Eva Tomas Casado 1clip1 from the Long-Term Strategy Conference

find themselves short. So let's talk about some solutions. I know you've been studying this problem of communicating on a vague, uncertain future, far future, to staff for a while. Was there a moment where you sort of realized what would make a difference?

Yeah, you're completely right. I'm into this already since a while and thinking about this and trying to find solutions. That are suitable for any corporation out there. And you know, in the futures field there is already, in general in the change field, there is a lot of discussion around going deeper than the surface level. So what I mentioned already in the beginning, this idea of the iceberg out there with the problem being just the thing on the surface and then the main part of the problem is hidden below. This is the same when you want to communicate long-term visions or dreams, because each one of us, and also we as a collective, be it within a corporation, an organization, or even in a community or nation, we have certain narratives and metaphors we are running on. And I realized tremendously about that when I was working with a client. It was just an after-merger kind of thing. I was I was facilitating there, and it seemed to be just a brilliant merger. So it was very polite discussions. They were agreeing on a lot of things on paper. It was really, it seemed to go super smoothly. And then at one point, we made an exercise just to get an idea of the company culture and to communicate to the other party what the past company culture was, I asked the participants to describe their company as an animal. And while one party described their company as an elephant, meaning that they had a very long history, it was a very traditional company, they had a long memory back, a lot of experience, the other company described their organization as a tiger. And I think, you know, this showed then the real gap which still was there after the merger on paper, which usually is in all the mergers in the world. So this is where I really realized, okay, when you work with these deep narratives, these deep ideas, mostly communicated in pictures, it's often very difficult to describe that in, um, logical language. It is more, much more easy to describe that as a picture. Then, uh, you really get to the bottom of it, and that is where you can start working. And that is also where you can start the change. When you try to start it on the surface discussion, you will eventually fail. So the same goes for communicating long-term visions or or dreams, you have to understand where, what narrative your people are operating on, what metaphors they are carrying, what portion of the past they are carrying with them, what is valuable to them from the past.