We were conducting a brainstorming session for a “Trust” initiative in the wake of lay-offs. Someone suggested posting the initiative’s “Key Behaviors” on the inside doors of restroom stalls. “Create Transparency” and “Produce Results” won by a furlong.

That burst of creativity happens all the time when you talk to people who are not communicators by profession. They’re not inhibited by “rules.” They don’t know you’re not supposed to “leap to tactics.” They’ve never heard of IABC.

And in the economic downturn, they often find themselves with another job, in addition to the one they’re paid to do: managing communication support for their projects.

So we’ve been working a bit lately on the Trail with a Mix of people outside the field: executives, scientists, technicians, front-line employees and other project managers. It’s instructive to work closely with them on communication, because they open a window to how people who are not communicators, by profession, view our field.

• The CEO of a major Foundation that supports children told us he wants more in-depth conversations between his field people and the community, around such issues as, for example, nutrition and education: What do you eat in the home? How many hours is the TV on? He wants his associates to record their conversations, their successes and failures, and publish them on a web site, as narratives, as an asset, and as a legacy. He said: “Learning is our profit.”

That is a candid and useful view on how face-to-face and online can work together.

• In our planning discussion on Trust, the group identified their goals as these:
o Having conversations with purpose
o Regarding knowledge as something to be shared, not withheld
o Kindness and courtesy, linked to profitability
o Candor and transparency around personality conflicts

Those are all communication issues; you’d expect them to surface around a Trust initiative, as Trust is the base on which successful communication is built.

The Foundation executive and the members of the Trust team are smart, hard-working people of good will – our people, our audiences, the ones we’re paid to serve. They want their organizations to succeed, they know that communication is essential to that success, they respect technology, but they won’t back down on the necessity of difficult conversations.

That’s not to discount the value of political rhetoric. In a brainstorming session on tactics, one participant expressed his disagreement with a proposal by saying: “I’m not connecting to the idea.” That tactic was worth the trip alone, and here’s why:

Consultants listen for a living: We learn everything we know from our client partners. I used that lever – “I’m not connecting to the idea” – the following weekend, when my wife Rebecca suggested we see “Nights in Rodanthe.”

Thanks, Dave.

Last week’s “Trail Mix” contest to find the best headline about the presidential election produced such impressive results that we’re having difficulty choosing the winners. (Yes, we know; we’re all winners.)

So cast your ballot: Choose your top three favorite headlines posted on the blog. We’ll compare your picks with our own—and award some nearly fabulous prizes.
The entries, all of which you can read in the previous “Trial Mix” blog, are, as I say, impressive.

Some are creative puns on the president-elect’s name:
“Obama is After Osama”
"Obama Yo’ Mama!

Others show real passion, both anger . . . :
“You Fooled a Nation: Now Don’t Fuck It Up”

. . . And hope:
“Barack Wins: America Officially an Obama Nation”

Some are humorous:
“Wall Street Journal: “Stocks Lower on Obama Choice of Chris Rock as Fed Chair”

And others let the stark elegance of the fact speak for itself:
New York Times: “Mr. Obama Elected President”

Why are these headlines so good – when many that we see in intranets, employee publications, annual reports, and so forth – are so bad? “Challenges and Opportunities.” “President’s Message.” “Played a Key Role.” “Meet John Smith.”

You could say that it’s because a once-in-a-lifetime election inspires creativity, passion, elegance and hope, and calls forth the writing skills that embody those values.

You’d be wrong. Listen – we’re paid to bring those skills and that passion to our work every day, regardless of the topic. There are no small stories.

--Pat and Jim

Whenever we do custom training inside an organization, headline writing is always at the top of the “needs work” list.

Corporate headlines are typically dry and boring. They don’t sell the benefits of the story they purport to be advertising. They don’t inform; they don’t entertain. They merely suck, and readers pass them by.

Online heads should be more functional than clever. In e-mail alerts and on home pages, these headlines are links that should give us enough information to decide whether we want to click through and read on.

But print headlines—and online heads after the link—should be more than functional. They should sing. They should be clever and pithy. Yes, I said pithy. Official definition:

pithy, adj.:
1. brief yet forceful and to the point, often with an element of wit
2. relating to, full of, or resembling pith.

After Barack Obama’s historic election, Pat Williams and I started playing around with the headlines that might appear in newspaper, magazines and web sites. Here are a few of our favorites:

Variety: Barack to the Future
Chess Magazine: Black Man in White House
Fox News: Radical Bill Ayers votes in Obama’s precinct!
Rolling Stone: Michelle, Our Belle!


The Wall Street Journal: Stocks soar on hopes of 2012 Palin bid


That’s a start, but we want to hear from you. C’mon. Show us your pith. Use all that pent-up creativity to mark this momentous occasion.

Winner gets a free hour of phone consultation.

Smart people can do really dumb things.

We’ve all been there, making bad decisions on important matters out of worry, or fear.

Organizations are like that, too. Only dumber. Consider how many companies are handling the current economic downturn. This is a time when communicators should be earning their keep, helping their leaders decide the best way to convey bad news—and a plan of action to get past it.

Instead, some executives conclude (on their own) that the best possible course of action is to shut down all communications, hunker down behind closed doors, make decisions that affect their employees’ livelihood and then communicate those decisions in a way that makes everyone feel like crap.

Cutting costs? Sure. Everyone wants to do that, especially when the economy slows. Why not enlist the help of the hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of people who might have a good idea about changing what they do just a bit so it wouldn’t cost quite as much. As the smart companies figured out long ago, lots of little changes can add up to real savings—and maybe even save a few jobs.

Even more important, enlisting the help of employees to cut costs lets them know that we’re all in this together.

What happened to all that “we’re a family” stuff? That message echoes through the hallways when times are good. When the news is bad, companies still act like families, just dysfunctional ones. Instead of looking out for one another, they suddenly turn into your drunken Uncle Al, who passes out at the Christmas table, or that strange cousin who doesn’t seem to have a real job and looks stoned most of the time.

Layoffs? They happen, especially in a downturn. But the execs behind the curtain, often with the unwitting help of HR, decide to handle layoffs in such a horrible, ham-handed way that they leave everyone feeling angry, especially those who survived.

Our colleague Marc Wright loves to talk about the Kubler-Ross Change Curve, and I guess I never fully understood it until I saw it play out at a major corporation that had to lay off some of its work force. The whole idea of the change curve is that bad news is like the process of grieving someone’s death, as originally described by Elizabeth Kubler Ross.

You start off in shock and denial and try to negotiate your way out of the news. Then you grow fearful and depressed. Then you’re just pissed off. Finally, you understand, accept the change and move on.

Marc’s point is that you can’t move on a straight line from denial to acceptance, and yet that’s exactly how most organizations handle layoffs. Feelings of fear and anger don’t go away just because you ignore them. They linger—and fester—and get in the way of truly moving on.

One more dumb thing: Organizations often use a downturn as a reason to reorganize everything, as if that was the reason the company’s fortunes went south. In some cases, this is nothing more than a smokescreen. Instead of talking about real problems and real solutions, organizations try to keep busy by shuffling people around.

We have a crisis. To the org chart!