Are you also wondering what is actually going on these days? I can feel the climate changing, things are getting more expensive, wars are spreading, the world is burning – have we all gone mad? And it’s not like we couldn’t hear the alarm bells for quite a while.
 
But rather than asking why most of us couldn’t hear them, if you’re a communicator like me, you’re probably familiar with arguments like “we have to explain sustainability better”, we must “fight greenwashing” or we just need better storytelling for people to get the facts.

But it doesn’t work and we’re heading ever faster into the abyss. Little seems to make sense anymore, many feel disoriented, and we can hear the same old stories, same old arguments, same old messages crumbling in the face of today’s reality. I often feel it’s absurd and surrealistic at times. Do you feel the same?

So how can we communicate about what’s going on now that our very survival is at stake? What is my own role, the role of my organization, or my brand in all this?

To start with, let’s look at the context in which we communicate. It's perhaps no wonder we feel confused and hopeless when we look at the floods of fake news, billionaire agendas in media outlets, algorithms that filter out critical content, and a generalization of ignorance and understandable shying away from dealing with what could look like the end of the world if we trust the news.

These days I feel a strong sense of pain of being in the world. What world will the next generations live in? Will I even be able to make a living in a world at war? When everything is dead and we struggle to even grow food from toxic soils? The mental health pandemic with unprecedented levels of depression, stress and burnout seems only a logical reaction.

There’s fear, anger and hopelessless in the light of what’s to come. You probably also know many in your surroundings that struggle, that suffer. Maybe you feel powerless: what can I do? How can I help? Or you simply can’t even think about that because you feel overwhelmed by everything. Are we welcoming these feelings today?

As a response, there are very loud voices out there calling for more law and order, for authoritarian leadership, or just repeat what they’ve been saying for years and decencies. Technology and growth will fix it or we need the state to fix it. Or religious extremists and conspiracy theorists claiming they own the truth.

Dictators and extremists are there to fill the gaps that our modern age has created. The loss of meaning. The loss of community. The loss of security. And I believe that no “fixes”, no symptom level treatment will be able to revert the toxic logic we are in. We can’t deal with issues in siloes anymore, the world is more complex than that. It’s a mess.

Are you afraid of death? 

I am asking this question, because it’s the elephant in the room today that no one talks about. It’s deeply uncomfortable to realise that the world you knew is coming to an end. And as Western societies we have lost the capacity of welcoming the end of a cycle. Unlike nature, the narrative of endless progress doesn’t know death. But we’re not a machine, we are biological beings.

If we were able to speak about the death of the beliefs, stories, narratives, messages etc. that no longer serve us, we may have a change to make space for something new. Something alive. Something that will guide us into the times ahead. But that requires us to have courage, to look at the shadows of ourselves and the world – and ask: what do they tell us? What are the root causes?

These often invisible, unconscious, repressed parts of our communications are showing increasingly today – toxic positivity, greenwashing, inability to speak about the elephants in the room, up to aggression and violence. The first step then is to reflect how these patterns are present in our communications: our narratives, our storytelling, our language, our conversations, our messages, our images, our embodiments etc.

From that recognition that our own way of looking at the world, that our life story or the story of our organization is tightly interwoven into the dynamics of our age, we can change things. Which inner truths, shadows, and pains are there waiting to be expressed? We can for instance explore how our personal shadows are reflected in the problems of the world. The light and the shadow of our being is what I would call our unique essence. It’s the dimension of communications within.

Then, there is what communications usually focus on – the outside dimension. We tend to want to influence others, convince others, up to manipulate others. Have you done that too? Like I know better, I need to explain you why sustainability is so important? Well perhaps is us that have been blind. Perhaps it’s us who haven’t listened not seen the daily struggle of so many, and not seen why we are actually talking about sustainability. It’s too uncomfortable to realise that we have been keeping up a colonial industrial system until this very day that has created issues like poverty, climate change and biodiversity destruction in the first place.

So if we learn to listen to our inner truths, we can engage differently with the outside world.  Showing our vulnerability is what will create a bond of trust with audiences and clients. And it will provide the basis for being able to listen to other perspectives. What is it in my story that can connect me deeply to others? For instance, as a queer person, the experience of marginalization has taught me to clearly see dynamics of power and dynamics of exclusion. I can see what the “medicine” for society is, what will make it more colourful and abundant.

And then there is the world beyond – the world of meaning making, of wisdom, of worldviews, of narratives. How has my organization been part of the narrative of eternal progress and colonization? And once we’ve digested this toxic heritage, how can we co-create new narratives that make sense of the world and that open up to new horizons of what is possible. How can we reimagine the world together with our stakeholders and thereby mobilise the energy needed to move into action that feels deeply meaningful, aligned, and important?

It is in these three dimensions of regenerative, life-affirming, communications that we can learn to navigate these turbulent times. We can deepen and broaden our understanding of communication dynamics, and work on the conditions for communications to thrive. This comes with a vulnerable posture, with the affirmation that we actually know very little, and with the conviction that so much is possible. That we can create a more beautiful world, where we can fully be, and express our greater potential.

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