Effective public health practice requires a combination of expertise and influence. Yet gaining expertise in the subject matter is only one element of practice: the ability to influence outcomes, policy, services and the people who make decisions is crucial. To deploy your expertise to have an impact, you must hone leadership and management skills to persuade, encourage and empower others. This chapter, therefore, aims to:

• offer a brief overview of different schools of thought in leadership;

• propose a simple framework of eight core domains for identifying skills and areas for professional development;

• introduce some popular theories for understanding others, which can enable you to work more effectively with individuals and influence within teams and organizations; and

• signpost to some key models of conceptualizing change and how to lead or manage change.

The African buffalo is one of the best-researched of all ungulate species even though it must give way to some North American deer species, an elephant-seal species and the red deer. The African buffalo had some monographs dedicated to it, but much new research has been carried out on the species since that time, which is brought up to date in the present volume. This allowed us to make an inventory of what we do not know yet about this important species. For that purpose, we made an inventory of research topics, or questions tabulated under three different knowledge domains, (i) ‘known unknowns’, (ii) ‘unknown unknowns’ and (iii) ‘unknown knowns’. The ‘known unknowns’ we categorized as those research questions sitting as it were in the backs of the minds of the current suite of African buffalo specialist; our inventory yielded 37 research issues. The ‘unknown knowns’, we portrayed as evidence-based scientific knowledge on buffalo that a current generation of scientists appear to have forgotten. This proved difficult, but three topics were identified. Here we also draw attention to the fact that modern scientists appear to ignore francophone literature, which is rather unfortunate as West and Central Africa are to a large extent francophone. Not using this repository of information may lead to knowledge decay. Finally, we share thoughts on the ‘unknown unknowns’, which we described as ‘knowledge once we have it will upset our present thinking, perhaps about African buffalo, perhaps on ecology evolution, or on aspects of the veterinary sciences’. Under this category, we touched on 15 issues, but perhaps our imagination was too limited. So, we share in total some 60-odd questions and ideas, and we hope that at least some of these questions or ideas will kindle someone’s imagination and drive to bring knowledge on this great species further.

Voters are the MVP of any coalition if they are engaged with the coalitions Agenda. How should a business publicly articulate its agenda in order to maximize voter engagement? Or, alternatively, how can messaging reduce the publics engagement with the opposing coalitions agenda? This chapter deals with these questions.

Narrative medicine has been around as long as people have tried to make sense of illness, but there is often a disjoint between the patient and the people administering the treatment. Narrative medicine is an attempt to resolve this by incorporating all relevant people into understanding and changing the patient's story of their illness. Patients and clinicians both have narratives, and medical practice should be structured around these narratives and how they impact on the patient's life. Understanding these narratives can help the patient resolve their problems relating to illness, whether that is about recovery, chronic illness or dying. Medical practice is imperfect, and the limitations should be recognised in narrative medicine.

Chapter 2 examines criteria that people use when forming perceptions of how they and others have been treated is fair or unfair. One of the important criteria that people use is whether they were given sufficient opportunities to voice their opinions about important issues at stake. It is crucial that voiced opinions are given due consideration. Being treated in a polite and respectful manner by people, and especially people of power, is also among the core criteria for evaluating procedural fairness. Generally being treated in a fair and just manner by competent and professional authorities is also among the important criteria of perceived procedural fairness. Taken together, perceived procedural fairness boils down to feeling to be a full-fledged member of your community and society and, ideally, the entire world.

Many mediated channels are available for relational partners to use for relational partners. At times these channels are facilitating long-standing relational processes such as relational maintenance, whereas at other times the channels provide new mechanisms for relational tasks such as gathering information about potential and new romantic partners or presenting the relationship to the couple’s broader social network. This chapter reviews relational processes through the lens of social media. The chapter overviews how romantic couples use social media in the initial stages of relationships to find potential romantic partners and seek information about potential and new partners, to communicate maintenance behaviors throughout the relationship, and the impact of social media during the dissolution phases. Both positively valenced behaviors (e.g., comanaging relational impressions and using social media to create electronic tie-signs) and negatively valenced behaviors (e.g., ghosting and cyberstalking) are discussed.

