We live in a time of talk. Someday anthropologists will decide that people who lived in 2023 all had ginormous mouths and itty bitty ears. We have 24 hour access to a megaphone that’s always on and people use that amplifier relentlessly, broadcasting every momentary thought and posting pics of ...
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We’ve said a lot in the past about the ramifications of professional propaganda and the weaponized BS that seems to permeate the culture wars and attacks on basic democracy in this country. If you’re not really concerned about it and don’t know what you can possibly do, consider the following ...
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Successful public participation requires authenticity. Authenticity requires participation to be meaningful, not perfunctory. That can cause stress for organizations that have dabbled in public involvement in the past, but have done so with minimum commitment. They want credit for engaging their stakeholders but they avoid any serious involvement because they ...
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We’ve talked a lot about the rule of threes in the past; it pops up in literature, communication, survival, photography – oodles of places. When you are trying to get a point across, you are best served and most successful when you think in terms of three. Don’t believe me? ...
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Every large institution takes on some level of bureaucracy, which can be incredibly frustrating and infuriating to normal people who have to work with it. Almost every institution tends to adopt its own acronyms and language, in part to simplify internal communication but also, as I’ve seen, as a kind ...
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Trust in government is up! Some measurements of trust in government actually show improvements for the first half of 2023 compared to numbers from 2020 through 2022. However … it’s still putrid. Only one in four Americans has confidence in Washington. One in three has confidence in state and ...
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People find it quite impossible to relate to faceless, sterile institutions. I have yet to meet anyone who gets all warm and tingly around the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The challenge remains that those sterile public institutions are all in the business ...
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While we’re on the subject of humility, dealing effectively with emotional, upset, angry people requires a skillset that’s counterintuitive to the ways that most of us usually communicate and interact with others. These skills and strategies may be different, but they work. Professionals, understandably, want to express confidence and professionalism ...
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Winston Churchill is often credited with saying, “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” You know people like that. We’ve elected way too many people like that. Actual or presumed expertise often results in confidence – certainty, but that certainty comes with a ...
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Your trustworthiness and credibility will likely mean the difference between career success or failure. If you’re untrustworthy but lucky, you might wallow in abject mediocrity. Most people who get into public service in the first place do so because they are the good guys – they just don’t often know ...
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