Dear Valued Associate, Well…2018 is off to a rousing start. I considered beginning this newsletter with a thought about the #METOO movement, or the release and repercussions of Fire and Fury, or maybe a climate change comparison of Sydney’s recent 47.3°C (117°F, the hottest in 79 years) to the northeastern U.S. and Canadian deep freeze “bomb… read more →
Meeting facilitation can be a complex art and science when the issues themselves are comparably complex. As we teach in our meeting facilitation training, learning to do meeting facilitation well requires paying attention to nuances, one of which is getting the right people in the room. The room, of course, can be either physical or… read more →
Dear Valued Associate, At a time and in a world that seems filled with vultures and thieves, it shouldn’t be surprising that Complicit is Dictionary.com’s word of the year. People should be concerned – and people need to stay involved, especially when just ‘checking out’ feels like the better thing to do. Our democratic survival and sanity requires… read more →
Dear Valued Associate, Imagine how it would feel if people actually appreciated the work that you do. Can you picture what it would be like to get up every morning and head off to work knowing that citizens respected your organization and its mission, your profession and expertise, and the effort that you put into public… read more →
Dictionary definitions of conflict vary with the dictionary, some including references to war to others that reference the more mundane incompatibility. Conflict resolution and dispute resolution are often used interchangeably, but disputes are more typically defined as something a little less serious than conflicts, or at least something that’s more short term and more easily… read more →
It was that first night, after a few hundred public meeting attendees started hollering at me about the things they were scared of or mad about, that I became very seriously interested in risk communication. I was barely aware of the term prior to then and only a select few academics were researching, writing about,… read more →
The thesis of this article is that the best, most effective crisis management team is You. And your neighbors and your community. Us. The Tribe. About a year ago, I read Sebastian Junger’s wonderful book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What an evocative concept … tribe. A… read more →
America seems to love polls, and the media loves to feed us poll results on a daily basis, but what do they really mean? And what is their true usefulness? If we take a poll on a specific question with a few hundred people out of a population of 300 million, we are often told… read more →
At the risk of revealing a dirty little blogging secret, the phrase I’ve used as the title of this article has been included in our guiding list of ‘key words’ for quite some time. So, I know there’s at least one of you out there who thinks this is an interesting topic. And I’ve passed… read more →
Citizens Advisory Boards are convened by government agencies to seek advice over time. Members are typically selected from diverse perspectives. As a cross-section of the broader community, they commit to spending time together to develop agreement on the advice they will provide to the sponsoring agency they serve. Documenting the Citizens Advisory Board’s advice is… read more →