Alignment
When pressure rises on projects, experienced technical teams slip into jargon, defensiveness, or silence. That is when communities and stakeholders trust begins to unravel, and the social licence to proceed frays at the edges.Â
Improve your delivery outcomes, read below and learn how to:
- Spot when a room is losing trust before anyone says so
- Tell people what cannot change without losing credibility
- Report back to communities in a way that builds trust, not just ticks a box
- Hold a difficult meeting steady when it goes somewhere you did not plan for
- Close the loop on engagement commitments, even through disruption
I use AI a lot. Ha, that felt like a confession, which surprises me because a year ago it was still quite judgey, judgey in the LinkedIn world for comms people to admit they were using AI. There are s...
This week I’ve been doing something a little different.Â
I’ve had the interesting experience of being on the other side of the communications and engagement equation and have been enjoying a foray in...
I recently facilitated a session with a small group of people who had deep experience in their sector and strong views about what needed to change. The conversation sat within some genuine constraints...
I’ve been thinking about two community engagement groups I worked with on a project where trust was already a little shaky.
Both groups had a session with a specialist engineer who had worked in his ...
Over the past year, I watched a contracted project manager quietly hold together one of the most demanding stakeholder relationships on a project.
The community member was influential among their pee...
The power of reciprocity in relationship strategy
On a roading construction project I worked on, the community had been through the wringer. The cyclone had taken a heavy toll and, twelve to eighteen...
Yesterday, I covered a large section of my home office windows with sticky notes. From a distance, it probably looked like a stationery shop had exploded in the room. Up close, I was trying to map wha...
After seven weeks in sprint mode, I’m taking a breath and reconnecting with some of the people who received very little of my attention while the deadline took over.
This week includes time with frie...
“You only come to us when you need something. This isn’t a relationship, it’s insulting.”
I’ll never forget those words.
I had just started at NZTA and was meeting an important stakeholder about a b...
I've spent four years teaching teenage students to de-escalate what I call an ego attack. Not a criminal attack, where someone wants your bag, your compliance, your body. An ego attack, where someone ...
The project team warned me about him before I arrived at the venue
Dave, not his real name, had been arrested and was in the local paper months earlier, over a different matter entirely, nothing to d...
My daughter is home from Dunedin for the mid-semester break, and the weeks before she arrives always do the same thing. Time compresses. I make plans, try to cram in more work than the calendar allows...
THE ALIGNMENT NEWSLETTER
Want one practical tool for handling pressure, every week?
Every Tuesday, ALIGNMENT lands in your inbox with one behavioural insight and one tool you can use the next time a room gets difficult. No theory for theory's sake. Just what works when the stakes are public and the pressure is real.