An Examination Of Citizens’ Awareness And Perception Of The Estate Management Profession In Anambra State

EXAMPLES OF AWARENESS

In this section we motivate our definition by giving examples where our definition coincides with the intuitive notion of awareness.

1.       DECREASING AWARENESS

Consider a stack of research papers that you want to read. You download and print a new term paper report and put it on top of the stack. The term paper report has high awareness as it is very easy to enumerate that paper, picking it off the top of the stack. But over time you will put more papers on the stack and the term paper report now falls towards the middle of the stack. Your awareness of that paper goes down as enumerating papers would take longer before the term paper is enumerated. As the environment changes over time, you can become less aware of a given object. Awareness can be recovered. You might see a talk mentioning the term paper report. In the context of the talk, your awareness of the paper becomes high again. This may cause you to put the Karp paper once again at the top of the stack, in effect changing your environment to increase the awareness of the paper.

2.       AWARENESS OF UNAWARENESS

In the context of Nigerian Presidents, you are likely aware of recent presidents like Muhammadu Buhari and Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, earlier presidents like Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru Musa Yar’adua and famous presidents like Olusegun Obasanjo and Nnamdi Azikiwe. But you likely have far less awareness of say Ernest Shonekan. Until you have read the last sentence. As a basic principle you cannot be aware of what you are unaware of.

2.3.1         BUILDING AWARENESS

1. Communications from others
2. Access to information
3. An event
4. An observable condition
5. Readily-available information
6. Catastrophic disaster
7. Gradually weakening financial performance

Activities for building awareness:

• i. Sponsor messages
• ii. Managers’
• iii. Public communications

OBSTACLES TO BUILDING AWARENESS

Building awareness can be much more difficult than it sounds. For example, when you hear a proposed change, do you trust the sender of the change message? Do you believe the reasons they give for why the change is needed? Even in our everyday life, we encounter many ideas for change in which we do not agree with the messages we’re given.

As an effective manager, you will need to understand the activities that drive awareness take into account those resisting factors or restraining forces that prevent the awareness message from taking hold with your audiences. In some cases the resisting factors are so strong, that even the best communications plan will be insufficient. Effective change management plans are designed to surface and deal with these resisting factors.

Potential resisting factors:

• Comfort with the status quo
• Credibility of the source or sender of the message
• Denial that the reasons for change are real
• Debate over the reasons for change
• Rumors or misinformation