“Television provided the stimulus, but personal reaction was the real content of the spot.”

— Joseph Napolitan, The Election Game and How to Win It

The TV spot Napolitan was writing about is the Muskie heartbeat ad from the 1968 campaign. The visual was a wobbling line and a beeping heart monitor. The voice-over asked:

“Muskie. Agnew. Who is your choice to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? “

And that was the entire spot.

You’ll notice, it contains no claim about Muskie or Agnew, nor does it contain statistics or arguments in favour or against the candidates.

And yet every voter who saw it understood what it was saying — and many of them concluded that Agnew, not Muskie, was the unfit choice.

What’s fascinating (to me, at least), is that the spot didn’t put that conclusion into the viewer’s head. It pulled that conclusion from the viewers mind.

That may seem counter-intuitive on first blush, but it makes so much sense if we are already familiar with Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion, and his view that we all have pictures in our heads, and our job is to draw from those pictures. And it’s a theme Joseph Napolitan turns to in his book, The Election Game & How to Win It.

We see this same mechanism at play in the more famous Daisy ad from 1964, where the closing line was Lyndon Johnson saying “we must either love each other or we must die” — something no reasonable person could disagree with. And yet every voter understood the ad was about Goldwater, and that it was saying he would get them killed. The fear was already there, sitting in every American adult’s head since the Cuban Missile Crisis two years earlier. The spot pulled the trigger.

Napolitan calls this the difference between received and perceived media. The spot doesn’t deliver a message to a passive listener. The listener completes the spot from inside their own head. The medium is merely the catalyst. The reaction is the content. And the practitioner’s job is to choose stimuli that create this reaction.

This sounds like a theory of political advertising. It is. But it’s also a theory of all communication, and one that we ought to bring to our work every day if we are in the business of communicating with the public.

Why This Book Matters

For most of my career, I have been operating on a working theory I’d absorbed from mentors on political campaigns, or with political campaign experience. I think if these mentors had written their own guidebooks, most would overlap with Napolitan, even if his 1972 book is dated in parts, and difficult to enjoy in others. (There’s a lot of name dropping of characters none of us know, and it sometimes makes you feel like Napolitan is writing for an old boys’ club…if you know you know..)

But it’s still worth the read, because it’s the first useful manual for running a political campaign, and because its central claim is still incredibly relevant today: that communication works by recall, not by argument.

It also contains a counter-intuitive argument that voters don’t vote on issues, and most campaigners make the mistake of campaigning on issues.

Napolitan cites private polling in which he finds that when you ask voters what they actually want in a candidate, they don’t tell you they want policy alignment. They tell you they want someone who is honest and who cares about their problems. By a margin of four or five to one over a candidate whose positions match theirs.

Voters vote for the person they trust. And the gap between what the practitioner thinks voters care about and what voters actually decide on is, in my experience, one of the most expensive mistakes in this business.

I also think this book is worth a read even if you’re not interesting in running a political campaign. And that’s because every business is in the business of politics, whether the CEO knows it or not. Regulators, employees, customers, governments, activists, investors — they’re all constituencies. They all form opinions. They all vote in their own way. The CEO who pretends otherwise is a political leader who doesn’t know they’re running a campaign, which usually means they’re losing one. And the discipline that would have helped them — message definition, channel selection, controlled versus uncontrolled communication, treating the work as a one-day sale — is the discipline Napolitan documents in this book.

That’s why this old, dusty book belongs in the canon.

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What We Cover in the Episode

Here’s what we get into:

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“Bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy. One common reason for choosing avoidance is the pain or the difficulty of choice.”

— Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy

I have produced the dog’s dinner more often than I’d like to admit.

Dog’s dinner is Richard Rumelt’s term for a specific kind of failure. It usually starts with the desire to demonstrate that the team has been thoughtful. The file is complex, the client is sophisticated, and we want them to see that we’ve done the work. So we hit them with appendices, stakeholder maps, decision trees, tables that cross-reference jurisdictions and influence vectors and timing windows. The deck swells from twelve slides to fifty-six. By the time we’re done, the document is a monument to how complicated the situation is.

The client signs off. They thank us for the rigour. We feel like we’ve delivered.

We haven’t. We’ve delivered a wall of complexity that proves the team has been busy and produces no decision the client can actually act on.

For a long time I told myself this was just the cost of doing complex work. In truth, the wall of appendices isn’t what the file required. It’s what I produced when I avoided the actual work.

The actual work is the kernel: diagnose what’s going on, decide what’s pivotal, refuse the rest, concentrate the result. That often takes a single page, not fifty-six slides.

Rumelt spent forty years inside boardrooms as a consultant and a UCLA Anderson School professor, watching organisations produce documents called “strategy” that he’d argue weren’t strategies at all. Good Strategy Bad Strategy, published in 2011, sits at the centre of a serious strategy reading list because it takes a structural question seriously: what makes something a strategy at all.

