Blog Post
Focusing on Your Opponents to Build Consent (an Example)
In winding up the August 14th Brownbag session, Hans promised to post an additional illustrative example on this blog. The points this example is illustrates: Consent-Building has you focus your outreach efforts, your communications efforts, on your fiercest...
How to Resolve Conflicts with Professional Activist Opponents
The stakeholders I interact with appear to be a different “animal” than what are often discussed in the class and Brownbag. That is, they are professional activists that work for non-for-profit groups. I have been working hard to communicate with them and apply many...
Leadership & Conflict Resolution Crisis Management 101
Whatever “Leadership” is, one of its components is “Crisis Management.” Why? . . . Because that’s one thing administrators, managers, . . . leaders . . . find themselves in: crises. Leaders Deploy Two Kinds of Crisis Management One of them (let's call this "Type A...
Our Public Involvement Process is Too Structured To Resolve Conflicts
Our Public Involvement Process is Too Structured. We sometimes hear where the rules and regulations keep you from having a genuine and working relationship with the public: "We follow specific rules, regulations, and laws in how to involve the public. The resulting...
People Often Bypass Our Public Involvement Process, and Go Straight to the Political Decision-Makers
People Often Bypass Our Public Involvement Process, and Go Straight to the Political Decision-Makers which is a phenomenon that you can see happening at every level of government. Although it’s not necessarily a disaster, you should not ignore it. After all, if your...
Bleiker Consent Building Brownbag Follow Up Blog
Crisis Management 101 Whatever “Leadership” is, one of its components is “Crisis Management.” Why? . . . Because that’s one thing administrators, managers, . . . leaders . . . find themselves in: crises. Leaders Deploy Two Kinds of Crisis Management One of them (let's...
The public don’t like to be told what they can and can’t do
Brownbag #69: June 9th, 2015: “Because we are a regulatory agency, we develop and administer regulations. Our interaction with the public suffers from the fact that people don’t like to be told what they can and can’t do.” Who can blame them?! . . . None of us like to...
Informing, Educating and Communication with the Public without Holding Meetings
Now that Brownbag #64 on "How we can involve MORE people . . . As MANY as possible" has been recorded, we'd like to follow up with some specifics to the final DOs and DON'Ts list we gave those who tuned in. Keeping in mind our main advice: In spite of what your...
Maximizing Public Input, Minimizing Pseudo-Input Into Public Projects
In the November 2010 Brownbag session I mentioned how important it is to “Keep an Ear to the Ground” . . . to “Beat the Bushes” . . . to listen to any--even the most unconventional “Input.” And, I gave an example of "unconventional" input on a mountain road...