Our globalized world is drifting apart. Looking at its latin roots, “to make common”, communications today struggle in creating shared language, meaning, and community. But rather than tackling the root causes of this development, many agencies and gurus promise quick fixes and replicable step-by-step guides. The result: we have facts without wisdom, social media without belonging, and brands without deeper beauty. Against that background, this series will explore how a life-affirming - a regenerative approach to communications can make sure that we see, hear, and feel each other again as part of this planet we call home.

By Jean-Philippe Steeger

Communications are everywhere.
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Communications are the web of meaning and bonding that shapes our everyday experience. Despite their crucial role for the quality of love, friendship, family, community life and jobs, societies today spend rather little consideration on how to communicate. Now that we are facing unprecedented conflicts within ourselves (mental health pandemic), between ourselves (wars, violence, discrimination), and beyond ourselves (clash of narratives), I believe that it’s time to ask what is needed for communications to become common again. 



Communications are how we see each other.

In the first part of the series, we will explore what it means to perceive each other again.  As living beings, we are more than static identities, brands, and products waiting to be “positioned strategically”, as if the world was a battlefield. There is something dynamic in us that wants to move, evolve, and belong – and how this is happening is distinctively unique. Probably, we were born to flourish rather than remaining a bud for all our lives. It’s about perceiving and embodying our ever-evolving essence across our different senses.
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Learning to see each other for our unique contribution and gift to the world is more than defining a value proposition – it is identifying each of our roles to play in activating our greater, ecosystemic potential.  If we embrace this notion of “embeddedness” we can come to a whole new view on branding. Brands as nourishing and active parts of their ecosystem become like fractals: they make the greater whole coherently visible and experienceable through every touchpoint. They make the dream they’re contributing to visible.




They are how we listen to each other.



Once we can see each other as vital parts of the ecosystems we are all part of, we can learn to listen to each other again. In today’s competitive attention economy, data-based assumptions replace listening, AI-crafted messaging overshadow meaningful engagement, and social media substitute feelings of belonging. Listening has become a reactive instrument - it contributes to cementing long-held beliefs and reduces our capacity for empathy and transformation.

Against that background, our second article will explore what it means to listen to the deeper needs and aspirations behind the surface. Since regenerative communications also includes an ecosystemic perspective, the notion of “radical listening” goes beyond needs-based approaches. “Radical listening” (listening to the roots) asks for the story behind, the traumatic narratives that connect our history, as well as the voices of nature we have suppressed through such narratives. 



They are how we trust each other.



When we can see each other and feel listened to, we can start to trust. Today’s epidemic of trust is nourished, among others, by record levels of loneliness, dishonest communications by business and government, as well as the loss of meaningful insights from media and academia. There’s a loss of trust in people, in institutions, in truth, and even in the biological reality of this planet.

The third article will dive into the factors that nourish trust in each other, in narratives that provide meaning, as well as in the solutions Mother Nature provides for our health and well-being (“radical trust”). Trust goes beyond listening – it is being able to rely on someone or something that can hold us when we need – and thus requires active engagement.



They are how we build the future together.

Finally, we will explore what it means to trust each other for building a more thriving future – by deepening community bonds, transforming places practically, and finding meaning in narratives that we share. If we are to give life to our dream to thrive together – rather than merely surviving – we must learn to communicate in ways that embrace the abundance of diversity, that sense into areas of potential, and that channel our attention where it is needed in our ecosystem. It is connecting to the worlds of wisdom beyond to shape the future we want to create – it’s not only non-violent, it is alive and kicking.

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