Most strategies fail, Rumelt argues, because senior leaders make small political accommodations that, in aggregate, replace the strategy work with something else. Something that satisfies more people in the room, hurts no one’s interests, something everyone can sign.

“Universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice.”

Put another way: death by consensus.

Why This Book Matters

Almost every public affairs leader — including me — has produced what Rumelt would call bad strategy. A coalition assembles around a regulatory file. Five member companies, each with their own priorities. The strategy session runs. The deck grows. By the end, the document lists eight strategic objectives, twenty-three priority actions, and a stakeholder map covering forty entities. The internal political problem has been solved. The strategy problem has been avoided.

Strategy, in Rumelt’s framing, is scarcity’s child. Without the constraint of having to choose, there is no strategy — only a list of things the organisation hopes will happen.

The diagnostic test Rumelt offers is the kernel. Any real strategy has three irreducible parts:

• A diagnosis of what’s actually going on

• A guiding policy for how to deal with it

• A set of coherent actions that carry the policy forward

Pull one out and the strategy stops being a strategy. The piece most often missing is the first, because diagnosing means choosing — saying that one factor matters more than another, knowing the second factor has a constituency in the room who’ll be disappointed. Diagnosing creates losers. The room is full of people who don’t want to lose.

If your organisation isn’t producing good strategy, the first place to look isn’t the team or the framework. It’s the leader. Strategy work can be delegated. Choice cannot. Choice creates losers in the room, and only the leader has the political authority to absorb that cost. The leader’s job is to refuse the document everyone can sign and send it back. To inflict the pain the team will not inflict on itself.

The audiences we’re trying to influence — ministers, deputy ministers, regulators, board members — are drowning in information and short on time. Clarity is in short supply, and simplicity is the biggest gift you can give. The wall of appendices is what you produce when you want to be seen to have done the work. Simplicity is what you produce when you’ve actually done it.

What We Cover in the Episode

Episode 8 of Masters in Public Affairs is a deep walk through Rumelt’s argument and its application to our field. Some of what we cover:

• The core idea — a strategy is a coherent response to an important challenge — and why every word in that sentence is doing exclusionary work.

• The kernel as the minimum-viable shape of any real strategy: diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions. The kernel works as a structural test. Take any document calling itself a strategy and ask: where’s the diagnosis, where’s the guiding policy, where are the actions? If you can’t find all three, you don’t have a strategy. You have something else with the wrong label on it.

• The four mechanisms that translate most directly to public affairs work: the kernel itself, concentration and the threshold effect, the proximate objective (and Rumelt’s counter-intuitive case for shorter planning horizons under high uncertainty), and the asymmetry move — Andy Marshall and James Roche’s 1976 Pentagon memo and how it applies to industry-vs-NGO regulatory fights today.

• Four mental models: the kernel, the pivot point, the long clock, and the dog’s dinner.

• Four common misreadings of the book — the most consequential being the assumption that bad strategy is a failure of effort.

• Four modern applications, including the consultant’s dog’s dinner, pulsing in regulatory work, proximate objectives in the legislative cycle, and the asymmetry move under the long clock.

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Bonus: Four Ideas From the Book That Didn’t Make the Episode

The book has more in it than even a sixty-five minute episode could carry. Four ideas from my highlights that didn’t make the cut.

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We can’t be expected to recognize and analyze all of the aspects of each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven’t the time, energy, or capacity for it. Instead, we must often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then respond without thinking when one or another of the trigger features is present.

— Robert Cialdini, Influence

That’s the book’s spine: the human mind cannot deliberate on everything. The environment is too complex, life is too short, and the brain has adapted by building a library of shortcuts — preset programs that fire when a trigger feature shows up.

Expensive things? Usually good.

Experts? Usually right.

Crowds? Usually onto something.

The shortcuts are adaptive most of the time. They have to be, because we rely on them constantly without noticing.

Cialdini calls this click-run. Press a button, the cassette plays. And this classic book is about what happens when someone figures out how to press the button without providing any of the substance the button is supposed to signal.

From that one idea, he builds a taxonomy:

Although there are thousands of different tactics that compliance practitioners employ to produce yes, the majority fall within seven basic categories. Each of these categories is governed by a fundamental psychological principle that directs human behavior and in so doing gives the tactics their power.

Seven principles:

1. Reciprocity

2. Commitment and consistency

3. Social proof

4. Liking

5. Authority

6. Scarcity

7. Unity.

More than forty years of critique haven’t dislodged this structure, which is remarkable on its own. And even more remarkable is how you see these principles everywhere after you read about them. I can’t look at an e-commerce site anymore, they all so desperately try to implement Cialdini’s principles. And as we learn, that’s a common mistake many practitioners make—to think they can apply these principles as a playbook. You can, but if you do, you’re an amateur.

Why this book matters

Most of what we do in public affairs assumes deliberation. We write briefs. We build evidence. We sharpen arguments. We respond to objections with better reasoning. And then we watch the campaign with the stronger case lose to the one with the stronger trigger.

