Day 1: Crash Course
I’ve been through this cycle several times at TNC: I feel totally lost, I gradually gain context, and then eventually I become confident in my new knowledge - only to uncover yet another layer of information that I previously knew nothing about, and start the whole process over again. Well, this week, it looks like I’m once more starting one of these cycles. Today we had a crash course in our overall team strategy, the latest policy and market trends in several priority areas (China, Europe, finance, soy - you name it!) as well as updates on interim strategies and goals for our different priority biomes including the Amazon, the Cerrado, and the Gran Chaco. If that scope doesn’t seem big enough to you, don’t worry — each presentation was full of statistics, stories, and strategy to unpack. My brain is buzzing with ideas and my notebook is a mess of scribbles and shorthand I can’t really read. What a day!
But rather than find this level of complexity daunting, I find it totally exhilarating. All of these different strategies and situations have real communications challenges that feel like a complicated puzzle I can’t wait to dig into. It’s not that there’s a lack of work to do, but rather that there’s SO MUCH to do and so many different areas to explore that prioritization is going to be a challenge. I want to help everybody as much as I can! Sometimes when faced with challenges of this size I get really overwhelmed, but not right now — instead, I’m feeling motivated. It helps that I really trust my colleagues to help guide me through this process as I start to put the pieces together, and additional capacity from the global comms team and consultants.
I know I’m supposed to be the communications expert here, but I still feel that I have too much to learn to be helpful in some of these conversations. For example, I was asked by a colleague today what I feel the key messages should be from producer countries to China re: EU deforestation regulations. I have some ideas, but the situation is so complex and my insight into the nuances is so limited that I couldn’t even begin to make a recommendation that I feel comfortable with. The last thing I want to do is speak out of ignorance and expose TNC to risk at the global level. I have to accept that I am still learning and feel comfortable saying so - nobody is expecting me to be an expert right away except for me.
Despite the firehose-esque pace of information I’m absorbing, it’s wonderful to meet all of my colleagues in person for the first time. I have been working really closely the Brazil team over the last few weeks, and their kindness and support has honestly been the best part of this job so far. I was thrilled to discover that the team is just as lovely and warm in person as they are over Microsoft Teams. I’m looking forward to developing similar relationships with the other business units - I had lunch with my colleagues from China, a region I know almost nothing about, and really enjoyed getting to know them and their work. Tomorrow I will be giving my presentation about global communications, and I hope that will open up new avenues for collaboration with me and the other team members I haven’t had a chance to get to know yet.
With all the work happening today, I haven’t had a chance to explore Cuiabá at all! So my only experiences in Brazil have been in the hotel so far. Some observations: they take cake really seriously here. Cake with all your meals and during coffee breaks as well. I could get used to that! Tomorrow the team is going out for a happy hour, so I will have a chance to poke around Cuiabá.
Overall, I feel enormously grateful to be here. Throughout my career in environmental communications, I’ve rarely felt this connected to the work. Intellectually I understand the impact that communications have, or else I wouldn’t be in this field, but it’s hard to feel that impact concretely when you are writing tweets for an event, for example. I still write tweets for events occasionally, but I also get to talk about communications strategy as a campaign tactic to achieve concrete conservation outcomes all around the world. That’s why I got into this work - because I believe communications are a powerful tool to push for change alongside other levers of change. Getting a chance to do that, alongside people from around the world, working on this complex global problem together — not to be cheesy, but it really feels like a dream come true.
