The Participation Blog

Why Don’t They Just Understand?!

We work with very smart and very caring people doing very complex public sector jobs who do their darndest to make great decisions that benefit all of us – the public. And at the end of the day, often the hardest part of their job is getting us to understand them and their decisions. Most of us aren’t wired to wade through data and complexity or to weigh competing opinions and various facts. So if we don’t understand it, the normal human response is to tune it out and dismiss it in favor of almost anything else that may be complete BS but more easily understood – like taking horse de-wormer. As we approach one million new dead Americans, we can only hope that we’ll learn to communicate better in the next pandemic than we did in this last one.