And that’s a bit of a shift for me. I’ve long argued that the campaign with the most emotive case wins. I think that is largely true, but I had to re-read this book to realize I’ve been missing the whole bit on triggers.

Influence explains this gap. It says, plainly, that most influence happens below the level of argument. The receiver isn’t stopping to weigh the evidence. They’re running a preset program that was loaded before the argument arrived, and that will still be running after it’s forgotten. Whoever fires the program controls the decision.

The Petrified Forest case in the episode is a clean example of this. A park sign designed to reduce theft — written the way most of us have written similar PSA campaign content at some point — nearly tripled the theft it was meant to prevent. A different sign, making the same moral plea through a different trigger, cut theft in half. Nobody on either side was persuaded differently. A different preset program ran.

Read the book as a practitioner and you start seeing that mechanism everywhere. In coalition letters. In compliance dashboards. In the way regulators frame rollbacks. In the way stakeholders react when freedoms are withdrawn. Influence is more than forty years old, and it keeps getting more relevant, because the environment keeps getting noisier and the shortcuts keep mattering more.

What the episode covers

Episode 7 of Masters in Public Affairs goes deep on Influence:

• Why Cialdini wrote the book, and why his three years undercover inside compliance industries matter more than most readers realize

• The core idea: most influence works by pulling a trigger, not by making a case

• Four of the seven principles in depth — reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, and scarcity — and how each one shows up in modern public affairs practice

• Three mental models drawn from the book: the ledger, the granted freedom, and the authority shortcut

• Three common misreadings, including the biggest one: treating the book as a playbook rather than a diagnostic

• Four applications for the work we do now — the modern lobbyist problem, signatory inflation, the dashboard problem, and the politics of withdrawn benefits

• The mastery lesson: why reading this book doesn’t immunize you against anything in it

This is the companion to Episode 5 on Pre-Suasion. Pre-Suasion is about what should happen before the ask. Influence is about what makes the ask land. You need both.

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Bonus: three threads from the book that didn’t make the episode

There’s more material in Influence than any single episode can carry. Three threads I left out that are worth their own time.

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For 13 years in a row, Avis lost money. Thirteen years. Then, in 1962, it ran a campaign that said: “Avis is only number two in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.”

Which is when it began to make a lot more money.

However, some people take away the wrong lesson from this story.

They think Avis succeeded because they tried harder — that the message was about effort and hustle. Ries and Trout are clear that’s wrong. Avis succeeded because they acknowledged where they sat in the prospect’s mind and used that position to their advantage.

They didn’t claim to be better than Hertz. They didn’t pretend to be the leader. They said: we’re number two, and here’s why that’s a reason to choose us.

Here's the fascinating part: Avis didn't change the product. They didn't get better cars or friendlier staff or lower prices. They changed where they sat in the customer's head. They accepted the mental hierarchy that already existed and found a way to make their rung work for them.

And for some reason, then took that tremendous success and toss it out the window. After the company was acquired, Avis ran a new campaign: “Avis is going to be number one.” That’s advertising your aspirations — telling the market what you wish were true instead of working with what the market already believes. It didn’t work. Ries and Trout call it wrong psychologically and wrong strategically.

Why did the first campaign work and the second one fail? Same company, same product, same market. The difference was where they started.

The first campaign started with what already existed in the prospect’s mind — Hertz is number one, and everyone knows it — and built from there.

The second campaign started with what Avis wanted to be true and pushed it outward. The mind accepted the first and rejected the second.

That distinction is the entire argument of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, published by Al Ries and Jack Trout in 1981. Their conclusion:

“You look for the solution to your problem not inside the product, not even inside your own mind.

You look for the solution to your problem inside the prospect’s mind.”

The solution to your communication problem is not a better argument, a sharper brief, or a more compelling data set. The solution is understanding what already exists in the mind of the person you're trying to reach — and working backward from there.

Ries and Trout call this "positioning," and they argue it's the foundational discipline for anyone trying to communicate in an over-saturated information environment.

They wrote that in 1981, with three television networks and no internet. The environment has gotten worse. The mechanism hasn't changed.

Before you read another brief or walk into another meeting, ask yourself: What does the person across the table already believe about this issue, about my industry, and about the competitive landscape of stakeholders trying to influence this decision?

If you don’t have an answer, your brief is probably noise to them.

If you do have an answer, you’ve got a shot at a position.

Why this book matters

Most people file Positioning under marketing. It lives on CMO bookshelves, gets taught in business schools, and a lot of practitioners in our field have never picked it up because they assume it’s about selling consumer products.

But I think it belongs in the public affairs canon. So much of what we do is positioning — positioning an issue so it occupies a specific mental slot before a competitor gets there, positioning our organisation so a minister thinks of us first, positioning a specific policy ask so it’s hard to oppose.

We did a lot of that in the Prime Minister’s Office, making sure every piece of legislation had a title that would make it politically painful for the opposition to vote against. It works.

