COVID-19 pandemic is shining a light on the roles that evidence and expertise can play in policy ... Epidemiological data ... reviews of evidence ... assessments of social ... impacts, and more... all competing for policy attention ... can lead to competing narratives... a sense of confusion...policy is necessarily political and evidence does not…

the best skill to teach children is reinvention... the author of Sapiens reveals what 2050 has in store for humankind...once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds... We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function...too many schools focus on cramming information. In the p…

Organizations must connect their causes to the personal aspirations of their audiences to transform public attitudes... having a majority is not enough... You need a majority that can’t be eroded or peeled away... in 1996... 27 percent of the US public supported legal recognition of same-sex marriages... 60 percent in 2015 ... the new normal... ac…

the Commission had joined forces with one of Europe’s most powerful foundations to keep the European debate on track "... developing new ways and instruments to reach and engage the public”... the Bertelsmann empire is stepping into the breach. With its staunchly pro-European ideals, deep pockets and broad reach ... could end up giving Europe’s a…

We’ve been taking the wrong approach to communicating about climate change... even climate-denying, anti-scientific, messianic nations like the United States are quietly preparing ... not at how to mitigate climate change, but how to prepare for its inevitability. We’re building walls ... to block tomorrow’s climate refugees... alienation verging …

Which did the ad industry choose?... It tried to ignore technology and automation... when that didn’t work, it bought the machines.... It didn’t invest in research, development, innovation... develop new services, new ways, new formats, new ideas, whole new ways of helping institutions and people relate, connect, and bond... So the broken relatio…

Every day the web is becoming more personal... ... brands ... need to understand more than theoretical profiles or carefully honed audience segments.... master the fundamentals of identity...  In this report you’ll learn:  - What it takes to create a persistent individualized identity that crosses platforms and screens  - How brands and agencie…

embracing and sharing the power of communication strategy much more broadly to help drive results and performance... supporting practitioners and clients to rediscover communication strategy as a source of real advantage.... the opportunities available to use targeted, intelligent approaches to getting the right people talking with the right info…

Welcome to GAME — a four step process to improve the quality of your communications — and storylining, the step that comes before storytelling... moving straight to storytelling without first crafting strong, logical, persuasive key messages ... results in a ‘failure to communicate’ … when we don’t take the time to think from our audiences’ perspe…

A communications strategy answers the question, “Why are we doing these activities?”... if you’ve been doing customer discovery and using the value proposition canvas, you know a lot about each customer/ beneficiary.

Each side of the climate debate accuses the other of exaggeration and suffers from its own... sometimes feel like a shouting match in a roomful of children wearing earplugs... We have allowed our political, national, economic, and cultural narratives free play ... where... are the narratives from science itself? Where is the science teacher?... p…

not necessarily easy to get buy-in from the organization... different parts of the organization are responsible for their own little bits so you can’t always do it within your own team.

what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant?... so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.

EU money flows from Brussels into thousands of projects and ideas. Why does nobody notice?... some of the worst storytellers happen to be located in Brussels ... majorities in society and the media believe that the European Union belongs in the dustbin of history... eternal Brussels congresses where elitist Eurocrats engage in nothing but myopic …

real dialogue seems to have given way to parallel monologues, paired with an inability to actively listen... Rhetoric teaches the art of using persuasive tools... resolving disagreement through measured agreeable discussion, known as the dialectic method... In 1922... "communication can by itself create a community". This early definition was clo…

Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood...two people together can mutua…

the distance between strategy and execution is unfathomably wide for most businesses and executives... Strategy people too often have ideas that aren’t rooted in the reality of the operations. And operations people too often aren’t invested in executing the plans that the strategy people craft for them.... saying a specific individual is responsi…

blogs and Twitter drive two-thirds of content flow. Mainstream media has become a catalyst that blogs and Twitter drive. Responsive Experience Tops Responsive Design: ... preparing for 10 types of customers ... you know who they are via their search terms ... content changes to meet their needs. We must know who they are and start building…

the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws. - If communication can fail, it will. - If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm. - There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message. - The more communication there is, the more difficu…

Two-way communication, engagement, dialogue, conversations, collaboration, and participation are buzzwords in contemporary public communication practices... how well do organizations ... listen — the essential corollary of speaking in communication? An international research study ... organizations overwhelmingly create an ‘architecture of s…

"When starting a new [internal] communication project, asking the right questions of your customer sounds like a no-brainer. But are your questions right? ... Richard shares his method of developing the right questions to deliver the best results –  to start your IC projects right." - The power of critical thinking: How asking the right questio…

How do we want to communicate with each other? ... what kind of communicator would we actually want to use?... How do you signal that you're available to talk about movies, but not to talk about work? As we talk to more people more of the time, we'll also need smarter status indicators and smarter ways to break down conversations. The closest t…

"We couldn't understand why people without technical knowledge had to tell programmers "what" to do and, furthermore, they had to supervise "how" programmers did it." At last. Someone said it. And also quite a bit more about the timesucks that are meetings, email and commuting. These guys avoid all of them, work 4 days/week and are growing …

"the biggest impact on competitive advantage comes not from products, processes or technology, but empowered employees. And with the lines between Internal and External Communication becoming increasingly blurred, ensuring your people are engaged and empowered has never been more critical.... Leading Internal Communication teams are already bla…

Place all your content eggs in someone else's basket, you'll get what you deserve. Facebook it, after all, a business. Some basic advice here, but it amounts to the same thing: monitor, optimise & diversify: "Facebook organic reach was around 6% in February, 2014 — a decline of 49% from October. For brands with more than 500,000 likes, the fall-o…

Researchers show that the fatter the annual report, the shakier the company: "they compared the file size ... to various measures of market volatility ... the size of a report a better predictor of subsequent market volatility ... The less material investors and analysts must digest to get valuation-relevant information from company managers, the…

Applies equally to projects, where for step 1 (quoted below) the focus should be the project's USP: "Define what exactly your company is, its motto and the sole purpose of its existence. Write down everything that you think your company/website is about. Is it about marketing tips, social media, mobile apps, etc.? Define the existence of your com…

Great idea for explaining EU affairs or just wishful thinking? "A new game called Fantasy Geopolitics (think Fantasy Football meets Model United Nations) is radically changing the way high school students in Minnesota are interacting with the news." - How a High School Teacher Is 'Gamifying' World News

"The winners and other leading entries in the annual Intranet Innovation Awards show that WordPress and other open-source technologies can provide an intranet platform to meet both organisational and user needs. One of the aims of the Awards is to showcase examples of successful approaches and practices which can be applied by intranet team wit…

These questions are worth asking whether you're thinking of Influencer Outreach or not. "There are all sorts of tools you can use to reach your marketing goals, but before even getting into the discussion of goals and influence marketing, you need to ask yourself these questions: - Who are you targeting? - What are your objectives? What does…