HIT Piece 3.31.2015

What do you do when you’ve been asking the right questions in the wrong way?

And you’ve been doing it for two years.

I’ve been thinking about this project, Human Services Consulting and Training that I’m building. I have been thinking deeply about marketing, branding, connecting, publishing and—ultimately—scaling.

Continuing to do what got me here, isn’t going to get me any further than I already am. And when the right questions have been asked in the wrong way, two years is long enough for that kind of self-involved navel gazing.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve laid the foundations for the beginning of something else. Something great. Something enterprise-level, C-suite level and above. But to get there, it’s time to pivot.

Away from end-users and toward buyers
Away from social engagement and toward deeper relationships
Away from frivolity and toward more focus

And, if you’ve been paying attention, day-in and day-out, for the last couple of years, you will note that my approach has become sharper and narrower, even as my options have increased to do work that really matters in the space that I am building.

Conflict resolution doesn’t scale, but engagement, relationships and products do.

It’s time to start asking the right questions in the right way….

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] Trust is not Scalable

Conflict resolution is not scalable, because trust is not scalable.

Make no mistake though, the products of trust are scalable. And the results of trusting an organization, a brand or even another person are scalable.

But trust is not scalable.

And the reason that it’s not is nuerologically and psychologically complicated, but basically, trust wanes the further removed my relationship is from another person. Not a brand, and organization or a system, but a person.

Conflict resolution in organizations, thus becomes unscalable, because the trust at the core of resolving conflicts doesn’t exist in the first place, because the parties involved are far too separated by the barriers of organization, values, culture, mindsets, behaviors, beliefs, etc.

This is the reason mediation works so well for neighborhood disputes, but not so well for sexual harassment lawsuits. When conflict resolution processes become a strategy, rather than part of an overall organizational culture, they fail miserably. Mediation, conflict resolution and other forms of ADR, should be at the core of a culture’s development as an organization grows, so that the products of trust—increased revenue and productivity to mention just a couple—become expected.

And so that, when disputes arise—and they will—the trust is already there and litigation (and even more untrustworthy, unscalable process) becomes unthinkable.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] Values as a Service

Even in a high tech, money saturated, hard charging culture, values, just like symbols, still matter.

Think of values in terms of the following metaphor: If values were the cloud, the story that we tell ourselves and others through our behaviors, language choices, and other means, would be the apps in the cloud.

The Ellen Pao case, the issues in Indiana, the arguments and disagreements over healthcare, how the government should spend money (guns vs. butter) and even the arguments and disagreements in your organization, all come down to values.

Culture comes about when people come together to form a community and abide with each other. Those people typically agree—either tacitly or openly—on the shared values their culture will demonstrate to the wider world. And what values will be reinforced with each other. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then what does the Ellen Pao verdict say about the culture of the American judicial system, the culture of litigation in this country, and the culture of Silicon Valley VC’s?

Well, we here at HSCT believe that the verdict says three things:

The culture of Silicon Valley is functioning exactly as it was meant to. Which means that it is going to have to fundamentally be broken and reshaped to mirror where the business culture of America is going: Silicon Valley VC culture is not alone here. All over America this is happening, in corporate boardrooms and splashed across websites. And no, public shaming of “guilty” VC’s, a la, Brendan Eich isn’t going to change anything significantly, either.
The culture of litigation is overdone, overblown and over relied upon to “resolve” some of the most value driven issues in the country today: From healthcare legislation to gay rights, the courts and litigation are being relied upon to settle arguments that are about the human heart, emotions and values. But the law—which reflects and supports a dominant value system—cannot change individual hearts or values. Not even a little. Don’t believe us? Think about this: How many racists are still doing business, building companies and making money in America, post-1968?
The culture of the American judicial system has to change: Should issues be brought before the court? Yes, but don’t expect justice. People usually sue when their feelings are hurt (a heart based issue), when they feel as though they aren’t going to be treated fairly (a heart based issue) or they feel as though they won’t be heard (a heart based issue). This is the place where restorative justice circles, public conversation projects and other heart based, values based process need to be implemented at a wider cultural scale. Don’t believe me? Ok. How many personal stories from women who have been (or are being) sexually harassed, can the VCs at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (or other male dominated, hyper competitive VC firms), possibly hear in a room, before they change their minds and hearts? 200? 300? 1,000?

