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 ...
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“You’re on mute” may be the most used phrase of the times. We’ve spent nearly two years working with each other by way of Teams, Zoom, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Google Meet, Skype, or some other video conferencing/meeting platform. And it turns out a lot of people have learned to like it ...
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The solution to “unfixable community input” is learning how to fix it. Fixing it through collaborative governance isn’t just a feel-good theory; I think it’s becoming imperative to the survival of democracy, or at least to recreating credibility for government. Rebuilding public trust will require power sharing between government and ...
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“The community-input system is unfixable and, more important, undesirable,” so says the accompanying article from The Atlantic. I say bull-cookies. With all due respect to the article’s author, they clearly don’t know what you and I know. Public engagement, done with authenticity, skill and creativity, is most desirable. The ...
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When you do the kind of important, greater good work that you do, talking about first impressions or last impressions might sound pretty superficial – not worthy of consideration by serious professional people. But I expect that you realize that public engagement and conflict resolution is at its essence … ...
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As I’m writing this, I’m watching a television report that Russian state media is labelling video and firsthand reports of civilian slaughter and atrocities in Ukraine as “fake news.” It’s a term that’s gotten a ton of traction since the election of the previous guy here in the U.S., but ...
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One of the great public trust paradoxes is the idea that people who don’t trust you won’t engage with you very constructively, but people who engage with you constructively tend to trust you. So public participation – co-production – is both the challenge and the solution to collaboration....
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I recently started working with a municipality confronting the growing homeowner opposition to multifamily housing adjacent to or within established neighborhoods. I’m sure you know that home prices and rents are going through the roof (pun intended) – as is demand, especially for multifamily and more affordable housing. Cities, builders, ...
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Change is the key. You can make a reasonable argument that the angry public, fractured state of our union, broken politics, and the present culture war being waged in the U.S. are all simply the result of changes that people were/are unwilling to accept. We need to understand change – ...
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I have to admit I’m getting just a little emotional writing this because finally … after all these years … I get to marry two of the more important and instrumental things from my professional and personal lives. Better meetings, meet better beer. Beer, I’d like you to meet meetings. ...
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