For at least three decades now, we’ve known that when it comes to public confidence and trust, big government has mostly been out to lunch, and the most recent data confirms that it’s not getting any better. There are no magic cures, but again, there are indeed proven ways of ...
read more →
Dale Carnegie, the incredibly influential How to Win Friends & Influence People book guy said, “When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.” He said this ...
read more →
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (“A broken what!?” the young person asked.), this business of working with the public is tough and getting tougher. As public meetings get uglier, officials are starting to realize that the solution doesn’t lie in reducing citizen comments from three minutes ...
read more →
Many moons ago, and in a different life, I lived in Arkansas. For a born and bred upper Midwesterner, it was a little bit of culture shock. I remember fondly my first grit(s), my first glass of sweet-tea, and most of all, I learned that genteel way of insulting anyone ...
read more →
I’ve thrown around the term “tribal” pretty liberally for a long time. You find it referenced all the time when someone is describing how groups of people tend to think, act and function alike – usually in less than flattering terms. We’ve used it a lot in descriptions of group ...
read more →
I honestly don’t remember who told me, but I guess somehow I was smart enough to take it to heart and I’ve done this ever since. Back when I was just a mere public engagement tadpole, someone wiser and more experienced than I gave me one of the golden tickets ...
read more →
Nothing happens in the work that you do with the public without being able to communicate well with people. Communication – the exchange of information. One big challenge that we frequently face is how difficult it is for some clients to realize what effective communication requires. I can’t count the ...
read more →
Participatory budgeting may be one of the most obvious and straightforward ways of engaging the public in the affairs of government. It provides people with the opportunity of making very specific decisions about how their collective public money, or at least meaningful portions of it, will be spent. The origins ...
read more →
As a transplanted westerner for 40 odd years, I’ve come to love the skies, the vistas and the stubborn individualism that runs deep in the culture of so many of the wide open places west of the Mississippi. That stubbornness sometimes goes a little overboard like it did with the ...
read more →
As we are in that season of joy, here’s another neuroscientific look at the importance and components of trust and the benefits of having it. As you’ve often found in this newsletter, this particular piece is written from the perspective of trust from employees in businesses, but it’s pretty ...
read more →
