Political Communication

A good way to see if your message will land is to say it aloud in public. If people visibly grimace,  you’ll know you are not on to a winner. Try it out with different political groups and different Commission departments. Former MEPs and Officials are a good test group. A good test is is on … Read more

Recently I stumbled up the work of Edwin Tufte. After reading it, I understood why most public policy communication can be better communicated by good visualisation rather than data dumps and words. Even if an image / picture tells a thousand words, writing 2 pages of A4 is still the common path. I’m not sure … Read more

Lobbyists are impacted by bias. Either their clients/members or they have a worldview that they bring to the consideration of an issue. It is normal and it harms your chances of winning. This paper, ‘Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases’, (link) suggests that … Read more

On Tuesday, the Guardian ran a story  “The 1977 White House climate memo that should have changed the world.” The memo is worth reading.   The advice and recommended actions have not changed much since 1977. What got me thinking is why does it take so long for scientific advice to have any impact on … Read more