Once Upon a Lie
A team red-teaming exercise where participants are hired to derail a climate law, and discover, from the inside, how public opinion is really shaped.
The scenario
Veritania's Prime Minister, Forrest Greenleaf, has staked his political legacy on the Green Future Act, a bold plan to move the country off carbon-intensive fuel as droughts and crop failures hit its farming heartland. Standing against him is Pandora Sterling, leader of the Traditional Prosperity Party, who casts the law as job-killing overreach on the nation's economic heritage and is determined to stop it before the next election. The Act's fate rests on public support in the months ahead.
Has staked his legacy on the Green Future Act, a transition off carbon-intensive fuel, and needs public support to carry it through Parliament.
Leads the Traditional Prosperity Party, frames the law as an assault on jobs and heritage, and will use any means to derail it before the vote.
How it works
Working in teams, participants are quietly approached, as experienced policy advisors, by Sterling's camp, with six months to turn the public against the Green Future Act. Each team develops and pitches its own public-opinion strategy to sway the country against the law. Playing the problem from the opposition's side, in the room and against each other, they build the machinery of narrative persuasion by hand before stepping back to see what they have made.
Your mission: develop and pilot innovative public-opinion strategies that could turn the population against this climate legislation.
Why it lands
For audiences who think of misinformation as something technical and distant, a matter of bots, algorithms, and platforms, building an opposition campaign themselves changes the register entirely. They see how a genuine grievance is found, sharpened, and redirected, and how ordinary public opinion is moved. The exercise makes an abstract, faraway problem immediate and personal.
How it was received
Ripple Research ran the exercise for the Global Impact Club, a group for whom misinformation had been largely a technical and distant concern. Participants described it as one of the best learning experiences they had had, precisely because it turned an abstract threat into something they had felt from the inside. Once you have built an opposition message, you recognise the pattern when you meet it in the real world.
Want to run this with your group?
We facilitate the exercise for teams, learning events, and leadership groups. Most sessions start with a short conversation about your audience and what you want them to take away.