Ries and Trout’s core diagnosis is that the mind doesn’t receive information neutrally. It defends against it. It screens out what doesn’t match existing beliefs, ranks what gets through into simplified hierarchies, and anchors hard on whoever gets there first.

In 20 years of practice, the pattern I’ve seen more often than any other is teams that lead with their cognitive argument — strong data, sound logic, clear recommendations — and expect the quality of the evidence to carry the day. It almost never works the way we expect it to. The decision maker already has a picture in their head. If the brief doesn’t fit that picture, the mind doesn’t update. It filters.

Ries and Trout explain why, and they offer a disciplined alternative: start with the prospect’s mind, figure out what’s already there, and build your position around that reality instead of against it.

What We Cover in This Episode

• Why a 1981 advertising book belongs in the public affairs canon

• How the mind filters, ranks, and anchors information — and what that means for how we design campaigns

• Why leading with facts and cognitive arguments is the most common pattern in public affairs and the least effective

• Naming as a strategic weapon — lessons from the PMO on legislative titles and policy framing

• The coalition dilution trap: how the instinct to build consensus often destroys the sharpness of your position

• Why the public assesses your issues against their own self-identity before deciding whether to support you — a blind spot the book itself underexplores

• The Avis, Tylenol, Xerox, and Taster’s Choice case studies

• Connections to Lippmann’s stereotypes, McRaney’s identity-protective cognition, Luntz’s language discipline, and Centola’s threshold dynamics

• Four mental models worth carrying around: the Ladder, the Créneau, the Teeter-Totter, and Sacrifice

Listen and subscribe here:

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Bonus: five ideas from the book that didn’t make the episode

The episode covers the core architecture of positioning. But there’s more in the book worth knowing. Here are five ideas from my highlights that didn’t make the cut.

Read more

Researchers at Stanford wrote a news article about a city dealing with a three-year rise in crime. The article was factual and cited real statistics. But they changed one word.

• Half the readers saw crime described as a ravaging beast.

• The other half saw the same article, with the same statistics, but crime was described as a ravaging virus.

After reading the article, the “beast” readers wanted to catch criminals and lock them up. The “virus” readers wanted to address root causes — joblessness, poverty, education.

One word had a 22% shift in policy preference. More than double the effect of gender. Nearly triple the effect of party affiliation.

One word, placed before the evidence, had more influence on people’s prefered policy solutions than whether they were liberal or conservative.

Why?

Not why did the word matter — that part we can intuit. “Beast” sounds like something you hunt. “Virus” sounds like something you treat. But that doesn’t explain the scale. Why would a single word, buried in the opening sentence of a news article, override the effect of someone’s political identity? Why would it outperform the thing we normally treat as the strongest predictor of policy preference?

You might think this is about word choice — about finding the right metaphor. It’s not. Or not exactly. Because if it were just about metaphor, you’d expect the effect to show up after the evidence, as a way of interpreting what was already read. But this word appeared before the facts. It set the lens through which every subsequent statistic was processed. The readers never knew it was happening.

That’s the puzzle Robert Cialdini spent thirty years trying to solve. And his answer reframes how I think about campaign design:

“The factor most likely to determine a person’s choice in a situation is not the one that counsels most wisely there. It is the one that has been elevated in attention, and thereby in privilege, at the time of the decision.”

— Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion

The factor most likely to determine what someone decides is the one that happens to be focal in their mind at the moment they decide. Not the most accurate factor. Not the most reasonable. The most focal.

“Beast” made animal-control associations focal — capture, cage, punish. “Virus” made disease-control associations focal — treat causes, prevent spread. The word didn’t argue for a policy. It activated a lens. And once the lens was in place, the facts arranged themselves around it.

Cialdini calls these windows “privileged moments” — brief, identifiable points in time when a person’s receptiveness is elevated because their attention has been directed somewhere specific. The frame is set. The soil is prepared. And whatever lands next has an outsized chance of taking root.

This is the book I think we need to understand before reading Cialdini’s more famous work, Influence. That’s because Influence answers what makes people say yes. Pre-Suasion answers the prior question: what do the best communicators do before they make the ask?

Why This Book Matters

I sound like a broken record, as I’ve said this often, but most of us over-invest in the quality of our argument and under-invest in preparing the moment of reception.

Cialdini spent years embedded in the training programs of top persuaders across industries. He watched their techniques, observed their pitches, studied what separated the best from the rest. And he noticed something that surprised him. The best performers didn’t spend their extra time refining the pitch. They spent it on what happened before the pitch.

They recognized that they were frequently in no position to change what they were selling. Someone else in the organization had designed the product, the program, the plan. What they could control was the sequence — what the audience encountered before they encountered the offer.

That’s the problem this book is solving. And it’s our problem too. We’re rarely the ones who designed the policy, the position, or the announcement. What we control is the context in which it arrives. Cialdini’s evidence — across decades and hundreds of studies — says that’s not a secondary consideration. It may be the primary one.

