About Stephen Dafoe

One of my earliest professional lives was in entertainment.

Magic taught me that an audience is never passive. People are always deciding where to look, what to believe, whether they are interested and whether you have earned another few seconds of their attention.

It taught me timing. Preparation. Presence.

It also taught me that what the audience experiences matters more than everything happening behind the scenes to create that experience.

That lesson has followed me into almost everything I have done since.

Writing taught me something different.

A performance disappears when it ends. Writing stays there.

You have to make the argument hold together. You have to research what you do not know, decide what belongs and what does not, and keep working until the thing says what you intended it to say.

Over the years, that led to several books, historical research, articles, essays and a great deal of writing that existed for much more practical purposes.

Writing taught me discipline.

It also taught me that clarity usually comes from removing things, not adding them.

Publishing brought all of that into the real world.

For many years, I was involved in community news, where the stories involved people I knew, decisions being made around me and events that were still unfolding.

There were deadlines. There were consequences. There was no theoretical audience.

News publishing for 18 years, 15 of that as owner and publisher of The Morinville News, taught me to distinguish between what was interesting and what was important.

It taught me the value of accuracy, context and fairness.

And it taught me that once something is published, you no longer control what people do with it. You had better understand what you are saying before you say it.

Municipal government gave me the view from the other side of the table.

I spent 12 years on Morinville Town Council and in board and committee work, where the issues were no longer simply things to write about. They were decisions that had to be made.

That taught me how imperfect most decisions really are.

There are competing interests, incomplete information, limited resources, political realities and people who experience the consequences differently.

It also taught me how quickly reasonable decisions can become unreasonable in the public mind when nobody explains them properly.

Communication cannot fix a bad decision. But a good decision can still go badly if nobody understands why it was made.

Photography and video gave me another language.

Sometimes a paragraph is the right tool. Sometimes it is a photograph. Sometimes it is thirty seconds of video. Sometimes it is a four-minute film and other times it is 19 months spent chronicling the life story of an athlete.

The important part is not the medium.

The important part is knowing what you are trying to communicate before choosing one.

That is why I have never been particularly interested in defining myself by a tool.

The camera, the page, the presentation, the website and the stage are all just different ways of getting something from one person to another.

Most of my professional work these days is in strategic communications.

Through Soaring Pig Studios, I serve as Chief Communications Officer for Roseridge Waste Management Commission and continue to serve a small number of long-term clients.

Much of that work begins before anyone knows what needs to be produced.

What is happening?

What actually matters?

Who needs to understand it?

What do they need to know?

What happens if we communicate it well, badly or not at all?

Only after that do we start talking about reports, presentations, public information, websites, video, design or anything else.

That approach did not come from a communications textbook.

It came from all the things that came before it.