Tell Me a Story
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Same Message, Different Audience = Different Approach
I just spent a couple of days with a group of very smart Midwest State agency people coaching their engineers to speak less like engineers when they’re speaking to people who aren’t engineers. A couple of my partners recently helped a Federal agency with a major public meeting that I ...
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Delivering Bad News in a Better Way
Government exists to provide for the common welfare. That means government is usually in the business of resolving conflicts for the greater good – or at least it’s supposed to. The greater good is frequently complex and almost always means compromise or some kind of consensus. But even when public ...
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Eight Tips on Talking With People – from the Best
I spent most of my earlier career years interviewing lots of different kinds of people about lots of topics, which was fertile training ground for the kind of work that we now do. So if you’re interested in getting better at drawing the values, needs and interests from people that ...
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Start With a Question, Not Just Your Argument
Most institutions start their encounters and meetings with the public intending to transfer the data and information that exists in their heads, across the room or table and into other people’s heads. Typically, they lay out their best argument (which worked well for them in graduate school) and, if there’s
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Try to Communicate With Some Tact, You Jerk
The author of this piece notes that it’s odd talking about this subject in this day and age but if we have any hope of fixing public conversations, it’s a skill set that needs to be relearned....
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You Work with Millennials
- Millennials, who are now assuming the lead in government and other institutions, have the dubious honor of fixing the problems created by the past and current crop of managers. They think and work differently than their predecessors.
- Leading and motivating start and end with communication and that’s a learned
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Ask for Help
In the craft of successfully engaging people in solving problem or resolving issues, asking for help from those people helps you considerably. Doing this is hard on the egos of CEOs and managers in public service, but it’s great for your projects. Just ask them....
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Who Is Really Lying to You?
You’re reading this after the midterm elections and, thankfully, after the conclusion of this year’s onslaught of particularly ugly political ads. A lot of those ads claim that their opponents are liars. So, somebody’s obviously not telling the truth. The problem is that we’re (all of us are) terrible at ...
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Memorable vs. Not Memorable
One of the outrage factors that we talk about in our two-day course deals with issues and events that people find most memorable. And the things that we find most memorable tend to be the more negative and emotionally sticky events of our lives....
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