One of the challenges that public involvement people face is embedding what they know that works into a system of government that is often less than enthusiastic about the whole idea of sharing control. Officials aren’t often very keen about giving the public any power or influence over their predetermined ...
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Online or in person, public participation planning is essential to (re)building or maintaining public trust, reaching the people who need to be engaged, learning the issues, finding the doable level of influence, and getting honest, usable input from people. Knowing and following the basics of good public involvement drastically improves ...
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Thirty plus years ago, I shifted to a mostly public sector career from a reasonably successful one in media, and then advertising and public relations. At the time, I was astonished by government’s ineptitude in conveying information to the citizens that it supposedly worked for. The people that I worked ...
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Empathy is linked to our best relationships with people and our own well-being. Empathic people tend to be happier and enjoy less stress. Empathy is a big topic these days because research and empirical evidence suggests that empathy is in serious decline. The University of Michigan found that college students ...
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Dealing with people and their oftentimes difficult, contrary opinions and positions makes up much of your day, I would venture to guess. Helping you understand and work with these people makes up almost all of our days. One of the universal truths to success lies in truly understanding the people ...
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As a confessed news junkie, I have learned to moderate my habit out of the need to maintain some level of sanity. I have friends who might challenge the sanity part, but they’re the ones who drink cheap beer. I digress. It’s easy to get sucked into the vortex of ...
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Right now, being a citizen in the U.S. feels unsettling, daunting and frustrating for people who follow the state of politics. Participating in the affairs of government seems like the last thing people might want to do. But put that in perspective: there are 500,000 elected officials in the U.S., ...
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If your job requires you to work with the public, at some point you’ll probably get a face to face or Zoom to Zoom audience with those people. They’ll give you their time and attention and you’ll have them in front of you or on camera. You’ll have this one ...
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There are no instant fixes to (re)building trust and there are no magic, automatic answers … but there are answers. At the risk of sounding like a shameless self-promoter, the courses that we teach all move the needle back in the direction of trust. (Re)building trust in leadership, science, ...
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Trust in expertise, academia, power and institutions of all kinds (particularly government) is at an all-time low. Research suggests that most people truly believe that business and government leaders are purposely misleading them. If that’s the case, how can a representative democracy function? This vacuum of trust opens the ...
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