Here’s the list of 20 important words that slithered into our vocabulary in the last decade. I’m not going to mansplain any of them; you’re on your own. Read More …
Now that we’re all on the usual path of New Year self-improvement, I suggest we consider the following. These verbal tics are easy to pick up; it’s time for all of us to lose ‘em. Read More …
Smart people don’t often take kindly to criticism about how they communicate what they know so well. The challenge is that subject matter experts (SMEs) are usually more accustomed to communicating with other SMEs than they are in communicating with people who aren’t SMEs. When you know a subject well, it’s hard to remember what… read more →
We’re living in a remarkable new age of professional propaganda where lies have become as common as truth. We’re in the truth telling business, however, and the challenge that we face is that it’s usually easier for charlatans to make fake information more melodramatic, attention-getting and interesting than it is for us to make the… read more →
You may have noticed that the public sector workforce is changing – a lot. Of course, there’s always an ongoing turnover in people, but federal agencies in particular are seeing a major loss of institutional knowledge and new people are filling management positions with little experience in actually dealing with and managing people. People skills… 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 →
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 →