Welcome 2022. Here’s to trying harder!

From shared truths (and lies) to shared solutions

Written by Natalia Smalyuk

January is still a little bit like a clean canvass. It’s a wonderful feeling, when there’s so much potential, and a chance to create something valuable in the world. Holiday wishes still echo in the ears: “take what you need into the new year; leave what you don’t behind.” During the break, it seemed like a good idea to look at 2021 headlines and take stock. The result is my personal take at what struck a chord (and should enter the new year) or pinched a nerve (and should stay behind).

Without further ado, I’ll cut to the chase, starting where it hurts the most: the crisis in Belarus (for those who don’t know me, I am a Belarusian Canadian). We want to leave that behind for sure. Friends ask: “Belarus hasn’t been in the news. Are things better?” Regretfully, no. Worse. We just don’t hear about it in the media. The news that “the situation continues to deteriorate” is, sorry to say, old news. Actually, no news at all. “Continues” is a misnomer. “Frozen conflict,” “less hope,” “more horror” – this stuff is simply too soft to cobble anything newsworthy out of it.

But when the Ryanair plane flying from Greece to Lithuania is intercepted by the Belarusian authorities over a purported bomb threat – well, that’s a different story. In media training, I often say: A “plane landed” is not news. A “plane crashed” is. What about a plane highjacked by the state to arrest a dissident journalist onboard? My media training colleagues, take note: that takes newsworthiness to a whole new level. That’s when, as a Belarusian Canadian Alliance (BCA) media advisor, I get calls from producers on the weekend. And that’s where the spokesperson and head of the BCA Alena Liavonchanka gets to do interviews all week long on what’s happening on the ground.

All of a sudden, the spotlight is on the “soft” reality of a dictatorship where an influential online journalist is a wanted “criminal.” He’s snagged mid-air in what a global affairs analyst and former spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Michael Bociurkiw calls a “gut punch to the rules-based order created after the Second World War.”

Then come the Tokyo Olympics. One of the most memorable images from this beautiful show of perseverance in the face of a global pandemic is a Belarusian sprinter, Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, surrounded by the Tokyo police inside the Haneda international airport. The officers are protecting the 24-year-old athlete from the Belarusian officials forcing her to fly back to Minsk ahead of schedule because she criticized her coaches online.

Why did Tsimanouskaya have to defect? According to the athlete, she realized she was in danger after getting word from her grandmother that Belarusian state TV was casting her as mentally ill. Our grandparents who’ve lived through the Stalin times know: if your face is on the screen, you are in trouble.

If Goebbels-style propaganda could stay in the past, our planet would be indescribably more wonderful.   

And then there’s a migrant crisis on the borders of the European Union neighbours of Belarus – Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. The plight of the refugees is broadcast into homes and phones across the world. Distraught men, women and children sleep on the ground and wander in the forest without food, water or medications. Doctors and lawyers watch from the sidelines, not allowed to enter the twilight zone in between borders. This tragedy is exacerbated by what the New Yorker calls “the largest humanitarian crisis” – the turmoil in Afghanistan, which brings yet more refugees.

Coincidentally, Kabul falls when Canada launches a federal election campaign where global engagement is not on the agenda. Why? Voters sure have questions that fall into the foreign policy arena. Are events in Afghanistan a sign that the U.S. is withdrawing from international hot spots? How will the world go about protecting its most vulnerable and addressing its burning issues? And where is Canada in all of this?

Our country is undeniably impacted by all manner of global crises. No need to look far. Take the pandemic, for example. Without effective international collaboration, we can’t protect Canadians from COVID-19 and its variants. And then there is, of course, a host of other issues. Return of protectionism.  Strained supply chains. Nuclear proliferation. And, yes, the big one – climate change. We can never be sure another train isn’t heading our way.

On the opening day of the first in-person U.N. meeting of world leaders since the COVID-19 pandemic, speakers decry the divisions that prevented united global action on the pandemic and climate change. “We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes,” says the U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, warning that the world is “on the edge of an abyss.”

In 2021, extreme rainfall and flooding struck Western Europe and central China, India and the Philippines. In British Columbia, unprecedented summer heat caused the most widespread drought in our recorded history. In the fall, the same areas came underwater in severe flooding. Climate scientists warn such events will become more frequent.

In her powerful COP26 speech, the prime minister of Barbados Mia Amor Mottley said a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperature would be a "death sentence" for island and coastal communities. “Try harder,” she pleaded.

But since the catastrophe will not hit immediately, it’s not clear if the countries less exposed to the risks will get behind. Trying harder means unprecedented international collaboration to achieve net-zero, where the “returns” on green investment might not be seen for decades, but the costs are obvious now.

Looking at the headlines, one might conclude that, instead of trying harder to tackle their shared problems, nations and political systems are busy competing with each other. Authoritarianism against democracy is the battle of our times. Sadly, it doesn’t look like democracy is winning. According to Freedom House, an NGO that monitors democratic governments around the world, freedom has been in decline around the world for 15 years.

Here’s another image from the news. Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko hugging on Putin’s yacht amid the international uproar over the hijacking of the Ryanair flight. A few miles away from the prisons and detention centres where political opponents are kept in inhumane conditions. This image is an epitome of everything that is wrong with authoritarian states.

