When you set out to convince, you make the conversation into a battle to be won and lost. You bring force and, as Newton’s laws of motion tell us, force creates counter-force. You’re creating resistance before you’ve even finished your argument. Winning means that in the end, we will just have one side (our own!). We want that unity of opinion, but we create opposition in the process.

This checklist is an instrument to help public health departments and communicators improve trust and communication, especially in anticipation of serious public health issues, health emergencies, and when misleading rumors are abundant. To develop the checklist, the project team collected data on frequently observed rumors during public health emergencies (PHEs), interventions to address such rumors and improve trust, and the experiences of 100 key informant public health experts and practitioners working on the front lines. The checklist reflects current communication science and the voices and lived experiences of public health communicators who have worked in an environment of persistent rumors and declining trust in public health. The checklist provides public health communicators with tools, resources, and internal advocacy opportunities organized across 5 priority sections. These sections can be broadly described as 1) focusing on internal operations, 2) building connections with the community, 3) establishing opportunities with “secondary messengers,” 4) anticipating loss of trust in a PHE, and 5) creating meaningful and accessible messages.

We argue that other peoples’ failures provide a neglected source of managerial learning that is associated with enhanced learning transfer. Due to their negative valence, stories about other peoples’ failures as compared to stories about other peoples’ successes should elicit a more pronounced motivational response, such that people elaborate the content of failure stories more actively. As a consequence, the knowledge gained from failure stories will more likely be applied on a transfer task. We expect this motivational response to failure stories and its benefits for learning to be most pronounced for people who view failures as valuable learning opportunities. We report an experimental study, in which participants were exposed to a managerial training with stories about either managerial successes or managerial failures that delivered the same learning content. Results showed that stories about managerial failures led to more elaboration and learning transfer, in particular for participants who see the learning potential of failures. We discuss how failure stories can be used to stimulate managerial learning in educational and organizational settings.