We are well into our first day back at Alert Level 4 as an entire nation, and I’m watching the 1pm update as new cases are announced and the genomic sequencing points to the variant originating in NSW, Australia. If you’re feeling anxious, it’s important to understand what stokes your anxiety and what calms it. […]
Over the last few days I’ve had the privilege of traveling down south to Twizel and Timaru for a couple of meetings. This was a postponed trip from a couple of weeks ago, when we had both bad weather in the area I was traveling to, and a possible outbreak of the coronavirus in Wellington […]
Yesterday, I had a great chat with the Editor of the Twizel Update, resulting in a front page story of this week’s issue. This is ahead of me visiting Twizel on June 28th to do a public talk in the evening at the Events Centre from 7-8.30pm on COVID-19 and our future from a psychological […]
Let’s imagine that we have a vaccination campaign that has gone really well in New Zealand, with a high proportion of the population receiving the Pfizer / BioNTech jab. As more people get vaccinated, community protection also increases. Let’s also imagine that, globally, numbers of cases of Covid-19 have fallen dramatically, but pandemic coronavirus variants […]
This psychologically-informed post offers suggestions for reframing the current narrative for strategic, high level Covid-19 communications. My analysis describes the current successful minority influence approach, but also the risks of continuing along this path. I propose moving from a story of safeguarding to a narrative of the potential benefits that are unlocked through vaccine uptake […]
The two earthquakes overnight offshore are likely to have woken many people up, who then had trouble getting back to sleep, or who had to evacuate because they lived in a potential tsunami-risk area. Or perhaps they had kids who were frightened and couldn’t get back to sleep. Or maybe you slept through the whole […]
Low risk doesn’t mean no risk. This is the coronavirus comms challenge now. Anger directed against what is essentially a highly mobile, adaptive and close to inanimate object whose sole purpose of being is to replicate itself quickly and widely doesn’t really make sense. So we direct our ire towards the unwitting hosts of the […]
I REMEMBER CLEARLY saying to Sarah, my wife, in March 2020: “This is going to last a long time. My intention is to stick to the pillars of Structure and Empathy to guide the response and communication of it. I’m going to need your help. If I stray too far from that, can I please […]
The New Zealand Government has this afternoon taken the decision to lower the Alert Level of the Auckland Region to Level 2, and down to Level 1 in the rest of the country from later tonight. Auckland’s Level 2 will be reviewed further on Monday. Many people will be relieved. The fact that most children […]
For some, this might have brought on a sense of deja vu. An evening press conference, being fronted by the Prime Minister. And lots of ‘abundance of caution’ appearing in the afternoon press conference. After an emergency Cabinet meeting this evening, the NZ Government has decided to #ActLikeItIsTheVariant in determining its response to the community […]