And here’s what surprised me most: he’s not just talking about long lead-time preparation. The beast-versus-virus study wasn’t a months-long conditioning campaign. It was a single word in an opening sentence. Pre-suasion operates at the scale of weeks and also at the scale of seconds. The question you pose. The image someone sees. The word you choose to frame the problem. All of it can be leveraged in the instant before your message arrives.

What We Cover in this episode

• Why the best persuaders spend more time on what happens before the pitch than on the pitch itself

• The focusing illusion: whatever is focal seems important, whatever is important seems causal, and whatever isn’t focal doesn’t seem to matter

• How that one-word shift — “beast” vs. “virus” — rewired policy preferences more than ideology did

• What I call the three-gear engine of pre-suasion: attention creates importance, association spreads the effect, commitment locks it in

• Why asking “Do you consider yourself a helpful person?” before a request raised compliance from 29% to 77%

• Four mental models worth carrying around: the focusing illusion, the association bridge, the commitment lock, and the authenticity filter

• Why detection of an influence attempt doesn’t just weaken it — it reverses it

• The Iraq War embedded reporter program as a case study in institutional attention management

• What may be the most powerful five-word persuasive communication in thirty years of research

• The difference between attention-grabbing and pre-suasion — and why fear without an action pathway generates avoidance, not behaviour change

• Why mastery in this work is in the preparation, not the performance

Listen and subscribe here:

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Bonus: six ideas from the book that didn’t make the episode

The episode runs thirty-five minutes and covers the core architecture. But there’s a lot more in Pre-Suasion that’s worth knowing. Here are six ideas from my highlights that didn’t make the cut.

1. “If-When” plans: simple follow-through tools

Good intentions translate to action only about half the time. The failure isn’t motivation — it’s that people don’t recognize the right moment to act, or they get derailed by competing demands.

Read more

“Successful social change is not about information. It’s about norms.”

— Damon Centola, Change

That sentence sits at the centre of one of the most important books I’ve read in the past decade. And it took me a while to fully absorb what it means.

We spend enormous energy in public affairs on information. Crafting the right message. Finding the right frame. Deploying the right spokesperson. Getting the word out. And all of that matters. But Damon Centola, a network scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, spent two decades running experiments that show the same thing over and over: getting the word out is the easy part. The hard part is getting people to act on it. And those are two completely different problems that require completely different approaches.

Here’s the distinction. Information spreads through casual contact. One person tells another who tells another. Centola calls this a simple contagion. News, gossip, awareness — one exposure is enough. You hear it, you know it, done.

But behaviour change — adopting a new technology, joining a coalition, supporting a policy, showing up at a protest — is what Centola calls a complex contagion. And complex contagions don’t spread through reach. They spread through reinforcement. People need to see multiple others in their network adopting before they’ll move. Not one influencer. Not one compelling message. Multiple independent sources, all pointing in the same direction.

That one distinction — simple vs. complex contagion — reframes almost everything we do. It means the viral model is wrong for the work that matters most. It means the influencer playbook is structurally flawed. It means awareness campaigns can actually backfire if they create visibility without adoption. And it means the most important variable in any change effort isn’t the quality of the argument. It’s the architecture of the network through which that argument travels.

That’s what this episode is about.

Why This Book Matters

I’ve been in public affairs for over 20 years. I’ve designed campaigns, built coalitions, run grassroots mobilisation efforts. And I’ve operated, like most of us, on a set of assumptions borrowed from marketing and epidemiology: maximise reach, find the influencers, make the message sticky.

Centola’s work challenges those assumptions head on. It shows, with controlled experiments, that they lead us to do the opposite of what works for complex change.

A few examples from the book that stuck with me:

Hybrid corn in Iowa was objectively superior to what farmers had, free to try, and desperately needed as the Dust Bowl approached. After years of aggressive marketing, adoption sat at 1%. The marketing itself strengthened the rumours working against it.

PrEP in Zimbabwe — a free daily pill that eliminates HIV transmission — was so ineffective that villagers who told doctors they were taking it had no traces in their bloodstream. Social stigma was more powerful than the fear of death.

Google Glass had a billion-user company behind it and massive awareness. But the visible gap between early adopters (Silicon Valley techies) and everyone else created resentment, not aspiration. The norm turned against the product.

In each case, the failure wasn’t in the message or the product. It was in ignoring the social network that would interpret it.

What We Cover in the Episode

This is a long episode — and intentionally so. There’s a lot of ground to cover and I wanted to do it properly. Here’s what we get into:

• The core distinction between simple and complex contagions, and why it matters for everything we do in public affairs.

• Fireworks networks vs. fishing net networks — why redundancy, not reach, drives adoption. And the finding that “laggards” who need multiple sources of reinforcement before adopting are 300 times more likely to stick than early adopters.

