The ground is shifting. Wars are multiplying. Climate change is reaching a tipping point. The energy and security architecture Europe relied on is being dismantled faster than it can be replaced.

How do we reduce our dependence on oil and gas and build what comes next? How do we build a digital infrastructure sovereign enough to keep us competitive in an AI-driven global economy? These questions preoccupy business, politics, and public administration leaders alike.

It is in this context that I find myself returning to what my mentor Hellmut Geißner still has to teach us today. He would have turned 100 this March. He was a speech communication scholar who placed rhetoric at the centre of his discipline — with "speaking with one another to make something a genuinely shared concern" as its core mission. Overcoming the propagandistic pedagogy of the Nazi era was his drive and motivation to place dialogic rhetoric above the rhetoric of the podium. In this, he drew on Magda Kelber, a Quaker-inspired adult educator, and founded the Institut für Rhetorik und Methodik in der politischen Bildung at the Europäische Akademie Otzenhausen in 1968.

This post is an attempt to take his perspective seriously under conditions he could not have anticipated.

Shifting Ground

The assumptions that once gave strategy its footing are eroding, not gradually, but abruptly. Geopolitical disruption, erratic policy shifts, and the dismantling of institutional certainties that organizations have relied on for decades are making the ground genuinely unstable. What could previously be treated as a relatively stable environment for planning now shifts in ways that cannot be anticipated with confidence. Strategy, in this sense, is no longer anchored in conditions that can be reliably assumed.

In the current state of the world, strategy itself is losing its footing, as the conditions it presupposes no longer hold and those on which it depends continue to shift.

The Coordination Challenge

The immediate consequence is not simply uncertainty, but a growing pressure to coordinate responses across domains that have traditionally operated with relative autonomy. Questions of energy, defense, and technological sovereignty, for example, cannot be addressed within a single institutional or national frame, yet the actors involved do not share the same criteria for what constitutes a valid course of action. What appears as a shared problem fragments in practice into different, equally legitimate perspectives, shaped by financial constraints, scientific evidence, regulatory requirements, and political considerations. Bringing these perspectives together does not automatically produce alignment, but often reveals how little they can be reconciled within existing structures.

But how is coordination to be achieved when political, economic, and institutional systems follow different logics that cannot simply be integrated?

A Structural Condition

Using a systems-theoretical perspective inspired by Niklas Luhmann allows us to understand why commonly used concepts such as "VUCA" miss the point. Labels like these describe the experience of instability, but not the structural condition that produces it. What we are facing geopolitically and economically are not simply more volatile environments, but situations in which fundamentally different systems must interact more closely than before, without sharing a common logic. Political, economic, scientific, and regulatory domains each generate their own valid perspectives, yet none can be reduced to another or integrated into a single framework. What appears as increasing complexity is therefore not simply a matter of more variables, but of fundamentally different orientations that must be coordinated without being reduced to a single frame.

This is because what appears as overload is not primarily a question of quantity, but of structure, as different systems generate their own valid perspectives that cannot be reduced to one another (Nassehi, 2021 and 2024).

What Speaking with One Another Actually Does

There is a persistent and convenient fiction in organizational life that communication is essentially a transmission process: leaders think, decide, and then communicate, and quality is measured by how faithfully the message arrives.

This model is not merely incomplete; it obscures what communication actually does, because it treats meaning as something that can be defined in advance and then simply conveyed, rather than something that emerges within the conversation.

A different view starts from the assumption that speaking is always a form of acting, and that what leaders say does not reflect a pre-existing reality but participates in shaping the forms of relation that become possible between people (Geißner, 1988).

In practice, this means that the decisive capacity is not the ability to speak clearly from one's own position, but to recognize that one's own position is always partial. A CFO reasoning in financial terms, a scientist in evidence, a regulator in compliance, each is right within their own logic. The challenge is not to override these differences, but to remain genuinely open to the possibility that one's own perspective may be insufficient, that the other may see something one cannot, and that the conversation itself may need to go somewhere that cannot be predetermined.

Re-spons(e)ability is not a competency. It is the practice of staying in contact with what one does not yet know.

Leadership responsibility today lies in recognizing that communication does not merely reflect perceived reality, but produces the forms of cooperation that shape our future.

Leadership as Role Work

Under the current disruption of a world order we once knew, leaders in conversation with each other are where decision making and cooperation can still become possible. Leadership can therefore no longer rely on predefined roles, stable frameworks, or established procedures to secure alignment.

What this requires is not primarily a cognitive skill, though it is that too. It is the ability to hold one's own role with enough distance to recognize that other roles carry equally legitimate claims – and that agreeing to a solution which costs something in one's own domain, in service of a larger whole, is not weakness but the very definition of leadership responsibility today.

We occupy multiple roles simultaneously – as functional leaders, as members of an executive team, as citizens, as human beings. The ability to balance these roles, to know which one needs to step forward and which one needs to step back in a given moment, is what makes situational attunement possible. And it is precisely this capacity – not technique, not charisma, not decisiveness – that determines whether genuinely new solutions can emerge from conversations where the contradictions are real, the stakes are high, and the outcome cannot be prescribed in advance.

Under these conditions, communication is not a tool leaders can apply, but the practice through which roles are shifted, boundaries are crossed, and creative forms of cooperation emerge that cannot be prescribed.

What Hellmut Geißner taught me — and many of his students — was not a method. It was a way of thinking about human communication as the site where respons(e)ability becomes real — where Ver-Antworten, in the full etymological sense of that word, takes place.

Related Posts on LinkedIn

→ LinkedIn Post 1: Hellmut Geissner – Centenary: "Sinn ist nicht. Sinn geschieht."

→ LinkedIn Post 2 on Hellmut Geissner – Centenary: "Es gibt kein rollenloses Sprechen."

A selection of a few of his most important publications

Geißner, H. (1986a). Rhetorik und politische Bildung (3rd ed.). Frankfurt a. M.: Scriptor.

Geißner, H. (1986b). Sprecherziehung: Didaktik und Methodik der mündlichen Kommunikation (2nd ed.). Frankfurt a. M.: Scriptor.

Geißner, H. (1988). Sprechwissenschaft: Theorie der mündlichen Kommunikation (2nd ed.). Frankfurt a. M.: Scriptor.

Geißner, H. (1991). Vor Lautsprecher und Mattscheibe. St. Ingbert: W.J. Röhrig.

Geißner, H. (1996a). Gesprächsrhetorik. In G. Ueding (Ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (Vol. 3, pp. 953–964). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.

Geißner, H. (1996b). Fünfsatz. In G. Ueding (Ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (Vol. 3, pp. 484–487). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.