A metamodern manifesto for responsible persuasion in the polycrisis. Ana Adi & Thomas Stoeckle, 2026. Five tensions, six refusals, four accountabilities, nine tenets — click any of them. They open one at a time, which is rather the point.
Crises no longer take turns. Climate, conflict, inequality, the unknown consequences of artificial intelligence: they intersect and compound, in what Adam Tooze calls the polycrisis. At its heart sits radical uncertainty — where the future refuses to hold still long enough to be planned against. This is the condition in which every act of communication now occurs.
Problems come in kinds, and the kinds matter. Tame problems yield to standard operating procedures, SMART objectives and KPIs — this is where most day-to-day practice legitimately lives. Wicked problems are complex, interdependent, open-ended; they resist definition and have no single right answer. Super wicked problems — like climate change and pandemics — exceed even our organizational structures.
The category error is applying tame means to wicked problems. Not only is this doomed to fail, it creates a false sense of security that makes things worse.
This manifesto is a reorientation: toward responsibility and accountability at every level of the work, toward the persuasion and AI literacies the work now demands, and toward an honest account of what this field is for in society. It begins where honest reorientation must: with the tensions that cannot be resolved, only held.
Not problems awaiting frameworks — the permanent conditions of responsible practice. A practice that claims to have resolved them has stopped paying attention.
Practitioners serve clients, bosses, organizations: that is the job, and the rent. And the work shapes publics, discourse, and the conditions of shared life: that is the consequence, whether acknowledged or not. Both loyalties are real. Neither cancels the other. The modernist toolkit resolves this by making organisational interest primary; the activist stance resolves it the other way. This is where the work is done: inside the tension, advocating and accommodating along a continuum, deciding case by case, and owning each decision.
Communicators must act anyway under radical uncertainty, among unknown unknowns, on evidence that might change dramatically at any point. The tame reflex is to manufacture confidence: more data, tighter forecasts, thicker decks. The honest alternative is to decide provisionally and say so: document assumptions, build in revision, and treat every plan as a hypothesis wearing a deadline. Confidence is not a virtue when the ground is moving. Revisability is.
This field persuades. Engagement, storytelling, dialogue, community — cleaner, gentler, laundered words. The euphemism became an image problem of its own: stakeholder publics distrust most what refuses to name its intent.
Owning the persuasive intent is not a confession; it is the precondition of legitimacy. Persuasion, openly declared and responsibly practiced — truthful, authentic, respectful, equitable, socially responsible — can be defended. Persuasion denied cannot.
A simple project can honestly speak of social impact (the change the organization caused, countable now, inside-out) and social value (the worth stakeholders themselves judge it to have, outside-in). Complex work plays out on other clocks entirely: public value, settled in deliberation; societal value, compounded across generations, invisible to any campaign cycle.
Each register's blind spot is another register's focus. The temptation is to harmonise them into one metric — quietly handing 'what counts' to whoever owns the standard. Connection, not harmonisation. Name the register you are claiming, admit what it cannot see, and never bill a campaign-cycle result as a generational one.
The communicator is not outside the communication, aiming messages at others. We are immersed in the same persuasion environment we help build — persuaded while persuading, audience to the very techniques we deploy, trained on the same feeds, exposed to the same synthetic content. This is the metamodern stance in one image: sender and audience simultaneously, and neither purely. The literacies this manifesto demands are owed twice over: to the publics we address, and to ourselves.
TINA is not an analysis; it is a narrative — one our own industry helped write, and now recites about AI with special conviction. The market-based framing of business, politics and society is a hundred-year construction, maintained daily in the language of commercial promotion. What was constructed can be renegotiated.
Standard operating procedures, SMART objectives and KPIs are adequate for tame problems, and only for those. Applied to wicked ones, they produce well-managed failure and a false sense of security. Most corporate attempts to tame ecological or societal crises with compliance toolkits end as washing, however well-meaning.
A measurement paradigm built to prove departmental worth to management is not accountability; it is performance. After decades of it, the share of self-reportedly excellent departments has barely moved. Holistic societal accountability asks harder questions than the dashboard answers.
Advertising persuades, propaganda persuades — and we, apparently, engage. This laundering deceives no one and corrodes trust in everyone. The field's image problem is not that it persuades; it is that it will not say so.
Efficiency is a ratio, not a reason. The dominant AI discourse in practice — faster and more content, streamlined workflows, optimized engagement — answers questions that were never asked, and treats the delegation of relational work to machines as progress. Technochauvinism mistakes the tool for the task.
