Internal Engagement
We help organizations overcome dysfunction, both with the customers/public that they serve and internally. People need control of their lives and jobs and if they don’t get it, they disengage....
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Keeping Your Chin Up
These are tough days to be working in public service, especially federal government. It’s hard for people who have been under constant fire and derision for years to stay motivated to serve the greater good, and it’s difficult to inspire younger people to want to do it for a living, ...
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Dispute Resolution, Conflict Resolution – Tomato, Tomato
Dictionary definitions of conflict vary with the dictionary, some including references to war to others that reference the more mundane incompatibility. Conflict resolution and dispute resolution are often used interchangeably, but disputes are more typically defined as something a little less serious than conflicts, or at least something that’s ...
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The Role of Risk Communication
It was that first night, after a few hundred public meeting attendees started hollering at me about the things they were scared of or mad about, that I became very seriously interested in risk communication. I was barely aware of the term prior to then and only a select few ...
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Crisis Management. Really?
Back in one of my previous lives (working for a Fortune 50 company), most of my job was managing a variety of the inadvertent kinds of problems that negatively affected the business, or the variety of other issues brought on by dumb manager decisions and things that people in the ...
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When It Comes to Public Opinion, Conflict Avoidance is Not Conflict Prevention
Some quick thoughts about what we saw and heard at the September IAP2 North American conference in Montreal about capturing and responding to public opinion – specifically related to online engagement. As you may know if you attended or signed up to get our updates, we released the results ...
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Executing an Effective Conflict Resolution Strategy
Conflict resolution strategies and conflict resolution techniques aren’t very difficult to understand, but they’re often challenging to implement because of our own egos. Sometimes this means we’re sweeping problems under the rug or downplaying the situation at hand–even covering it up. However, executing an effective conflict resolution strategy means we ...
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Consensus Decision Making vs. Referendum
I can imagine that many shared my foreboding as the world approached the referendum known as Brexit. Now that we are hearing about and beginning to experience some of the fallout from this vote, many of the “Leave” voters are beginning to wonder if they have done the right ...
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