• Countervailing influences — why targeting the most connected, most senior people first is often backwards. A person with 500 contacts is roughly 10 times less likely to adopt than someone with 50, because the silent non-adoption of the majority drowns out the signal from the few.

• The 25% tipping point — Centola’s experimental proof that a committed minority of 25% can overturn an established norm, and why activism below that threshold looks like failure even when it’s accumulating toward a breakthrough.

• Three principles of relevance — when to use similarity (credibility and solidarity) and when to use diversity (legitimacy). Most of us default to similarity. When the barrier is legitimacy, that default hurts us.

• The polarisation experiment — where removing decorative party graphics from a screen was the only difference between zero learning and 90% accuracy among Democrats and Republicans looking at the same NASA data.

• China’s 50 Cent party — how every mechanism for creating social change can be run in reverse to prevent it. The dark mirror of the entire framework.

• And the mastery lesson: diagnose the infrastructure before you design the campaign.

Listen and subscribe here:

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Bonus: Four Ideas From the Book That Didn’t Make the Episode

I took a lot of highlights while reading this book. More than I could fit into even a long episode. Here are four ideas that didn’t make the cut but are worth your time.

1. Stigma as a Resource

In the 1990s, public health campaigns were failing to reduce HIV transmission among injection drug users. The problem was familiar — drug users didn’t trust mainstream healthcare providers and weren’t interested in advice from authority figures.

Read more

Masters in Public Affairs goes back to the foundational books in this field and extracts the principles that the best practitioners return to again and again. One book at a time.

“You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and pre-existing beliefs. It’s not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listeners’ shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you say is even more real, at least in a practical sense, than how you perceive yourself.”

That’s Frank Luntz, right at the top of Words That Work. And that passage should sting a little. Because most of us have been on the wrong side of it.

I’ve certainly had that moment. I craft what I think is a perfect message. Clear, accurate, well-supported. Send it out. And the response makes no sense. People heard something we didn’t say. They reacted to a meaning we didn’t intend. They filtered our words through beliefs we didn’t account for.

Luntz spent decades studying exactly this problem. His career was built on one observation: communication is determined by the receiver, not the sender. The quality of what you said is measured entirely by what the other person did with it after your words left your mouth.

He puts it in a way I keep coming back to: “The act of speaking is not a conquest, but a surrender.”

That’s a hard idea for people in our field. We think of communication as projection. We build messages, we push them out, we measure impressions and reach. Luntz is saying the opposite. The moment you speak, you’ve handed your words over to someone else’s brain. You’ve surrendered control of what they mean.

Why this book matters for practitioners

Words That Work was published in 2007. The political examples are dated. Luntz spends a lot of time on the 2004 election and Rudy Giuliani’s approval ratings — not all of which ages particularly well.

But the principles underneath those examples haven’t moved.

The receiver’s filter is still operating. People still process your words through their existing beliefs before those words arrive as meaning. Sequence still matters — the order you present information changes how people interpret it. Persona still determines credibility — what you demonstrate always outweighs what you claim. And single-word reframes still reshape entire categories of public perception.

What makes this book earn its place in the Masters in Public Affairs canon is where it sits relative to the other books we’ve covered:

• In our first episode, we looked at Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, which established that people respond to the pictures in their heads, not to reality itself.

• In our second episode, David McRaney’s How Minds Change showed us the cognitive science behind why those pictures are so resistant to change — and that questions work better than arguments for shifting them.

Luntz takes both of those insights and builds a practitioner’s toolkit. He’s the bridge between understanding how opinion forms and knowing how to work with that formation process in real time. Lippmann diagnosed the problem. McRaney explained the science. Luntz shows you what to do about it in the campaign office.

That said, the book has an honest limitation worth naming. Luntz built his career on a specific empirical method — dial testing, instant-response focus groups, real-time language testing. The book almost entirely skips that methodology. You get the proven outputs without the process for generating your own. He gives you the answers from his lab. He doesn’t give you the lab manual.

His ten rules are useful defaults. They are not a substitute for doing the listening work with your own audience.

What we cover in the episode

Here’s what we get into:

• The Kissinger story that captures the entire thesis in a single anecdote — how one word he didn’t choose undermined a decade of foreign policy.

• The core idea that everything else in the book hangs from: communication is a receiver-side phenomenon. Your intentions don’t determine what people hear. Their existing mental pictures do.

• The multi-layered mechanism Luntz describes — how words get filtered through the listener’s beliefs, how sequence changes meaning, how persona creates or destroys credibility, and how single-word reframes can restructure an entire industry’s public perception without changing the underlying product.

• Four mental models for practitioners: the receiver’s filter, results over process, education before motivation, and consistency with freshness.

• The common misunderstandings — including the honest limits of language, the line between reframing and spin, and why the ten rules are a starting point rather than a complete system.

• Modern applications, including why the silence-equals-guilt principle matters more in the age of social media than it did when Luntz wrote this book.

• And the mastery lesson: the best communicators are the best listeners. Your audience already has the language. Your job is to find it.

