Today was to be the start of the jury selection process for a trial in Minneapolis: former police officer Derek Chauvin faces charges of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd. It will be delayed slightly by continuing legal considerations, but will be underway soon, causing my hometown to again become the focal point of heightened tensions around racial justice.

Today I also read about the polling site FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of support for Black Lives Matter (BLM) over the past year: disturbing. Support rose dramatically in the immediate aftermath of George’s death, then fell precipitously within three months. Did BLM undertake tactics that drove away support from those who had, perhaps for the first time, really wrestled with the concept of systemic racism? There were certainly attempts to brand the movement with ties to violence and destruction, but most of us see BLM as a very active but non-violent presence in our current cultural landscape. So, what has happened to support for that presence? I am very sad and sorry to observe that, for too many of us, the urgency of that moment has slipped away.

I found myself re-reading things written last summer in the weeks just following that tragic Memorial Day weekend: many commentators and civic leaders (including me) talked of a reckoning on racial disparities. From across the spectrum of business, education, elected officials and clergy came predictions of progress toward our ‘more perfect union.’ Pledges to be part of the changes needed were made, meetings were held…lots of meetings were held. Books are being read to try to understand lives different than our own; access to training on DEI is a demand in myriad organizations.

And yet the politics of division had a very successful season: in the final six months of 2020 there were overwhelming reminders of all that separates us, all that is at stake if we dare to take steps toward a more inclusive future.

How to proceed? The major political parties appear to be stepping very carefully into their futures – Democrats must balance their moderate and progressive wings, Republicans must determine whether ideology is still part of their DNA and if so, what that might reflect. Not even the attack on our U.S. Capitol could disrupt the hyper-polarization – after a couple days to recover from the shock of those images, efforts to demonize across party lines picked up where they had left off. While our president can – and will – be a strong role model on inclusion, we shouldn’t expect Congress to be leading the way toward that more perfect union.

As our communities and our companies become more diverse, we must do the work ourselves to also become more inclusive and share a real commitment to achieving equity. For me, it starts with a deeply held conviction that our futures are inextricably bound: we share a planet with extraordinary – but not infinite – capacity to regenerate; we share the potential of human imagination and adaptation; we share yearnings for safety, security and self-expression. We have a shared fate.

We’ve allowed ourselves (and been led) to believe that if someone is winning, then I must be losing.  If one family is getting ahead, it must be coming at the expense of mine. People pay lip service to ‘win/win solutions,’ but also reserve their rights to take home all the chips if it turns out that is possible, whether in a partisan decision or a financial transaction. I have written before about Americans’ curious mix of pride in our collective accomplishments alongside a too-common unwillingness to recognize who contributed what to the cause. On that point, I have reflected over and over again on something I saw on the news last year: Doc Rivers, the head coach of the Philadelphia ‘76ers shared his raw feelings. I’ll paraphrase here, because I’m working from memory: “Black Americans are the most patriotic people of all – we love this country even though it doesn’t love us back.” It was a powerful way to put systemic racism into focus for me.

Our shared fate rests on building a strong economy, fueled by strong, resilient people. To achieve all that we are capable of will require that we confront and address the very vulnerable foundation upon which we stand: our people have not all been allowed to play the game of life with the same set of rules. Our history has not been inclusive – and so we have deeply-engrained inequities that are going to be very challenging to overcome. But we know our history and cannot responsibly pretend that we don’t know its consequences. The goal of the work ahead should not be about creating blame or guilt. Our goal must be creating the strongest future possible. Our shared fate.

It’s no secret that the events of 2020 took an unprecedented toll on society; but for those in the public relations community, communications have never been more important.

Tunheim is a leading member of IPREX, the $420m network of independent communications firms with 1,100 professionals in 100 offices around the world.

IPREX recently released insights about the lessons of 2020 and implications for 2021 for the independent PR and marketing industry, based on inputs from its offices around the world. Despite – or maybe because of – its many challenges, 2020 heightened the need for communications services.

Given the disruption of the global market, the flexibility of the IPREX model is positioned well for what brands and organizations need, as opposed to highly centralized approaches to communications.

Taken from answers from 26 agency owners around the world, IPREX offers important insights on communicating in 2021.

Firms with deep experience supporting hospitality, tourism, and travel suffered alongside their clients, as the impacts of the pandemic brought much of that sector to an abrupt halt.

While these firms continue to recover, many IPREX firms also expect to be impacted by the emergence of new or changed trade dynamics, from the aftermath of Brexit for the E.U. and the U.K., to the next generation of China-U.S. relations under a Biden administration, among a myriad of others.

While each country, region and metropolitan area around the world shaped its response to the challenges of COVID-19 based on local realities, the capacity to share experiences, stories and data created a strong awareness of the value of global connections.

