The Human Side of Risk

Natural disasters, including COVID-19, are coming at you, at all of us, so rapidly and disruptively that the time has come to bring all your people in — internal and external stakeholders alike — so they may get ready on time and become far more engaged in your organization's adaptation efforts, particularly given the absence of sufficient reliable data that can factor in all the unpredictables.

You're already doing that with sustainability, engaging your internal and external audiences with your actions to save the planet. Adaptation, though, is remarkably different, because human bias leads most people to avoid facing what is now an inevitable temperature rise and the ensuing consequences. You, though, can no longer afford indifference. The stakes are too high. So your new challenge is to extend your sustainability leadership into adaptability leadership and lead your people and the world in a new, exciting direction.

Our founder, Alexander Díaz, spent the better part of two years in an exhaustive R&D process to unlock the best way to embed resilience strategies, messaging, creative and culture change to your communication and transformation. At COMMON Future, we have built on that exclusive knowledge with the best talent and most cutting-edge solutions in the market, the very first firm in the world to develop this expertise. We bring it to you now — with Deep Adaptability.

Communications

If you're a city, you know the value of communications to mobilize citizens and move policies and laws. If you're a company, simply add adaptability to your existing sustainability platform, for the very same reasons you communicate your greenness to begin with:

• Higher mission alignment and action/innovation engagement by executives, employees and suppliers.
• Greater loyalty from customers and the higher sales that come with it.
• Collaboration and license to operate from communities and regulators.
• Reputation enhancement from news media coverage and earned social media.
• Easier access to capital, particularly the $35 trillion ESG market.
• More!

The message there is: "We're sustainable because we care." Here, it is: "We're adaptive because our product is important to your resilience and we want to make sure you have access to it no matter the extreme climate that comes our way. We will remain standing tall, operating — for YOU."

To that end, we offer five solutions:

• Issue Advisory, the classic role of a public relations and communications counselor, in our case focused on the complexities and nuances of managing climate adaptation and resilience. It includes public affairs, reputation management, and initiative leadership.
• Adaptability Reports, same as your CSR Report and Website, or you may hire us to add an adaptation section to your existing sustainability platform.
• BrandSCALE, marketing campaigns for your adaptation brands, or the products (exactly like your sustainable brands) you bring to market and look to scale: B2C, B2B or B2G, product or reputation, sales or thought leadership campaigns, anywhere on the planet.
• CSR Adapt, where we co-create initiatives to help vulnerable people, communities and businesses respond and adapt to natural disasters, thereby creating or building your adaptation CSR portfolio.
• Degrees of Content, original productions for those who respond better to film, music, theater, dance, photography, books and other creative and performing arts, than to traditional content.

Culture

As you know, persuading people to adopt sustainable behaviors is a craft that takes more than communications. For the shift to deepen, it takes culture change. And so it is with resilience behaviors, but far more so, because as we say in Our Thinking, the future will be dramatically different from the past they know and the present they master. Adaptation takes an even deeper, more sustained transformation.

We help you achieve it with FIVE TASKS, an exclusive strategy that Alex explains in this column and this one, and that COMMON Future delivers with an integrated, five-step offering outlined in the deck below, summarized here:

• Future Picture, where our creatives build video content to help your people see the future as it will unfold.
• Creative Hub. Speaking of our creatives, they're in offices world wide and are wired for culture change.
• Engagement Hub, aligned with the strategies you know well to secure high engagement by everyone everywhere in your organization.
• Organizational Agility, because of all the engagement outcomes you seek, this is perhaps the most mission-critical to ensure that your company always adapts deeply to extreme events.
• Trigger Events Hub. Behavior science tells us people overcome certain biases when hit by or exposed to events — in this case, extreme climate events that happen anywhere on the planet.

For all of the above, we draw on collaborators from the incomparable talent pool and adaptation expertise of two partner organizations: the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP) and the Deep Adaptation Forum. For the creative, content, full-service agency side, we call on our teammate-colleagues across the COMMON global social-enterprise network (the agencies in the group call ourselves the COMMON Rebels).