We need more people challenging the way we think about our work. We’ve fallen in love with “practical steps.”
But even the most confident of steps don’t… | 19 comments on LinkedIn
Treat your writing as a means to try and understand — not a way to share what you already do.
Stop acting like an expert. Start acting like an investigator.
Replace things you “must” know with things you’re curious to know.
In the end, How-To is the commodity of our lifetime. Expertise and experts are amazingly ubiquitous and accessible. More than ever, the ability to produce How-To-Think content which challenges the status quo and solves meaningful problems for people is how we stop transacting the audience and start transforming them.
This is what I want to do with environmental communication: I want to guide the government environmental outreach community, sharing what I’ve learned in local government while drawing on the ideas I’ve absorbed from other realms of interest — accessibility and community building and co-design. This is why I left my old job: to influence strategy and advocate for more effective, evidence-driven approaches to behavior change.
Chief among those in the environmental behavior change realm is working upstream to improve systems to reduce how much people need to think about. It is ironic for a communicator to realize that the most effective tool is eliminating the need to communicate as much as possible 😎
Also, he’s spot on about quitting reading marketing content. 90% of it is regurgitated hollowness.
Via Tara McMullin who added the commentary:
Expertise is marketable, for sure. And that’s fine if [your] aim is “authority,” which is just another way of saying domination.
Curiosity and openness are marketable, too, in their own ways.
Tara McMullin