It’s an election year and nobody knows what the future will bring. One thing is certain: 2025 is going to be different, and then some. We’ll save you our predictions for life in America, but they don’t exactly look like an episode of The Jetsons.
American society tends to put a stigma on feeling uncertain. It’s not easy for most of us to express feelings like this. Much better to say we’re “great”. This stigma holds true, even in the cause-driven sector. You may have given your funders a strategic plan two years ago and be under pressure to stick to it for the next three years, even as the world is going through seismic shifts.
The world is in many cases literally on fire. Last year was the hottest on record. There are wars unfolding. Dictators are imprisoning journalists. Oil bosses are running climate conferences. It’s natural, in fact, we think, for you to be asking: WTF?!
We aren’t therapists. We can’t help you process the emotional impact of not getting a jetpack to call your own. That said, we’re two experienced consultants familiar with the challenges faced by leaders at organizations around the world. Uncertainty is perhaps the only constant that both of us have helped our clients navigate most often. It’s as inevitable as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk battling over the size of their space rockets.
Against that backdrop, we specialize in helping our clients find certainty about their voice. It can, in fact, be surprising how often we work with clients and hear them say, afterwards, “I feel like we know ourselves better, now, than we did before we started working together on this tone-of-voice document. The benefits were much deeper and broader for our organization than the content we created.”
Cause-driven organizations tend to call TwoMindsComms.com for a consultation when they know they need to make a shift. They might not know exactly how, or what it looks like. But that’s why they call us, because they know we do this work all the time.
Perhaps your organization has been working together on some content for a while, but it is, for some reason, falling flat. It doesn’t contain the special sauce that explains the organization’s raison d’etre. The thing that used to get you out of bed in the morning is missing.
In some ways, without the allusion to middle age, because of course, both of us are in the prime of our lives!…many non-profits find themselves, once they have established and been working together for a number of years, going through a kind of “midlife crisis”. And sometimes startups go through awkward teenage years when they must pivot. It can be challenging to know how to extricate yourself from that kind of morass, or even recognize that it’s happening, until you’re in it.
We’re not here to transform your organization overnight with some magic pills or magic beans, or even a specific pre-fabricated process. But we do want to listen authentically and with an eye for quick fixes, to build trust so that together we can get you moving back in the right direction. We have found that one of the best ways to tackle this is to work on something concrete.
In our experience, organizational malaise is never as bad as it seems when you’re going through it. On the flip-side, organizational mania is also never a great idea. What you want is to feel that your challenges are meetable, that your successes have merit and value, and that you are authentically partnering with people who help you communicate about everything from a place of trust and positivity.
The Jetsons did predict self-driving cars, smart watches, robot servants and the Internet, incidentally. Like The Jetson’s predictions, we’ve still got time to make your organization’s wildest dreams a future reality! But let’s get you to a place of more certainty, first.
Ellen Mendlow and Matt Davis are the co-founders of TwoMindsComms.com