You Talk Too Much
And as much as I want to think I’m an exception, I’m sure that I do, too. We all do. We’ve lost the art of brevity and if we want people with short attention spans to pay attention, we’d better be brief....
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Your Optimism May Be A Problem
Working with people in leadership positions reveals an interesting conundrum related to credibility with communities. Leaders more often see themselves as cheerleaders for the projects that they manage. That zeal, however, makes it difficult for them to empathize with those who don’t see those projects quite as positively, which creates ...
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But, That’s Not What I Meant
One challenging thing we all face is recognizing the continual disconnect between what we intend to say or write, and how that intention is actually interpreted by the receiver. There is a lot of “stuff” that influences that exchange. For example, what specific words that you select to say, what ...
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Hear, Here
We live in a time of talk. Someday anthropologists will decide that people who lived in 2023 all had ginormous mouths and itty bitty ears. We have 24 hour access to a megaphone that’s always on and people use that amplifier relentlessly, broadcasting every momentary thought and posting pics of ...
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Truth Decay Is Dangerous
We’ve said a lot in the past about the ramifications of professional propaganda and the weaponized BS that seems to permeate the culture wars and attacks on basic democracy in this country. If you’re not really concerned about it and don’t know what you can possibly do, consider the following ...
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With A Little Help From Your Friends
Successful public participation requires authenticity. Authenticity requires participation to be meaningful, not perfunctory. That can cause stress for organizations that have dabbled in public involvement in the past, but have done so with minimum commitment. They want credit for engaging their stakeholders but they avoid any serious involvement because they ...
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The Rule of Three Strikes Again
We’ve talked a lot about the rule of threes in the past; it pops up in literature, communication, survival, photography – oodles of places. When you are trying to get a point across, you are best served and most successful when you think in terms of three. Don’t believe me? ...
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Lose These Words
Every large institution takes on some level of bureaucracy, which can be incredibly frustrating and infuriating to normal people who have to work with it. Almost every institution tends to adopt its own acronyms and language, in part to simplify internal communication but also, as I’ve seen, as a kind ...
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There’s Good News and There’s Bad News
Trust in government is up! Some measurements of trust in government actually show improvements for the first half of 2023 compared to numbers from 2020 through 2022. However … it’s still putrid. Only one in four Americans has confidence in Washington. One in three has confidence in state and ...
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Put a Face on Bureaucracy
People find it quite impossible to relate to faceless, sterile institutions. I have yet to meet anyone who gets all warm and tingly around the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The challenge remains that those sterile public institutions are all in the business ...
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