I just spent a couple of days with a group of very smart Midwest State agency people coaching their engineers to speak less like engineers when they’re speaking to people who aren’t engineers. A couple of my partners recently helped a Federal agency with a major public meeting that I was able to poke my head in on via Facebook feed. It was painful to watch high ranking government officials deliver their speeches to real people and continually fail to connect with anything that their audience needed or wanted to hear or understood. This widening disconnect between us and people who manage our collective good just doesn’t have to be that way.