Alliance efforts in the future won’t be a return to past practices or models, but new forms of global cooperation, collaboration and partnership with independent firms on-the-ground in key markets operating with the benefits of shared talent, technology and best practices.

Both the pandemic and the accelerating polarization of societies around the world have contributed to the fracturing of traditional sources of public information, undermining citizens’ confidence in official messaging from government and private brands.

IPREX firms have seen an increased demand related to developing strategies to reinforce the credibility of those institutional players. This need isn’t likely to abate anytime soon.

Specifically, IPREX firms report a rise in the increasing sophistication required in using digital and social media tools for the delivery of effective messaging.

Many corporations supported by IPREX firms are engaging in unprecedented efforts to ensure they are meeting their obligations to all their stakeholders: customers, employees, communities and investors.

Corporate social responsibility efforts are moving into new levels of investment and sophistication.  IPREX firms report clients are increasingly coming to their agencies for environmental, social and governance (ESG), sustainability and purpose-driven work.

Set off by events in the U.S. (in particular, the death of George Floyd), but reverberating around the globe, issues of racial and ethnic equity have now been raised to a level of awareness such that brands and organizations cannot sit on the sidelines.

Authentic and inclusive voices, as well as clear intentionality, are now reputational commitments being made by IPREX itself, as well as by the clients IPREX agencies serve through their public relations and strategic communications services.

Is your organization thinking through complex stakeholder communications? Let Tunheim help you think it through. Contact us to get started.

Like many companies, Tunheim has spent countless hours over the years formulating and declaring a core set of values – the cultural cornerstones – that have served as the basis for our collective, as well as individual, behavior for doing the work we do every day. Well intended and meaningful, the values we set forth have served us well and very much influenced who the team is today.

But like a lot of companies, we’ve had challenges over the years in ensuring that our employees felt connected to our values day in and day out. The changing dynamic of our work assignments, the need to grow and expand our services as well as the influx of young, smart, aggressive professionals forced us to regularly reexamine and communicate our company values so that they didn’t become meaningless words written on a piece of paper.

Then 2020 happened. The pandemic not only forced us to change how we do our work, but the virtual workplace altered the cultural dynamics our values sought to establish. More importantly though, the murder of George Floyd triggered a cultural reckoning for our community at large and gave us the opportunity to view our company values through a different lens; one that had us examine our own beliefs and behaviors and asking whether our company needed to redefine our core values to explicitly reflect how we intend to operate and behave consistently with awakened cultural awareness.

So, the management team went to work, listening to and learning from our DEI team. We asked for input from our colleagues through surveys and discussions and had thoughtful conversations amongst ourselves to establish a set of company values that reflect a shared sense of commitment to our work, our communities, our diversity and to each other. We start with a simple declaration, We Value;

What we do is connected to the outcomes in our community and around the world. We are committed to moving the world forward.

We value equity, inclusion, and dignity for all. We strive for excellence and recognize that our differences make us stronger. We respect and seek out inclusion of differences, realizing we can learn from each other. We insist on a culture of respect and recognize that words and actions matter.

Our clients are the lifeblood for why we exist. We seek to be part of their team. Their goals become our own. We celebrate their success and help them advance their mission.

We believe that no one individual is as good as our collective best. We learn from and listen to each other’s ideas, which improves our product. Together we are stronger; better.

Each person is of equal value. We will treat each person as they want to be treated.

In the ensuing weeks and months, members of our team will be sharing their individual connection to our values and what is means to them on the Tunheim social media platforms. This work is intended to intentionally connect our behaviors to the work we do. Our values reflect who we are as a company and at Tunheim we are a company deeply committed to improving the world in which we live and work.

I believe most of us are experiencing some form of the anxiety that exists when so many aspects of our lives have undergone changes and we are not yet comfortable with the consequences of those shifts. We have navigated through the terror of the early stages of the pandemic, moved into the painstakingly slow period of determining how to defeat the pandemic, suspended our normal business instincts as the economic toll continues to wreck its way and upend assumptions about timelines and returns to ‘normal.’

But we can only suspend our inclinations to move ahead for so long: whether you are an industry trailblazer or a self-confident young professional, we are past time of thinking it prudent to wait and see how things evolve. There are risks in moving too fast, of course – but risks in not moving fast enough, as well. How to resolve those tensions?

As a communications consulting firm, we are busy developing plans to help our clients advance their narratives and their objectives, taking into account as effectively as we can how context and appetites have shifted. Monitoring both perceptions and impacts – and being prepared to nimbly adapt and modify plans – seems more important than ever, so we have incorporated those disciplines deeper into our work with increased sophistication.