Tech oriented people, engineers, software developers, finance geniuses, and management leaders, like to operate in numbers, because numbers seem value neutral. After all, who can argue that 2+2 =4? But, when they have to deal with people, sometimes, they would rather not. Will VC’s in the Valley clam up, slowdown in hiring women, and become more closed, following the Ellen Pao verdict?

Maybe. Maybe it would be better for the culture of VC firms to model the attitude they try to foster in the culture of the start-ups they fund. But the rational hearts of the people who believe in numbers rather than values, are the ones that have to shift before the culture will.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Emotional Labor

Just the other day at a workshop, after filling out a communication assessment, we heard this:

“I’m an engineer. This is all great stuff, but really hard to quantify.”

And later in the workshop, after we made another point, we responded by saying:

“You can quantify the effects of emotional mismanagement on the bottom line, in terms of lost productivity, health issues, declining quality of production and overall employee disengagement.”

The engineer nodded his head.

Emotional labor is the final frontier. It’s a space that care workers, mothers, therapists and social workers have inhabited for years. And, in an economy where manually (or technically) laboring was once seen as scarce, emotional labor didn’t matter much.

And yet…

40 hours a week, the average person goes to another location, away from their home, and interacts with people that they did not choose
26% of people report that they are disengaged at work and with work, and 13% of those people are actively disengaged at work
44% of companies are outsourcing jobs to other countries, across all sectors, with the vast majority of employers reporting that they are doing so “to control costs.”

What kind of labor matters?

Well, the kind that can’t be outsourced:

The kind that addresses people’s emotional inner lives, where we spend 99% of our time.
The kind that addresses issues of self-awareness, leadership, emotional intelligence, focus, discipline and many other emotional tasks.
The kind that builds resiliency encourages accountability and that develops people to be more than just cogs in the machine.
The kind that develops and encourages interpersonal communication, conflict engagement, and responsibility.

The challenge in this paradigm shift (for every organization), comes when 20% of the people in an organization are doing 80% of the emotional labor.

But, emotional labor, moving forward in a world where more and more will be accomplished by fewer and fewer people , is the only kind of labor that matters.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] The Power of Story

Stories lie at the core of the human condition.

Stories, myths, fables and legends serve a psychological need that human beings have for connection and understanding. The people in professions that understand this, from priests and pastors to marketers and con men, can weave stories so fabulous that they can sell a person anything, from a washing machine to the cannibalistic sacrifice of virgin flesh.

Psychologists and psychiatrists know the power of stories.

They spend years in the medical and mental health fields, carefully mapping the ways in which cognitive connections develop and then the ways in which those connections are externalized with the outside world. Therapy is just a refashioning of a story that you have told yourself for so long that it has become true for you.

When we talk about stories, we inevitably have to talk about fiction and fact, truth and lies. Content and Context serve an important function here, because the ways we determine what the truth is (both “for us” and “for the other”) are important. What may be truth for you in a story may be an out and out lie for me.

Mediators specialize in getting to the truth by first acknowledging that everybody tells a shaded truth: Not necessarily a lie, as in, a story told with the intent to deceive, but a truth that is bent and shaped through content and context to service a particular interest: theirs.

The third factor that influences all of this is power. Now, social justice practitioners and thought leaders talk a lot about power: who has it, who doesn’t, and who is using it to oppress or to privilege.

Power, however, is also based on content and context. This is a tough truth for true believers in social justice, and why the panacea of a socially just future will never be fully recognized.

There are too many competing stories.

When every story competes for primacy in the external realm of an open, capitalistic market, some stories win and some stories lose. The story of Coca-Cola is obviously a winner in the marketplace.

The story of all kinds of insurance—from life and health to car and home—is neither winning nor losing. The story of MySpace is definitely losing: As did the story of Pets.com, Borders and Woolworths.

When we think of the personal brands that we present online, from our social media presences to our tendency to spam and flame each other in the “below-the-fold” comments section of our favorite online articles, stories and storytelling become even more important.

Case in point:

I read an article here http://tinyurl.com/q98wp8c, which served to activate my own stories that I tell myself about writing, famous authors, the nature of public opinion, online journalism, Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, obscure Viennese writers, World War 1 intellectualism, racism, social justice, wealth inequalities and the ubiquity of online blowhards.

