It was pointed out recently that we seem to be a nation united on values and divided by politics. (Values unite, issues divide.) Almost all of us want to feel safe, secure and provide better futures for our kids. How we do those things is where things begin to deteriorate. ...
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Getting the best out of people and nudging them into some level of cooperation is a learnable art and skillset. It’s sort’a required for the work that we do. Although we do deal with students and clients who sometimes just oversee the function of public participation but don’t actually work ...
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As a transplanted westerner for 40 odd years, I’ve come to love the skies, the vistas and the stubborn individualism that runs deep in the culture of so many of the wide open places west of the Mississippi. That stubbornness sometimes goes a little overboard like it did with the ...
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The pandemic halted face to face meetings, but we adapted and video conferencing became mainstream. Office buildings turned into ghost shells for nearly two years until employers began slowly enticing people out of their bathrobes and back to an agency/business desk, for at least parts of the week. We’re now ...
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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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Democracy – and a Democratic Republic like the U.S. – is an exercise in collaboration and it’s how we’ve gotten this far. I’ll argue that the best public participation is almost always a collaboration. But in recent times, the idea of compromise has been branded as a weak-kneed, liberal-minded copout. ...
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Working with people is frequently difficult and complex and the rules of engagement aren’t always easy or quick to learn – except sometimes....
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The solution to “unfixable community input” is learning how to fix it. Fixing it through collaborative governance isn’t just a feel-good theory; I think it’s becoming imperative to the survival of democracy, or at least to recreating credibility for government. Rebuilding public trust will require power sharing between government and ...
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In last month’s newsletter, we mentioned that flaws – mistakes – are forgivable, but bad intentions are not. People who work in and with the public sector are usually motivated by the best of intentions; it’s usually why they choose to get into this line of work in the first ...
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Public participation is grounded in the premise that people who are affected by a decision have a right to have something to say about that decision. I’ve generally presumed that we, in America, shared a fundamental belief that the public’s interest is the foundation of a functioning democracy. And that ...
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