Listen and subscribe here:

• Spotify

• YouTube

• Apple Podcasts

• Substack

Bonus: Ideas from the highlights that didn’t make the episode

Every episode requires cuts. Here are a few ideas from my reading notes that didn’t make it into the final script but are worth your time.

Read more

“There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer that is going to change their mind. The only way they are going to change their mind is by changing their own mind, by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they’ve never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently.”

— Steve Deline, deep canvasser

That quote comes from a man who has had more than 15,000 recorded conversations trying to change people’s minds on contentious social issues. He’s an activist with a clipboard, not a psychologist or a political scientist. He and his team at the Leadership Lab in Los Angeles stumbled onto a persuasion technique that independent researchers later measured as 102 times more effective than traditional canvassing, television ads, radio, direct mail, and phone banking combined.

And his core insight, the one that everything else in their method hangs from, is that persuasion is something you help someone do to themselves.

This is the idea that sets up David McRaney’s entire book, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. McRaney is a science journalist who spent years telling people there was no point in trying to change minds — that motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and tribal psychology made it essentially impossible. Then the shift in public opinion on same-sex marriage broke his framework. In 2012, the majority of Americans opposed it. The very next year, the majority supported it. If minds can't be changed, how do you explain that?

The book is his attempt to answer that question. And the answer he found, across deep canvassers, street epistemologists, cognitive scientists, and conflict negotiators, is remarkably consistent: the techniques that actually work all share a common structure. They create conditions where people re-examine their own reasoning and discover its weaknesses themselves.

Blaise Pascal figured this out four hundred years ago: "People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others." Four centuries, and we're still designing campaigns around the information deficit model: the assumption that people disagree because they don't have enough facts, and that providing those facts will bring them around.

It won’t. And McRaney shows why.

Why this book matters

If your job involves shaping opinion, building coalitions, or moving decision-makers from one position to another — this book challenges the operating assumption underneath most of what you do.

The assumption is that better information produces better outcomes. That if we can just get the right facts in front of the right people, presented clearly enough, they’ll come around. This the information deficit model, and the evidence against it is overwhelming.

Political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber reviewed more than 100 published studies on voter persuasion. Canvassing, TV ads, direct mail, phone banking. None of them produced lasting attitude change. Zero.

McRaney documents techniques that do work and explains the cognitive mechanisms behind them, giving practitioners something we can build on.

The core reframe: this is a post-trust crisis, not a post-truth crisis. That distinction matters enormously. If the problem is post-truth, you solve it with better facts. If the problem is post-trust, you solve it with better relationships and a fundamentally different posture toward the people you’re trying to reach.

What we cover in the episode

This is the latest episode of Masters in Public Affairs, where we go deep on the foundational books in public affairs and extract the mental models that hold up over time. In this episode, we cover:

The information deficit model and why it fails. McRaney traces the assumption that facts change minds through centuries of well-intentioned failure — from 19th-century rationalist philosophers to Benjamin Franklin to Timothy Leary to the modern “post-truth” panic. Each generation believed the next information technology would resolve disagreement. Each was wrong.

The Redlwask experiment. Subjects exposed to a moderate dose of negative information about their preferred political candidate became more supportive — not less. Below a certain threshold, counter-evidence strengthens the position you’re trying to change. Above it, people accommodate. There is no gentle middle path. Half-measures inoculate.

SURFPAD and the construction of reality. Why reasonable people looking at the same information reach opposite conclusions — and why neither side experiences themselves as having made a choice. This connects directly to Lippmann’s pseudo-environment from Episode 1, and McRaney gives us the neurological mechanism underneath it.

Tribal psychology and the cost of changing your mind. Brooke Harrington’s line — “Social death is more frightening than physical death” — explains why people cling to beliefs that outside observers find absurd. They're clinging to the group, and the belief is just the badge.

Three field-tested persuasion methods. Deep canvassing, street epistemology, and the Smart Politics method. Three independently developed techniques that converge on the same principle: questions over arguments, stories over facts, the other person's reasoning over your own.

Network percolation. How opinion change scales through populations, and why you don't need thought leaders or elites to start a cascade. The key variable is the susceptibility of the network.

Listen and subscribe here:

• Spotify

• YouTube

• Apple Podcasts

• Substack

Bonus: Ideas from the book that didn’t make the episode

There’s more in How Minds Change than fits in a single episode. Here are a few ideas from my highlights that are worth knowing, even if I didn’t have time to develop them fully.

Read more

“The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event.”

That sentence is the entire book.

Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published in 1922, is built around one observation: People don’t respond to reality. They respond to pictures of reality in their heads.

This sounds obvious. It isn’t.

If you take it seriously, if you follow Lippmann through the implications, it changes how you think about communication, persuasion, democracy, and your own judgment.

The setup

Lippmann opens with the outbreak of World War I. He describes people going about their business in the days before war was declared. Making plans. Buying goods. Starting careers. All based on a picture of Europe that had already ceased to exist.

