Professional communication is dominated by short conversations and exchanges of information at an interpersonal level. Mobile and digital technologies have revolutionised access to communication, so people can correspond through multiple channels. For very brief messages, short conversational exchanges or push notifications, instant messaging or texting may be appropriate. For other short messages, from one paragraph and up to one-two pages in length, emails, memos or letters may be used for communicating across the office and with external stakeholders.

This chapter reviews the common functions of short forms of communication in organisations and outlines ways to craft short messages using four common channels: instant messaging, email, memo and letters. While email is typically the leading channel of internal and external professional communication for an organisation, there is still a vital role for hard-copy communication documents, like letters and memos, in the business environment.

Chapter 6 delves deeply into the subject of communications in groups. We discuss the factors that hamper effective communications. We also explore the effects that gender and more broadly, member diversity can have on the nature of our communications. We include a section on factors and techniques that improve the quality of member communication in a diverse society.

Chapter 13 describe COVID-19 as a wicked problem and show how different CI-mechanisms have been used to cope with the pandemic. The first CI-mechanism is the transparent information flows during the pandemic. Knowledge is being shared at a rapid pace in the global online setting. Most of the big news sites provide citizens with updated statistics on the spread of the virus. Another example is the governmental “test and trace”-strategy that aims to maximize information about the spread of the virus at all times. A second CI-mechanism is citizen responsibility. Citizens in all countries have faced the challenge of complying with behavioral rules enforced by the government. Rules on social distancing and voluntary quarantines depend on citizen cooperation. Here, New Zealand stands out as one of the most successful countries. Third, collective learning at a system level has been important in dealing with the pandemic. One example is South Korea who learned a lot from the Middle East Virus (MERS) in 2015 a couple of years before the COVID-19 outbreak. Their past failure in coping with that outbreak, made them much better prepared than other countries.

This chapter equips readers with the knowledge to create effective health communication campaigns. It explores simple ways to ensure your audience understands your health message, including researching your audience, setting SMART aims, and reducing jargon.

This chapter examines the path from the origins of the United Nations and its Charter to the 2030 Global Agenda on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and charts the interconnectedness of fundamental concepts that underpin the human rights movement to today’s implementation of the SDGs. Specifically, we explore how the twentieth-century origins of the United Nations transformed into twenty-first-century platforms of action and advocacy through support from psychological research. Early concepts provided by key historical figures are linked to the evolution of those concepts to form the current global agenda. For example, how do the basic pillars of the UN system form a conceptual foundation for planning and advocating for human rights? The chapter illustrates the inter-relatedness of these foundations and presents perspectives to create support for successful implementation through the value of psychological science to facilitate behavior change in formal educational settings, in community settings, and with technology. We address ways in which informing civil society plays a vital role in achieving success in addition to financial support from Member States. Finally, the chapter describes how the education of citizens globally is essential to the implementation of the SDGs and presents the promise of psychological research to potentiate the effectiveness of educational models.