How do we convey a vision?

Written by Tasha Gideon. Coralus Activator, Verrah CEO.

“It’s indescribable.”
“Words fail me.”
“I’m speechless.”
“You have to experience it to understand.”

Often, we offer these phrases as the highest of compliments. We intend them to signal something so incredible it’s beyond human language. Operating outside conventional vocabulary is an essential part of a whole human experience. But dreams, pre-language childhood, memories, limbic sensations, and intuitions are individual experiences and notoriously hard to explain to anyone else. Visions are hard to convey.

My work as a branding strategist often brings me into contact with people with a vision. They’ve had a revelation — about a business, a movement, a product, a service — and they need to share it. They come to me with bushels of words or complex diagrams and ask, “Can you make people understand this?”

No, I say. Nobody can make anyone understand anything. But we can try to translate your big idea and invite people to it.

Surfacing a new name for Coralus (formerly SheEO) was a community-driven process unlike any other. I’d never seen such willingness to pivot, work through discomfort, and balance playfulness and rigor. Precisely the type of environment where big ideas can get translated.

When our community working group quite literally flowed toward an ocean concept, it simply felt right. Playing with the ocean theme, we returned to the essence of our interdependent and resilient community.

And coral offered itself as a gift. We marveled that coral is only 1% of the world but sustains 25% of ocean life, at its ability to thrive after repeated life-threatening events, at its irreducible communal nature, and that it relies on diversity for its health. The list of resonances with coral goes on and on.

Nature-based metaphors are uniquely effective at conveying the essential truths of big ideas. Sometimes, only nature is potent and rich enough to carry a vision.