The biggest, loudest, most passionate voices attract the most attention and those activists tend to get things done. Additionally, those activists almost always represent themselves as the voice of the people, suggesting they speak for the majority. Trouble is that more often those loud voices only represent a narrow interest, ...
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The work that you do is important. OK, maybe it’s not as important as our egos sometimes tell us we and our work is, but still, pretty important stuff. The stakes are high in the need to communicate the problems that need to be solved and engaging people in understanding ...
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Ideology, partisanship, and self-service in government aren’t necessarily new, but it sure seems more obvious recently. There are always those who, shall we say, have less than honorable motives. And there will always be those who truly believe in the righteousness of what they choose to believe and perpetrate. Added ...
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Cable and online media have created a culture where everyone talks – or yells, and nobody bothers to listen. It’s as if the last person standing – talking … wins. Empirical evidence and research has taught us that one of the most effective first steps in dealing with adversarial groups ...
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From our “using the right words” division of The Participation Company comes some suggestions for making presentations more effective. Some of these are repetitive and redundant, some are dumb excuses, some crutches, or shoptalk, or weasel words. All are good to lose....
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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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