Dear Valued Associate, At a time and in a world that seems filled with vultures and thieves, it shouldn’t be surprising that Complicit is Dictionary.com’s word of the year. People should be concerned – and people need to stay involved, especially when just ‘checking out’ feels like the better thing to do. Our democratic survival and sanity requires… read more →
Dear Valued Associate, Imagine how it would feel if people actually appreciated the work that you do. Can you picture what it would be like to get up every morning and head off to work knowing that citizens respected your organization and its mission, your profession and expertise, and the effort that you put into public… read more →
Dictionary definitions of conflict vary with the dictionary, some including references to war to others that reference the more mundane incompatibility. Conflict resolution and dispute resolution are often used interchangeably, but disputes are more typically defined as something a little less serious than conflicts, or at least something that’s more short term and more easily… read more →
It was that first night, after a few hundred public meeting attendees started hollering at me about the things they were scared of or mad about, that I became very seriously interested in risk communication. I was barely aware of the term prior to then and only a select few academics were researching, writing about,… read more →
Back in one of my previous lives (working for a Fortune 50 company), most of my job was managing a variety of the inadvertent kinds of problems that negatively affected the business, or the variety of other issues brought on by dumb manager decisions and things that people in the company had done or failed… read more →
Some quick thoughts about what we saw and heard at the September IAP2 North American conference in Montreal about capturing and responding to public opinion – specifically related to online engagement. As you may know if you attended or signed up to get our updates, we released the results of a survey of the practice,… read more →
Conflict resolution strategies and conflict resolution techniques aren’t very difficult to understand, but they’re often challenging to implement because of our own egos. Sometimes this means we’re sweeping problems under the rug or downplaying the situation at hand–even covering it up. However, executing an effective conflict resolution strategy means we acknowledge and agree on the… read more →