emotion isn’t just about movement; it’s about meaning, it’s what turns silence into voice, empathy into action, and individuals into collectives.
We may not all start revolutions, but every story we tell, every choice we make, every emotion we amplify, adds to the shared pulse of the world we’re building.
Maybe that’s the task of our time: to remind each other we still feel.