They don’t care about their “stakeholders,” be it their own electorate or the international community. Denial is their default crisis management strategy. They use media to smear their opponents as foreign agents, traitors or mentally ill. And if anyone dares to hold them accountable, they lash out with the same old messages. Foreign interference! Double standards!

This comparison from satirist Sacha Baron Cohen caught my eye: democracy depends on shared truths; autocracy depends on shared lies.

Shared lies across the globe sound surprisingly alike, from Myanmar to Belarus to Russia to Kazakhstan to China and numerous other states. Cast protesters as terrorists. Sentence opponents to years in prison on bogus charges. Shut down independent media. And, of course, blame it all on “foreign actors.” It’s the same playbook, over and over again. And, in this day and age, it’s more and more confusing.

But let’s switch the topic to something closer to home. 2021 may have been the year we realized shared lies are not just a far-away phenomenon. In an Ottawa Citizen opinion piece, Edward Greenspon, president and chief executive of the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum, argued that democratization used against democracy is one of the central paradoxes of our times: “The Internet has become a propagandist’s dream, loosening the grip on reality of tens of millions of people.”

We all heard shared lies. COVID-19 is created by Bill Gates. Or George Soros. Or the pharmaceutical companies. Vaccines are implanting chips. Someone must benefit from this, right?  

Misinformation thrives when people feel isolated, when a sense of social identity and belonging is weakened by remote work, when offices lose their role as the centres of connection that bring organizations together. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube inadvertently fill in the vacuum with extreme, negative views (anger sells!). And when we come back to the real world, vaccination believers crusade against anti-vaxxers at dinner tables.

O.k. That’s A LOT to leave behind. But we are in the beginning of a new year, and what matters is the future. The white canvass in front of us can still be filled with the goodness to bring along into 2022. And even if this is nothing but wishful thinking, here are some wishes for the new year.

• Think beyond boundaries and borders.  

We’ll ultimately emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, and governments will set up task forces, commissions, inquiries and post-mortems to review pandemic performance. The challenge is to go beyond assigning blame and look at all the factors that have kept the world from effective collaboration. Nations may live oceans apart. Provinces may play by their own rules. Disciplines may reside in different faculties and departments. Decision-makers may be dispersed across geographies and jurisdictions. But, to turn painful COVID-19 lessons into the silver linings of resilience, the world must act as one species. We have one home. Our precious planet.

• Bring the public along.

Part of “trying harder” is bringing stakeholders along. That means communicating where they are – not only in industry forums, government summits or peer-reviewed scientific journals, but in the news and, yes, on social media. While momentum on climate action is growing among governments and business leaders, publics are skeptical that anything is going to change. According to Environics Research, four in five Canadians don’t believe our country is on track to achieve net-zero by 2050. To gain support for massive changes needed to achieve ambitious targets, in the form of government policies, technological innovations and business transformations, stakeholders must be engaged in ways that inspire and motivate action, not confuse and overwhelm.

• Consult with stakeholders.

It’s easy to put the blame for humanity’s many woes, from social polarization to “shared lies,” on someone’s shoulders. Facebook, for example. Similar to other technology and social media giants, it’s guided by market logic, and a deep commitment to democracy and human rights is a lofty goal not manifested in its actions. But hate speech, election manipulation and conspiracy theories are also an outcome of the failure of policy-makers to act, not react before companies like Facebook embedded in the social fabric. Had stakeholders been consulted early on, they could have spotted at least some blind spots – and could have come up with some solutions.

• Invest in quality journalism.

In the New York Times op-ed, Kara Swisher talked about Facebook as “the parental equivalent of giving a knife to a toddler and hoping for the best.” In 2021, headlines zoomed in on the need to invest in social media (and regulatory frameworks) to keep them from harming their followers. But what about also investing in quality journalism? While extreme positions thrive on social networks, journalist voices could bring more balance and depth desperately needed in public discourse, tipping the scales from “shared lies” to “shared truths,” – had they not been silenced by that same market logic resulting in media consolidation, closures and layoffs.

• Plan ahead.

Hopefully, 2022 is the time to start looking forward to the future instead of grinding through the pandemic. Playing the long game seems counterintuitive in the “one foot in front of the other” reality. How can one look ahead when even the greatest plans become obsolete in a few months, if not weeks or days? During the pandemic, organizations have put a lot on hold. Short-term, crisis-bound thinking became the norm. But uncertainty shouldn’t bottleneck decisions that need to be made today to shape a better tomorrow. Strategic plans designed as flexible roadmaps will help anticipate different scenarios, learn and adapt, whatever curveballs are thrown our way.

So, that’s also A LOT to take along with us into the new year. The possibilities are exciting, and it’s a great time to be a communicator. We can use our resources to spread shared truths instead of lies, build trust instead of undermining opponents, and voice hope instead of amplifying fear.

Happy New Year. Lets crush it. And here’s to trying harder!

NBAU Consulting offers strategic planning and crisis leadership consulting, coaching and training to guide organizations through change and adversity and build resilience.