People who have been wronged or mistreated need to hear an acknowledgement of that injury before they will ever likely be willing to move on to bigger or other conversations. A century and a half after the fact, one enormous wrong began being righted on a warm, wind-swept desert day ...
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Making America Communicate Again (MACA) isn’t going to be easy. We’re different; we have distinct priorities, experiences and we’re talking among six generations – Silents, Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z and the Polars. Consider Generation Z, now entering the workforce and getting lots of attention these days.
Explaining how ...
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PublicInput is a software company that recently released the results of their survey on current trends in public involvement. Keep in mind that this is from a for-profit business, but you might find some of the reported trends interesting, particularly numbers four and five....
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The age of weaponized propaganda that we’re lucky enough to be living through obviously isn’t going anywhere soon. It’s proven effective for nefarious actors bent on manipulating public opinion to get what they want. I’m not talking about the infotainment media darlings, influencers, and outlets that are so untrustworthy that ...
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Oscar Wilde supposedly said, “Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.” Those of us in the engagement and consensus business deal with tough people and situations for a living. Most regular human beings get to carry grudges all the way to their gastroenterologist’s office; we don’t have that ...
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My political science professor said on our first day in her class that politics is simply an alternative to violence. That stuck with me for decades and came roaring back to mind one January 6th. Nearly four years later, America has voted against politics. In a more recent ...
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We’re on the cusp of the most consequential U.S. presidential election of our lifetimes. It’s hard to comprehend how we’ve possibly come to the ridiculous but clear choice that we’ll make in November. But the question is obvious: will we live in an uglier, hotter, meaner, dirtier, less healthy, less ...
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There’s a human trait that all of us have to some degree, with the exception of people with antisocial personality disorder – socio- and psychopaths – but we don’t often recognize that it’s a trait that needs to be nurtured and developed. Empathy is embedded in us and one of ...
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Helping people understand new information, as we suggested in the opening of this newsletter, requires getting them to first just consider what you’re trying to convey to them. At a time when all of us are bombarded with online and traditional media constantly competing for our attention, getting people’s attention ...
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Nobody put it more eloquently than Sly and the Family Stone: people are different. (Feel free to substitute your own adjectives; just try to keep it clean.) We communicate in different styles and when we’re agitated, concerned, scared or pissed off, people can adopt refreshingly new styles which might ...
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