And that was in the first two minutes after I had finished reading the article.

A couple of hours later, I was talking to my lovely future bride and her son and relating the story of the article, further embellishing the story I was telling myself about the article that I had just read.

This is the power of a story and of storytelling. I start out reading someone else’s words and end up making my own meaning of them. Then, to make matters worse, I influence others in how they create their own stories and how they intersect with the external world, featuring myself, the article, the people with whom I interacted and, of course, the stories that they tell themselves.

When conflicts happen, the circle closes, reopens and closes again on the stories that we tell ourselves. Because while conflict is change and conflict is dynamic, it is disruptive, disjointing and personal. The stories of conflicts vary, but they typically begin with:

“They did thus and so to me. And I turned around and did thus and so to them, but they are at fault and they owe me an apology because they started it, I’m innocent and that’s the truth.”

And there it is. The two most important words in any story, whether it’s a marketing story to get you to buy a car or a religious story to get you to buy a belief, the most important thing in any story is the Truth.

Writers, bloggers, journalists, poets and others have long known the power of the truth in a story, which is why stories work so well. They appeal at a deep level to something in the human psyche that very few ever talk about: the desire to be entertained.

This desire is why fiction outsells nonfiction.
This desire is why “reality” TV is always scripted.
This desire is why, even in the midst of a terrible trauma or a horrible conflict, resolution is so hard to come by: Either one, or both, of the parties is being—at some elemental, cognitive level—entertained.

Dopamine is a neural chemical that is triggered in the midst of pleasure and pain. It lulls a person to sleep even as it creates bonding by also releasing that other neural chemical, oxytocin.

The desire to be entertained is intimately linked to the desire to be lulled and pleasured by connection. And the ultimate way to connect is through storytelling.

Forgiveness, reconciliation, anger management, deep breathing, mediation, mindfulness, are all hard and require work to maintain. They require the frontal cortex where creativity, art, poetry, music and all the other hard things live, to be activated and used.

Power enters into this in the area of telling the truth, versus telling a story. Power equals control and he (or she) who has the power (mostly power “over” another person) gets to make the rules.

Power used to be concentrated in the hands of the very few, however, as technological advancements have occurred; power has dissipated to even being in the hands of the very young and the very old. Social media, the Internet, blogs all are forms of communication that give everyone the same power and the same access, though outcomes will vary.

And thus we close the first part of the loop: Stories, fables, legends and myths serve a purpose. They allow us to categorize, compartmentalize and make sense of the world. Stories that we tell ourselves are the most important stories of all. This is why motivational speakers the world over talk endlessly about having a positive mindset; which allows us to tell ourselves stories that are positive and uplifting.

But, what do we do when the stories aren’t that great: When the trauma, dysfunction and conflicts lie at the core of our stories?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Business Mentors I

Business mentors for the savvy peace builder are just as important for the development of long-term success as are other elements of building a project.

No peace builder can truly “go it alone” but too many get trapped in silos, or behind clients, believing that they will just “learn the building of a business on the fly.”

This never works.

Our recommendation: Design a personal Board of Directors. This should consist primarily of professionals with industry experience who have no emotional investment in the success or failure of your venture.

Then, meet with them once a month (at minimum) and treat them to coffee. Listen to their ideas and expertise, but also keep your own council.

A great resource to begin this process (that’s free) is your local chapter of SCORE (link here).

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 03.24.2015

The applause from the crowd surrounding the arena is starting.

First, it begins with one set of hands, giving permission to several more, and several more, until the entire arena is wrapped in thunderous applause.

But then, when they aren’t calling for you anymore, when the lights go down, and the crowd melts away into the night, back to their homes and their responsibilities, and I am forgotten, what’s left?

The people I inspired and the people I will hire.

The blog, the podcast and the coming video channel and the online web hub/portal.

The research, the writing, the books and the ebooks.

The modules, the trainings, the seminars.

The software, the apps, the projects.

The work.

Because, one day, I will leave all of these arenas permanently, never to stand on these particular stages again.But…not just yet.

Keep that one set of hands clapping….

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsonsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] The Imp At The Door

Tell us what you think when you hear the word “impossible”?