The widespread adoption of social media, mobile phones, and online dating apps has drawn more attention toward the importance of media technologies in romantic relationships. However, most observed relational functions and effects of digital media are not novel. Rather, they have been documented previously with traditional media such as books, letters, radio, newspapers, recorded music, television, and the telephone. Romantic relational phenomena manifest across both traditional and digital media due to similar affordances. This chapter provides an overview of research on traditional media across relational processes (mate seeking, relationship initiation, relationship escalation, relationship maintenance, relationship disruption, and relationship dissolution), identifying key social affordances, and introducing relevant theories. We discuss how people use media in relationships, how media consumption affects our relationships, and how people foster relationships with media characters (i.e., parasocial relationships).

New technologies hold great promises of making crisis response better. These technologies may improve information positions and enable faster communication as well as produce more rapid and targeted responses in crises. As such, technological progress boosts effectiveness and efficiency, while reducing risks to frontline responders. Still, the reality does not always match these great expectations due to technical failures and implementation difficulties as well as persistent social problems that cannot be resolved by new tools or systems. There are often even undesirable side effects. The dilemma for frontline responders revolves around finding the right attitude toward new technologies. Technological progress is a historical inevitability, but new innovations should only be adopted if these match a recognized problem in the response and not just for their own sake. There are guiding principles, based on earlier experiences, that offer useful insights in how to best incorporate modern tools and systems. This requires a prudent approach that considers new technology with a mix of hesitation and curiosity.

Interorganizational coordination is increasingly viewed as crucial to frontline crisis response. Contemporary crises often require the collective action of multiple organizations. Many researchers recommend integrating frontline responders of diverse organizations to make good use of scarce resources and synchronize their actions. In practice, frontline responders frequently choose fragmentation by dividing responsibilities and limiting interactions instead. This allows them to implement a fast response without being dependent on others. At the same time, it can lead to safety risks and suboptimal outcomes. Frontline responders face a dilemma, because they have an interest in pursuing both integration and fragmentation. It is useful to note that coordination may not always be the right course of action in a crisis. Even if it is, it does not necessarily need to be formal, as much coordination emerges in the operational field. For more structured ways of coordinating, the nature of the crisis and existing interorganizational relations are useful guides in how to organize the coordination. Generally, it must be conditional upon the situation at hand.

The Introduction opens with a close reading of information proliferation and human–machine interfaces in James Joyce’s Ulysses to establish these themes as central to the book’s exploration of the emergent early-twentieth-century phenomenon Love labels “cybernetic thinking.” She traces biographical and intellectual connections between T. S. Eliot and Norbert Wiener (the “father of cybernetics”), provides an overview of the field of cybernetics and its definitional challenges, and proposes that a reconsideration of cybernetics’s cultural lineage – as evident in experimental modernist texts – will contribute a valuable new dimension to our understanding of both modernism and cybernetics. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s notion of the “cybernetic fold” is redeployed to describe the rich openness to data-processing-possibility that emerges during these decades, when high-speed computing is imaginable but not yet technologically realized. After contextualizing the project within existing media- and modernist-studies conversations, the Introduction culminates with a close reading of Wiener’s cybernetic approach to information that links his perspective on technical innovation to modernist aesthetics.

The Coda pushes the implications of the book’s argument both backward and forward in time. Love reads Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes as a nineteenth-century precursor to the cybernetic impulses of data-collection and data-processing, and points to the growing body of criticism that is probing the historical parameters of cybernetic thinking even further back in time. Love proposes that the emerging sense of a literary–critical cybernetic paradigm is particularly significant to scholars of modernism in light of the field’s recent global turn. Finally, she illustrates how the cybernetic reading of modernist formal experimentation can both illuminate and offer aesthetic alternatives to contemporary technological debates surrounding issues like surveillance and privacy. This conclusion drives home the argument that modernist literature can help us understand the longer and more diverse cultural history of our present-day, information-rich world; it also gestures to new possibilities for research and analysis that might push our awareness of cybernetic thinking back even further into earlier cultural moments, movements, genres, and texts.