Practice Notes

Welcome to the March Practice Notes

Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Christchurch. It’s a sobering time for us all here in Wellington as we contemplate the last week.

 

New member of our team

We welcome Marie Kiely on board. She’s an experienced facilitator and leader in the public sector. Marie has specific expertise in change management, strategy and communications.

 

Leadership Café – 31 March

You’re invited to our new Leadership Café. Check out details of the first one on 31 March here. http://www.trainingpractice.co.nz/assets/Leadership%20menu%20ed%20310111.pdf You’ll come away with up-to-date and practical ideas to lead, engage and motivate your people.

 

What's new in the world?

Make your messages sticky

Check out a great book and really useful approach to making sure what you say and write is sticky, ie, people are attracted to it and your message gets through.

Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, Random Books, 2008 (yes of course with names like that, they’re American) put forward six key ways to make your messages sticky.

1. Simplicity — Keep your messages simple and work out your core idea. Then make it profound.

2. Unexpectedness — People pay attention to things that are out of the ordinary. So comparing two unrelated items or using metaphor both work well.

3. Concreteness — Use verbs, clear words and images. Too much business and public sector speak washes over us because it’s so vague and abstract.

4. Credibility — Make your idea or your endorsements credible.

5. Emotions — Make people feel something. Logical arguments will only get you so far.

6. Stories — They’re like a mental flight simulator. We can respond quickly and effectively to the message. (We’ll look at this more in our March Tea and Toast).

 

How do we define well-being?

Well-being is a word we use all the time in the policy world and more generally as well. But what does it mean?

The UK government is trying to measure the nation’s well-being and a new paper from the positive psychology camp also shines the light on this important and huge topic.

Forgeard, Jayawickreme, Kern and Seligman have published a paper this year called Doing the right thing: Measuring well-being for public policy. It puts forward five components of happiness and well-being. These, they say, are “the best approximation of what humans pursue for their own sake”. They are:

• Positive emotion – leading to a pleasant life
• Flow - leading to an engaged life
• Purpose – leading to a meaningful life
• Relationships – leading to a life with social connections
• Accomplishments – leading to a life with achievements

This work is at its early stages. But the positive psychology movement has a lot to offer. We’ll follow this debate as it unfolds.