The mainstream news media, and politics in general, has had a love affair with the word mandate for the past several presidential news cycles and that should make all of us a little crazy.
Elections are decided by vote, still probably the cleanest and most efficient system that we’ve come ...
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How are consensus decisions developed?
Consensus becomes possible within groups that are committed to honoring each person’s contribution. The collaborative problem solving process involves a shared commitment to listen 
respectfully to each other and the choice to allow each unique perspective to inform the whole view. A consensus-building group will ...
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Consensus is one way that groups can make decisions. There are other ways, of course. A conceptual range of options is depicted graphically below. It spans from one person making a decision on behalf of the entire group to consensus with no constraints, meaning that ...
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“Never apologize, mister, it’s a sign of weakness.” ― John Wayne
One of the hardest things for people – individuals or organizations – to do is say “I’m sorry!” Think about your closest personal relationships. Something you have done or said – intended or not – has hurt a person ...
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Some quick thoughts about what we saw and heard at the September IAP2 North American conference in Montreal about capturing and responding to public opinion – specifically related to online engagement. As you may know if you attended or signed up to get our updates, we released the results ...
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What is active listening? Many years ago when I was a callow public involvement apprentice, I took a course from one of our icons, Jim Creighton, the founding president of The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), on Active Listening. It was so intimidating on a personal level, ...
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This summer, we surveyed IAP2 leaders and practitioners about the condition of our field in 2016, and the public participation survey results are in.
In fact, we presented those today during our 2016 IAP2 North American Conference session, titled “Over Our Dead Body.”
If you were in attendance, ...
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Our partner, Dr. Marty Rozelle, recently wrote an article on dialogue in community involvement and the importance of listening to others. Well, I consider myself a professional listener, so I thought I’d expand on that.
With my community involvement work, I do a lot of listening to others … ...
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Conflict resolution strategies and conflict resolution techniques aren’t very difficult to understand, but they’re often challenging to implement because of our own egos. Sometimes this means we’re sweeping problems under the rug or downplaying the situation at hand–even covering it up. However, executing an effective conflict resolution strategy means we ...
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The dictionary defines the verb trolling as making “a deliberately offensive or provocative online post with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them.” We all experience this and the more we use online dialogue and public input in community involvement, the more doors we open ...
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