The value-creation plot in which the organization stars, stakeholders applaud, and society provides the set: that story is long exhausted. At every scale beyond the single project, the protagonist is neither the organisation nor the communication department. It is time we focused on the humans and their stories.
Responsibility that lives at only one level is an alibi. We all hold all four levels at once — each with its own discipline, none delegable to the others.
Responsibility starts with the practitioner, before any code reaches them. The self is not a reliable witness: we align with our in-groups, avoid dissonance, and reason our way to whatever loyalty requires. The personal discipline is reflection with teeth: know your values, name your biases and their cultural roots, and keep asking the question every shadow avoids: am I — are we — sure about this? Principles like truthfulness, authenticity, respect, equity and social responsibility help as pocket equipment, not as absolution.
When Bell Pottinger stoked racial division in South Africa, the firm was punished and the individuals who did the work moved on. That asymmetry is the professional accountability gap in one case. A profession that openly owns persuasion must be answerable at both levels: the organization and the person.
Accountability infrastructure is culturally and locally dependent — importing one model everywhere is its own kind of solutionism. But there is a commitment that does not bend: the profession must find its way to consequences, by whatever means its context allows. The question is not whether to get there. It is how, even by different means.
Business models are incentive-and-reward structures with consequences, intended or not. If betterment of society is a business objective, it lives in the model — in what gets rewarded, funded and promoted — or it is washing, however sincere the campaign. Communicators cannot outrun their organization's incentives; they can make them visible, and refuse to decorate them.
It is time to train organisations in communication rather than only sending communicators to yet more training. Everyone who communicates on an organization's behalf persuades on its behalf.
A field that persuades for a living owes society the capacity to recognize and weigh persuasion. Persuasion literacy — how organized persuasive communication works, who pays for it, how to read intent — belongs in general education, not just in our trade curricula. And now AI literacy alongside it: knowing what generative systems actually do (fluent language without understanding), whose incentives drive them, and when the content they produce is persuading, and on whose behalf.
A field that builds public literacy builds the very scrutiny that holds it accountable: the profession of persuasion becoming the teacher of its own defences.
Replace the if–then reflex with the what-if habit. At every stage of every plan, ask: what if things change? Build the pause into the structure — revision loops, reflection checkpoints, tangential development spaces — because insights are only as good as a knowledge base that can change dramatically at any point. Not decoration. Structure.
Modern confidence proved too rigid for a wicked world; postmodern doubt too dissolving. Metamodernism does not split the difference. It oscillates — simultaneously modern and postmodern, and neither. Not a metronome's tick, but a pendulum without constant rhythm whose swing responds to the moment. Whenever your position hardens into certainty, ask what it forecloses.
Name the intent, name the paymaster, and let the work be judged as what it is. The responsible persuader does openly what the field has long done apologetically: accepts the scrutiny that openness invites as the cost, and the proof, of legitimacy.
Impact for whom, value to whom, decided by whom, on which clock. Each register is blind to what another sees. Connect the registers; never collapse them. If all the answers point back at the organization, start again.
Outside-in before inside-out. The organizational perspective is a perspective — entitled to advocacy, required to accommodate. Planning worth the name lets stakeholder positions interrogate organizational goals, expects disagreement to survive the process, and treats a well-understood disagreement as a legitimate outcome.
Generative AI mirrors our sociotechnical condition: commercially driven, consequence-rich, wrapped in a there-is-no-alternative narrative. Use it as a companion that widens the view: more scenarios, more stakeholder positions, more discomfort. Never as an oracle, never as a substitute for relationship, and always as a literacy under construction.
In a field addicted to speed, the radical act is time stolen back: for reflection, documentation, the second look. The pause is not lost productivity; it is the difference between measuring numbers and understanding value. We mistake speed for quality. Stop.
The deepest purpose of this work is cultivating shared meaning across difference. Instead of smoothing difference over or campaigning permanently to the like-minded until the echo chamber closes, metamodernism seeks that difference. In a dividing society, the field's normative remit is counterbalance: curators of complexity, facilitators of communitas.
Communication cannot control, let alone fix, the problems of a wicked world — but it can learn how to dance with them: clumsy solutions, provisional moves, honest about their provisionality. It is the only ambition that survives contact with the polycrisis. We propose some new moves.
Take the tensions with you, into your meetings and into your breaks. Locate yourself on all four levels of accountability. Then try something different: name a refusal, and make it out loud.