The word means different things to different people, but we think that the most important function of the word “impossible” is that it focuses us on lack and regressions, versus prosperity and ascension.

In dictionary terms, the word serves as a descriptor to a person, place or thing that is very difficult, not able to occur, or unreasonable.

Now, your personal definition of “impossible” may vary from ours, but much of the time, when we address the coming conflicts of the next ten years –over access to the Internet, water use, energy use—the nascent solutions that we propose to resolve the conflicts are deemed by listeners to be “impossible.”

Though, it was pointed out to us, that the word “impossible” begins with the construction “imp,” which is a mythological being associated with mischief, disruption and change.

When the normal, the expected and the day-to-day is disrupted with a sense of mischief, typically the imp is alive and well, creating trouble, difficulty and unreasonableness.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] You Are Doing Great Things, I Know It…

Performance evaluations, feedback, criticism and “suggestions for improvement” in people’s performance all serve as ways to separate leaders from followers.

We had a conversation this week about caring (see here) and we keep coming back to the idea when we think about how leaders should encourage their followers’ hearts. Most of the time, people analyze what we do—as either leaders or followers—and then make judgments about our performance. Often this judgment is then equated with a person’s character, wisdom or ethics.

But organizations and institutions can’t—and don’t—care. Only people do. And in order to encourage people to continue to follow, leaders must care about the people that they are leading, enough to guide them through the necessary risks to execute the mission.

Performance evaluations, feedback, “suggestions for improvement,” criticism, and many other forms of feedback are often used as a cover for the vulnerability that really caring about followers requires.

“But what do you do if people aren’t doing the ‘right’ thing and screwing up the process?”

This question is a corporate variation on “How do you tell the truth in grace to someone?” and it’s an excellent one. Here are three ideas:

Know what you care about as a leader and why—Some leaders care about process more than people. If that’s the case, recognize and praise the process, rather than attempting to recognize and praise the person.
Be genuine with yourself as a leader—Some leaders struggle with self-awareness. But feedback, criticism and other forms of “improvement” lectures don’t work, and can often be seen as blameing and excuse making. Being genuine with yourself means care about what your role is before caring about your followers’ roles.
Seek to understand first—Some leaders are self-absorbed, narcissistic and vainglorious. Harsh sounding words, yes, but in a world where genuine recognition of others is the only way to effectively encourage a heartful followership, a leader must seek to understand their followers’ hearts—and care about them.

In the short run, caring about people and building relationships is the only way to go for a leader. Celebration and rituals, combined with the importance of symbols, done with authenticity and heartfelt pride in ones followers, can do more to cement long term growth than any amount of money, service development or process change.

Encouraging the heart requires caring about people and creating long term, value based relationships.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] “Yes We Can!”

“Yes we can!”

Boy, isn’t that a catchy phrase.

The word “we” is synonymous with enabling others to act, but there are a couple of other pieces that go along with that word:

There are two kinds of power—Many leaders resort to “power over,” when they lose faith or trust (more on this in a minute) in their followers to accomplish the goals that leaders have articulated. Leaders with bad visions (i.e. Hitler, Stalin, etc.) do this more often than leaders with good visions (i.e. Steve Jobs, Moses, etc.). But “we” creates the second kind of power, “power with.” It empowers followers to see the vision and implement it in their own way.
Trust is always an issue—When leaders “let go” and truly begin trusting “the masses” to move a vision forward, some followers aren’t going to get the message right. Some followers are going to be deceitful and self-serving. And some followers are going to fall away when it gets to be too hard. Martin Luther King, and Gandhi both experienced this, but it did not diminish their faith and trust in their followers.
Carrying capacity increases—A leader who doesn’t have to control the “scope creep” of a spreading vision, is not really a leader. Part of acting on a vision is that when action starts, so do reactions: from friends, enemies, circumstances and opportunities. How does a leader know when to say “yes” and know when to say “no”? Well, when the number of followers increases because of trust and empowerment, then the ability to say “No, I can’t right now…but give it to Sally over there” becomes a statement of collaboration, rather than a principled rejection.

We without empowerment, trust and collaboration is just a word with smoke but no fire and followers can easily become cynical when its overuse transforms from inspiration to cliché.

“Yes we can!”

Ok. How will you?

-Peace Be With You All-