Competence, integrity and empathy are key ingredients when it comes to who we trust, which explains why many people have a difficult time trusting those who hold power over us. Read More …
Most of our clients are in the bad news business – you may be one of them. Delivering less than desirable news to citizens is an unfortunate part of government. People often don’t like the changes that government imposes on them for the sake of the greater good. So delivering this kind of less than… read more →
Our inability to communicate with each other is spooky. (Gratuitous Halloween reference.) By every reasonable, credible, objective source that I can find, it can be safely said that nearly 97% of experts know that the climate is changing rapidly and human activity is a major contributor. But climate denial is a multi-billion dollar industry employing… read more →
As someone who suffers from the affliction, I can tell you that attention spans are getting shorter. In fact, studies show that people’s attention and understanding decline after reading about 30 words. That means that this paragraph is now over your attention limit – thanks for getting this far. Read More …
We’re in a hard-to-explain field. One of the recurring lines that you’ll hear at gatherings of community engagement people is the sheer joy of hanging around people who don’t need an explanation of what we do for a living. But how we define ourselves and the vocabulary of democracy, civic engagement and community was considered… read more →
The Facebook page titled ‘Stop Mandatory Vaccinations’ has more than 140,000 followers. These are people who may have meant well in trying to learn what’s best for their children, but have reached dangerous conclusions that put other children at serious and unnecessary risk. Social connections – meaning social media, trust, our engrained need to conform,… read more →
Marketers play on our emotions and sensibilities. People who choose to go out of their way to buy free range eggs do so because at some inner emotional level they can picture that proud, independent chicken majestically loping across the wide open prairie under azure skies with a big happy grin on its beak. Advertisers play the… read more →
The most effective public involvement being done these days seems to be in communities where public services are already closer to the people using them. Urban planners are significant users of public engagement and many of them have asked us for some examples that are a little out of the ordinary. So we thought we’d… read more →
A recent Pew research study finds that Americans tend to have a positive image of the work of research scientists (which is great news), but don’t think much of the ability of those scientists to communicate (which is entirely fixable). Once again, it corroborates what we’ve seen for years. Some of the best, smartest scientists, engineers and… read more →
As conveners and managers of people who have challenges and need to solve problems, we’re usually asked to help groups figure out what their members collectively think – what the priorities actually are. That sounds simple enough but it almost never is … thus we facilitate those conversations. People and groups are almost always surprised… read more →