We work with clients who are expert in their respective fields, and they’re understandably confident in what they know. But in this new age of anti-science and the demonization of expertise, that confidence is often mistaken for arrogance by an angry, skeptical public. When experts need to establish themselves as ...
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One of the best and most useful skills to develop in public engagement, facilitation, and conflict management is the ability to ask dialed in, compelling, clear, to-the-point, interesting questions. Great questions result in great answers, and questions that sound more like some kind of ham-fisted, bureaucratic interrogation usually get lousy ...
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In the work that we do and in the classes that we teach, we increasingly run across people just starting out in this biz. Newer facilitators tend to be nervous about the idea of dealing with volatile situations and people with strong feelings on competing sides of issues. They’re usually ...
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This story was penned by an experienced academic and practicing mediator, but everything in it really resonated for me and I thought you might like these six basic lessons....
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You may have noticed that the public sector workforce is changing – a lot. Of course, there’s always an ongoing turnover in people, but federal agencies in particular are seeing a major loss of institutional knowledge and new people are filling management positions with little experience in actually dealing with ...
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Competence, integrity and empathy are key ingredients when it comes to who we trust, which explains why many people have a difficult time trusting those who hold power over us. Read More …...
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Most of our clients are in the bad news business – you may be one of them. Delivering less than desirable news to citizens is an unfortunate part of government. People often don’t like the changes that government imposes on them for the sake of the greater good. So delivering ...
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Our inability to communicate with each other is spooky. (Gratuitous Halloween reference.) By every reasonable, credible, objective source that I can find, it can be safely said that nearly 97% of experts know that the climate is changing rapidly and human activity is a major contributor. But climate denial is ...
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As someone who suffers from the affliction, I can tell you that attention spans are getting shorter. In fact, studies show that people’s attention and understanding decline after reading about 30 words. That means that this paragraph is now over your attention limit – thanks for getting this far. Read ...
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We’re in a hard-to-explain field. One of the recurring lines that you’ll hear at gatherings of community engagement people is the sheer joy of hanging around people who don’t need an explanation of what we do for a living. But how we define ourselves and the vocabulary of democracy, civic ...
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