What do we do when there’s a big, upsetting thing that nobody wants to talk about?

People have different approaches, but for much of the corporate world, the answer is often to tiptoe around it and pretend it’s not happening.

Here are some examples of elephants in a series of questions:

• Is social media robbing young people of healthy childhoods?

• If companies are rolling back or expunging their ESG values, did they really mean them in the first place?

• Has tribalism revealed itself as the dominant human state, over collectivism?

• Did printing so much money in 2008/9 destabilise all our futures in the longer term?

• Is it helpful to present a united front, or a multiplicity of views?

• What is leadership right now?

• How can you have disagreements in organisations without fissures resulting?

Hollywood has its elephants too. It doesn’t seem to know how to deal with COVID, with so few of its movies set during the biggest health crisis in living memory. Why? A few years on, it’s perhaps time to revisit the COVID shift and ask what was temporary, and what was more permanent.

Business is wrestling with elephants. The return to the office is not a done deal. Bosses, managers and frontline workers have seen firsthand that much of work can be done in other ways. No matter how determined the return-to-work policy, those people cannot ‘unsee’ what they have seen, so there can be no going back to the previous status quo.

But where do we go from here?

We’re not saying that at Collective Content we know exactly how to deal with all elephants, all of the time. Saying nothing though, however understandable, is doomed to get you exactly nowhere with customers and markets. And for those with something fresh or insightful to say, an opportunity knocks.

Credit to Camilla Cavendish, whose recent article in the Financial Times prompted this piece.

Til next time,

Collective Content

We like this

• Charlie Colenutt – Is This Working?: The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them

• Kirsten Bradley – The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook

• James Graham – Dear England

• Ryan Coogler – Sinners

Word of the Moment: Woman

Continuing with the theme of addressing big issues, the UK Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers ruled that in the Equality Act, ‘sex’ means biological sex. This means that, under the Act a ‘woman’ is a biological woman or girl (a person born female) and a ‘man’ is a biological man or boy (a person born male).