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 […]
What can we do to prepare for the impact of low-probability occurrences but with the potential of huge impact? Climate change, solar flares, biological accidents or attacks, and technological malfeasance can all be included in this category – though the probability of these are changing al the time e.g. cyber attacks. Governments should invest in […]
The news that the vaccine timetable for those in Group 4 – most of the New Zealand population – has slipped from July to the ‘end of July’ is concerning enough on its own. But now we also see that there is a small outbreak of Covid-19 cases in Melbourne, which authorities are scrambling to […]
If you’ve ordered my paperback book from Amazon, especially in the UK and have been told it’s out of stock, I can only apologise. To be honest, I’m bewildered, confused and more than a little annoyed. I suspect this is a combination of incompetence on the part of IngramSpark (who is my printer and supplier […]
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 […]
In my lengthy blog post yesterday, I talked about what the exit narrative for New Zealand may look like now we know more about the vaccination strategy. Thinking further about this, what I’ve realised is that the task is about changing New Zealanders’ relationship with the future. Let me explain. When the pandemic started, it […]
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 […]
In conditions of uncertainty, or when we are not entirely sure how to act or what to think, we look to others for cues on what we should be doing. This is where we all need to act as leaders. To practise physical distancing, to wear a mask if we can. To wash our hands. […]
I remember back to when I first started pushing back in Central Government on NZ on the idea that the Canterbury Earthquake recovery would be done in 2 years. This was the conversation that was happening in rooms in which I was being asked to provide advice, and appearing in documents too. One of the […]