We talk about (re)building trust in government a lot in this newsletter and it will be interesting to watch the long-term reputation ramifications of the partial government shutdown – still underway, as of this writing. Public trust in government continues to erode and increasingly permeates down into state and local ...
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We in the public involvement biz like to pat ourselves on the back about what a good job we do, but it’s healthy to take an objectively critical step back and look at the broader state of the field, and the state of the field described in the following article ...
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If you answered ‘an old white guy’ you win … congratulations! The following data shows that the preponderance of public participants tend to be white, older, male and there to protect their status quo. Big surprise? Probably not. Is that most effective and useful? Probably not. Determining who really ...
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Power and control usually manifest as arrogance and that makes people angry. We use different terms and euphemisms – reducing public anger and outrage, calming the waters, lowering the temperature, building trust – for the same basic goal: getting people to the point of having a reasonable dialogue or debate or interaction ...
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Your mission and the work that you do is complex and full of detail. It may not be that complex to you because you’re the expert, but for most of us it’s a struggle to figure out. If you expect people to trust you, they need to understand you and ...
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The author of this piece notes that it’s odd talking about this subject in this day and age but if we have any hope of fixing public conversations, it’s a skill set that needs to be relearned....
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I spent most of my earlier career years interviewing lots of different kinds of people about lots of topics, which was fertile training ground for the kind of work that we now do. So if you’re interested in getting better at drawing the values, needs and interests from people that ...
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Government exists to provide for the common welfare. That means government is usually in the business of resolving conflicts for the greater good – or at least it’s supposed to. The greater good is frequently complex and almost always means compromise or some kind of consensus. But even when public ...
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I just spent a couple of days with a group of very smart Midwest State agency people coaching their engineers to speak less like engineers when they’re speaking to people who aren’t engineers. A couple of my partners recently helped a Federal agency with a major public meeting that I ...
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