Then he gives you the end of the war. November 1918. The armistice is announced. People celebrate. The war is over.

Except the armistice hadn’t actually happened yet.

And in the five days between the celebrated armistice and the real one, several thousand men died on the battlefields.

That gap between the picture in people’s heads and the reality on the ground is where consequences live.

Why this book matters

Lippmann was one of the most influential journalists of the twentieth century. He advised presidents. He helped shape American foreign policy. And he had watched, from the inside, how governments shaped public opinion during wartime.

He was writing as someone who participated in constructing those pictures. He knew how the sausage was made.

What he produced is the closest thing we have to a diagnostic manual for how public opinion actually forms.

The mechanism he describes hasn’t changed. The technology has. Dramatically. But the underlying process is the same now as it was a century ago.

If you work in public affairs, communications, advocacy, or government relations, this is foundational. It belongs in the canon.

What we cover in this episode

This is the first full episode of Masters in Public Affairs. We cover a lot of ground in half an hour…

• Why Lippmann wrote this book and what he observed during World War I

• The core idea of pseudo-environments and why we respond to fictions as powerfully as realities

• The mechanism of how public opinion actually forms, step by step

• Three mental models you can extract and use immediately

• Common misunderstandings and why this isn’t a license to manipulate

• Modern application and what this means for practice today

• The mastery lesson of diagnosis before action

Listen and subscribe here:

• Spotify

• YouTube

• Apple Podcasts

• Substack

Bonus: what didn’t make the episode

There’s more in Public Opinion than fits in a single episode. Here are a few ideas from my highlights that are worth knowing, even if I didn’t have time to develop them fully.

Read more

Most people working in public affairs didn’t learn the job in a classroom.

I certainly didn’t. And most of the best practitioners I’ve learned from didn’t either.

I learned by doing — by watching campaigns succeed and fail, by sitting in rooms where decisions were being made with incomplete information and real consequences. I wrote things that didn’t work. I read research I misunderstood. I slowly realized that being busy was not the same as being effective.

It took years to notice a pattern that should have been obvious from the start: public affairs rewards people who take the fundamentals seriously. Not just early in their careers, but especially after they’ve been doing the work for a while.

And yet, as a profession, we’re surprisingly bad at teaching ourselves.

There is no shared curriculum. No agreed-upon canon. No common understanding of what everyone should master before they start improvising.

So most people improvise from day one.

They borrow tactics from the last campaign. They reuse the same playbook in different contexts. They confuse access with influence and activity with progress. When things don’t move, they work harder instead of stepping back.

I’ve done all of that myself.

One belief has become clearer to me over the years: public affairs is about winning public support.

Voters — not politicians — are the ultimate constraint in this work. Elections force clarity. Public opinion sets the boundaries of what’s possible. Campaigns, not arguments, are what actually move outcomes.

Once you understand that, a lot of bad public affairs suddenly makes sense. It also explains why so many practitioners struggle early in their careers. Understanding how public opinion works, how framing shapes perception, how coalitions form, how strategy differs from tactics — these aren’t advanced skills. They’re basic. Most of us are never taught them properly.

After more than 20 years in this field, I’ve found myself doing something that might look counterintuitive.

I’m going back to the basics.

Elite athletes are famous for this. Kobe Bryant spent hours on fundamental drills long after he’d mastered them because he understood that fundamentals decay if you stop training them. The greatest players are never too good for fundamentals. They return to them with more intention than everyone else.

The same is true in public affairs.

Writing clearly. Reading research without fooling yourself. Defining what winning actually looks like. Understanding framing. Designing campaigns instead of delivering outputs. These are skills that need deliberate practice, not one-time exposure.

And they’re skills I had to teach myself.

Masters in Public Affairs is an attempt to build the kind of learning I wish existed when I was starting out — and the kind I still want access to now.

Each episode focuses on one core skill in the craft and uses a book that belongs in a modern canon as a training tool. Not as theory. Not as commentary. As something you can actually learn from and apply.

Some of the books are old. Some are uncomfortable. Some aren’t “public affairs books” at all. That’s intentional. We’re sticking to what works.

If you’re early in your career, this is a way to accelerate learning that usually takes years of trial and error.

If you’ve been doing this work for a long time, this is an invitation to sharpen the fundamentals again — without apology.

A note on how this connects to my other work.

Power Shifts exists to explore how institutions adapt — or fail — under continuous political, regulatory, and structural change. It looks forward.

Masters in Public Affairs is the practical foundation underneath that work. It reinforces the basics that make good judgment possible in the first place.

Think of it as the curriculum inside the institution.

This project is for people who are serious about the craft.

People who want to understand why campaigns work — and why most don’t.

People who believe this profession can be learned, and relearned, if you’re willing to invest the time.

If that sounds like you, welcome.

The fundamentals are waiting. Pick your preferred training court:

• Spotify

• YouTube

• Apple Podcasts

• Substack

And the first episode is waiting for you: