What are communications in a thriving world?

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What are communications in a thriving world?

This question was at the heart of our inquiry during our first re:storied workshop “Re:storying Communications” — ahead of the launch of our community platform (doors are now open!).

Before we went off into breakout groups to sit with this question, Jean-Philippe Steeger guided us on a visualization and we explored the diverse spectrum that is communication.

Guiding visualization

Jean Philippe took us on a bespoke guided visualization. We journeyed from the busyness of Time Square and its flashing billboards to a small village in the density of the Amazon Rainforest. In each place, we were invited to imagine what we see, our bodily responses to our environment, and our contribution as communicators and story-ers to these contrasting places. We arrived at the re:storied portal, with the burning hills and ruins of modernity in the background. Surrounded by a cloud of butterflies, we were ready to step into the re:storied portal. Into regenerative futures.

The Shaman and PR — 2 Perspectives on Communications

As we dived into new ways of making sense of our role as communicators, we left our modern logic by (re)introducing the shaman (also associated with the archetype of the magician). Besides communal healers, shamans are known to be storytellers and communicators between realms. They are mediators between the human community and the larger community of beings on which humans depend for their material and spiritual needs. In the Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes:

Do you resonate with the shaman? In which ways do you see your role as a weaver or communicator between different worlds? How do you promote harmony and balance?

Niels shared the example of his work with a mental wellness impact fund. They developed Nurture Capital, a radically new investment approach focused on developing portfolio startups rather than investing in a couple hoping one will be the next unicorn:

"My job as a communicator was to bring across ideas of regeneration, nurturing, and compassion to investors operating in the traditional, mostly male-dominated Venture Capital industry. One coach even warned us that the words we used, like Nurture Capital, could remind investors of their relationship with their mothers — which isn’t always positive. So some translation work needed to happen, which is why I developed a visual identity that communicated the essence of our work while avoiding words that could have negative connotations. I had to awaken the magician within, conjuring up something new and enlivening without fully naming it."

As regenerative communicators, we’re weaving new narratives as the old are being composted. Different audiences come together, but might have different levels of understanding. We need to be able to listen and speak to each of them.

Let’s now look at an example on the other side of the communications spectrum — the origins of PR and marketing.

Manipulating the subconscious

The field of PR and marketing was established to boost corporate sales by associating products and services with unconscious desires, thus creating an emotional connection between a brand and its customers.

Adam Curtis’ documentary The Century of the Self casts light on how at the dawn of the 20th century, PR consultant Edward Bernays used his cousin Sigmund Freud’s theories to manipulate public perception and “engineer consent”, or in other words, to trick people into buying things they don’t consciously need but whose promises they unconsciously desire. In his book Propaganda, Bernays argues that:

Before the mid-1920s, it was considered unconventional and sometimes even illegal or immoral for women in the United States to smoke. In the District of Columbia in 1921, for example, a bill was proposed to deny women from smoking.

However, this belief began to shift when Edward Bernays entered the scene. To increase cigarette sales, he launched a series of marketing campaigns associating cigarettes with “torches of freedom”, capitalizing on a broader cultural shift that saw women standing up for their individuality and independence.

In the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929, for instance, he hired women to march while smoking their "torches of freedom". Smoking quickly became a symbol with emancipation and gender equality.

With the birth of a new “market”, tobacco companies' profits skyrocketed. Cigarette sales to women rose from 5% in 1923 to 33% in 1977 while lung cancer slowly became the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women.

With the growth in evidence of the dangers of smoking, the tobacco industry saw their business model threatened. They consequently invested in building up their PR by targeting doctors to build a field of counter-science that questions the public health evidence that became increasingly solid. The FBI files — publicly available, show how the interplay of political strategy and science has created what became publicly perceived truth.

Their strategies included seeding doubt about evidence, creating false consumer associations, buying doctors etc. We can call these “PR scripts” and they may sound familiar to you: many of these scripts are used by the fossil fuel industry, war industry, alcohol industry today.

Common to them are the separation of facts from their context, a narrative of individual freedom and responsibility, and aggressive PR strategies that intimidate adversaries. Today, these instrumental narratives increasingly find their way into the design of algorithms.

We can learn from these examples that what we consider reality and truth is often a socio-political process. We can even speak of the manufacturing of truth.

As communicators, it may then seem crucial to understand where dominant narratives around themes of freedom or progress come from: In this case, an understanding of power and truth that is extractive and destructive to health, peace, etc. During our courses, we will both digest these toxic narratives that show up in our everyday lives and cultivate narratives and communication practices that we call life-affirming.

Without tapping into the same destructive dynamics, how can we learn to see communications from a perspective that is alive, that contributes to wellbeing of all life?

Group Harvest

In small groups, participants explored the question: “How would communications in a thriving world look like for you?”. The question seeks to expand our range of what is possible, beyond the current communication landscape that envelops us today.

Some patterns that emerged include:

• Communicating from love instead of fear; move away from the “villain mentality, “connect to humanness in us all and acknowledge the fear, embrace the pain, and fully feel the grief to move beyond”
• Recognize people’s sovereignty and agency - people are?capable of making their own decisions
• Communications that excite and awaken positive emotions
• Communications that feel in harmony with nature; harnessing personal and local stories; comms that connect us with our places, ancestral systems, and collective heritage
• Communications that hold complexity, and allow a plurality of perspectives to co-exist, as opposed to resorting to single definitions

Join our learning and practice community - doors now?open!

I co-founded re:storied alongside Emilie Grau and Jean-Philippe Steeger with the purpose of shifting how communication is done and regenerate Earth. This requires a?movement of like-hearted communication professionals.?

Explore regenerative communications with fellow professionals?and advance your career as a regenerative communicator. Get access to our community platform, monthly workshops and learning integration circles, resources and tools!?

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