But personally I can’t seem to shake the sensation that I am on the cusp of…something. And having just past my birthday, referencing ‘the cusp’ reminded me that I am one of those people born IN the cusp of two astrological signs – Aquarius and Pisces, or the Cusp of Sensitivity. While I confess that my awareness of things astrological is only superficial (I usually read the horoscope column on Sundays), I am open these days to new possibilities for inspiration, as we all should be, I am thinking.

So I have done a bit of research related to being ‘on the cusp.’ In western astrology, there are twelve signs representing the dozen constellations that our sun travels through over twelve months. The cusps are those times when the sun is transitioning from passage through one constellation to the next.  Makes sense. The precision of those passages and how they relate to our calendar or to our personalities are, of course, the stuff of tarot card readers and mystics. I’m not going to go too far down that path. But I confess that I am intrigued about the dynamics of being caught between two constellations…or two paradigms…or perhaps the transition from pre-COVID 19 to post-COVID 19.

I’m less interested in how my personality traits map across the transition (FYI, my sign suggests I am creative, but prone to a lack of organization: the words ‘offbeat and eccentric’ were used). More important, I think, is the perception that energy really is moving around us differently in this time of being ‘on the cusp.’ I do strongly believe that energy is an important part of our context collectively: Is there energy in the marketplace for innovation (i.e. increased risk-taking)? Is there energy in communities for recovering bi-partisan efforts? Is there sufficient energy being expended on solutions to the economic equity challenges laid bare by the pandemic?

And energy is also, of course, a life-giving resource that each of us has personal responsibility to manage: where is my energy going? Is my energy positively oriented or stuck in negative orientations that I’ve got to reverse?

We’re in this cusp of something together. What’s your sign?

While myriad parts of the world are grappling with snowstorms and icy roads or heavy rains and flooding, and all the misery that comes with those challenges, I am sitting in Minnesota – famous for such weather disruptions – experiencing a different, surprisingly helpful reality: it has been really, really (really!) cold here for a span of almost ten days. But the science of such a cold snap is that it is almost always sunny (and with the snow already on the ground, blindingly so).

After the roiling, frustrating, confusing navigation of the past twelve months, there is something very clarifying about a run of crystal-clear days, even ones so cold that being outside for more than a couple minutes is dangerous. Everything comes to a stop – life seems literally frozen in place. And that enables a new kind of reflection: you can SEE things differently, like focusing on a still shot in the middle of a hectic video. And it seems important to take advantage of such an opportunity since you know that a warm-up is coming, people will be busy moving around again, traffic and activity will resume shortly. The drama will restart in a minute. But for these few days, I’m focused on this moment of reflection, fine-tuning my perceptions of what we’ve all been through, with hopes that new clarity better prepares me as a communications counselor – and just as a person ­­– in the months ahead.

We have, as a society, made a couple important pivots in the past month. On the political front, the second impeachment of Donald Trump was a painful review: for supporters of the former president, unfair political theater; for his detractors, a comeuppance long overdue; for all who value democracy, a very sad reflection of how much work we have ahead of us to bring the American people together in the future. Though more than half of the U.S. Senate voted to convict him, he reportedly celebrated his ‘win’ with friends and family. Preliminary moves to impact the 2022 elections are already underway. We are moving past the Trump administration – although in what direction we will move remains to be seen.

On the pandemic front, we have more challenges ahead, as well, but it feels like we are finally on offense: the pace of vaccination production is accelerating, plans for inoculations seem to be clarifying.  While the pressure to ‘open the economy’ continues to be a call from some, the reality is that most of the economy is open, adapting in ways both subtle and dramatic to what COVID-19 has taught us about risk, priorities, opportunities, sacrifice and loss. The scale and scope of things that are forever changed will take years to assess, even as each of us begins to move into that future. Without clear vision of what is coming, we are making plans, with hopes that our forecasts are at least close to the reality that will unfold.

It must be acknowledged – in the ways we treat each other in the weeks and months to come, but also in the governmental measures aimed at recovery and stimulus that we should support – that this pandemic and the economic strife it created were not ‘equal opportunity’ challenges. The impacts of the past year fell unevenly on some families, organizations and communities, mostly through no fault of their own. Ensuring that our collective recovery is equitable and recognizes those uneven impacts must be a shared objective, as challenging as that may be to accomplish.

And then there is synchronicity: Even as I’ve been writing this morning, I received the wonderful surprise of a bouquet of soon-to-bloom tulips for my upcoming birthday. Tulips, the surest sign of emerging life:  whatever other greenery is popping up in a spring garden, they are almost always the first signs of bold colors, a harbinger of the warmth and growth to come. We are many weeks away from tulips rising in my backyard here, but I’ll be using this beautiful bouquet to remind myself that the bulbs are out there, hidden in the frozen soil under a blanket of snow. New vibrant life is out there – I just need to plan for the tending of my garden. Grow Where You Are Planted.