My Biggest Lesson: Laura Costello

Laura has over 10 years experience in the communications industry and joined THINKHOUSE, The Youth Marketing Company, in 2015. Laura’s speciality is in leading transformative communications campaigns that connect, convince and create change. To accelerate a sustainable future, Laura advise's individuals and brands on how to embrace and communicate purposeful action that inspires positive cultural shifts for business, people & planet. She works with the likes of the Irish Environmental Network, Musgrave, Fair Seas, IMMA, RTÉ, Tony’s Chocolonely, Heineken, Creative Ireland, Ben & Jerry’s, innocent drinks and Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard. As the Ireland lead for Purpose Disruptors, Laura is growing a community of creative professionals working to reshape the advertising and marketing industry to tackle climate change. Laura received a distinction in Business Sustainability Management from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. In 2022 she was named by Forbes as one of 43 People Changing Advertising For The Climate.

In November 2018, I began the Reclaiming Agency leadership course and spent three days in the middle of the English countryside with a group of marketing professionals. Out in the wilderness with seven wonderful strangers, we were invited to step into a period of unlearning and possibility. We talked about advertising and climate breakdown, nature and poetry, resilience and vulnerability. It became the defining lesson of my career to date. 

To articulate one of the most enduring lessons in one sentence; instead of always trying to find answers, ask more beautiful questions. 

This is a more powerful way to address the complex problems that face us (the world, the industry and us as individuals). As poet & philosopher David Whyte puts it: “The ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very un-beautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity - as much by asking it, as it does by having it answered. You just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.” 

I was 27, three years into working as a strategist in THINKHOUSE. At this point in my career I had worked on a number of campaigns (with brands likes Ben & Jerry’s, Lil-Lets, Movember and innocent drinks) that had cemented my interest in the brand purpose and impact space, but I had not yet come to a deep understanding of the industry’s role in the climate story.  

Reclaiming Agency (now run by Purpose Disruptors) is designed to help marketing professionals to tackle the climate emergency. I arrived at it a little by accident. A colleague in THINKHOUSE suggested I take their place. I didn’t hesitate. It was not only career-defining, but life-changing. It helped me to develop an understanding of how I can be useful in the healing of our relationship with the natural world. It set me on a path to discover the role our industry can play in creating a thriving future for all life. 

Through a series of ‘beautiful questions’ across these three days, I came to understand how advertising and marketing works as a system in the world. The nature of the protagonist role we play in the climate story is not immediately clear until we pause, pay attention, and ask questions.

We are architects of desire. We move people, change mindsets and inspire them to change their behaviour and act. But the desire we’ve driven largely fuels a greater disconnect with the natural world. We need to be living different lifestyles. The advertising industry was (is) at a crossroads, requiring a radical rethink to move away from driving endless consumption, towards something new. 

What could a radical rethink look like? What if it wasn’t all about buying stuff? What worlds could we imagine instead? What if it looked like promoting a new kind of good life? What if it told stories that nature and future generations would be grateful for? 

Led by the endlessly inspirational Jonathan Wise and Emma Ashru Jones (who curated the most generous and considered programme I’d ever encountered), that weekend in 2018 was the beginning of a conversation about what kind of people we want to be. About what kind of ‘leaders’, thinkers and creators the world needs us to be. A conversation we’re still uncovering more beautiful questions for. It’s a conversation about accepting and understanding the true scale of what we’re facing. A conversation about courage. 

Since 2018 there’s been emergency declarations, corporate pledges, climate summits, climate strikes, more poetry and words of wisdom shared. There were tears and laughter. Days of full hearts and days of broken ones. 

‘How resilient will we be?’ was one of the questions offered by Jeremy Mathieu as we reflected on the challenges of the climate science together. I still think about this. There is no future ahead of us that is free from loss or pain. 

Translated to my daily work, the lesson revealed how limited we are when we try to come up with answers to complex problems. The climate challenge is too complex an issue for anyone to have THE answer. It is also up to everyone to enable a sense of agency around creative solutions, rather than to presume the answer sits somewhere else. Yet questions and uncertainty sit uncomfortably in business conversations. The experience gave me the ‘agency’ to challenge traditional agency culture - a culture in which many of us are programmed to have answers. That’s what we get paid for. Strategies with clear perspectives and exciting solutions. Yet the state of the world requires us to accept a state of humility. A new way of being. It requires us to work more collaboratively - and in unprecedented ways. It is only from this state that we can truly reimagine how we can start to do less harm and more good. To act with intention and integrity to make our work serve the world better. 

‘Business as usual’ has stopped working for the majority of life on earth. Finding the beautiful questions provides a necessary perspective and it changed my own story in crucial ways. My Reclaiming Agency lesson(s) led me to seek out big lessons. From Do Lectures in 2022 to spending three months working remotely from Colombia in 2023. Sometimes, the most important work is in the figuring. In the getting lost. In the retelling of our stories to ourselves and to others. Questions help us live closer to the edges of understanding. It is in the ‘not knowing’ that we befriend brilliant strangers and let them change our life. The unlearning continues.