HIT Piece 06.16.2015

When something is missed that should have been obvious, that feels like a monumental failure.

What feels worse than that is when something is missed that should have been obvious, and no one tells the person who missed it about the mistake.

The feeling that no one is paying attention enough to point out the flaws in the design, is the same feeling that Steve Martin had playing to an empty room early in his career.

Online however, there are plenty of empty rooms, with people talking in them, but the people talking can’t see that the room is empty, the audience is slipping out and the lights are slowly being clicked off, one by one.

This is the real reason many people don’t try to do stand-up (or start blogging) but would rather attend a stand-up show, or casually consume blog content. There’s no risk of failure or shame in consumption.

There’s also no risk of humiliation, because no one read, or listened, closely enough in the first place to point out constructive criticism.

-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] The Balance is Not Mocked

Permission and permissiveness should not be confused.

Permission is something that is traditionally given. Permissiveness, however, is a passive act. Primarily a passive-aggressive act.

Permission seeks to collaborate and coordinate with another party. Permissiveness seeks to establish its own boundaries and is based in a “no” that sometimes comes off as a “yes.”

Permission is up front in establishing the hierarchy by which it operates. Permissiveness is sneaky and—let’s be frank—a little arrogant.

Permissiveness is taken from a party in conflict. Permission, however, is neither given nor taken. It exists in the whisper space between asking and taking.

There is a state of permission in many, many conflicts—interpersonal, work, church, school—that is confused with the permissiveness to “do as I like” accompanied by the corollary of “you suffer what I wish.”

The moment in conflict when a party commits an act of permissiveness is the moment when a conflict deepens negatively.

The moment in a conflict when a party commits an act of permission is the moment when a conflict deepens positively.

Do not be confused. The balance of permission/permissiveness is not mocked.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Conflict Jazz

Jazz music is a narrative experience that tells a story based in improvisation, riffing and unpredictability.

Just like interactions in conflict scenarios, jazz has underlying rules and a structure, and you can choose to follow it.

If you do that though, the conflict never gets even close to being resolved.

Instead, just like in a jazz jam session, you and your conflict partner can choose to wind up the tension, escalating assertively, and appropriately, until real innovation and change springs forth from the scenario.

Can you do jazz when engaging in conflict?

Of course.

It’s all jazz anyway…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Psychology of WellBeing

Conflict in the workplace doesn’t have to reduce overall career wellbeing.

But we think that it does for three reasons:

We think that work (and by extension careers) should be utilitarian pursuits, focused on drudgery, repetition and boredom. Which is an attitude remaining in the Western Culture from our agriculture and industrial past.
We don’t really believe that work (and by extensions careers) can change. We have thoroughly accepted the idea (pushed by industrialists, politicians, and the media) that “that’s just the way that it is.” And we are so trammeled in our cages of fear of being fired, that we will do anything not to make changes that will affect our wellbeing positively.
We frame material promotions and financial advancements, in the workplace as metrics of approval and signs that we are accomplishing good work. Partly this is because of the way that we think work should be. It is also partly because the value of work relationships cannot yet be monetized.

So, we believe these three things about work at varying levels in varying positions in the organizational hierarchies we find ourselves, and then we are surprised, disappointed and frustrated when difficulties, confrontations and conflicts arise.

What’s the way out?

We have to let go and stop thinking of ourselves as hostages to the workplace.

We have to do the dance with fear, increasing the tension between difficulty, confrontation and conflict, in order to accomplish material changes that will bring about the career wellbeing we crave—and that will change the cultures of the organizations we currently inhabit.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Labor Conflicts

Computers and algorithms, big data and analytics, robotics and wearbles.

We are the first generation that might live long enough to watch our technology outstrip our ambition, our needs, our wants and even our good sense.

There is no software—or hardware—solution for human emotions though. And as we transition from being a society and culture based on economic consumption, we will have to develop a new economy based in creation.

We are going to have to monetize the outcomes, the talent, and the voice that emotional labor gives us.

Finally, mothers’ and feminists’ cries about the disenfranchisation of “women’s’ work” will be answered. We will have to place a monetary value on empathy, story, design and artisanal focus, and move away from the precision that machines can give us.

Conflicts will arise that will be unexpected around issues of access rather than race, gender or economics. The “left brained” people aren’t going to just stop analyzing, using logic and developing new ideas.

And the conflicts that have always existed under the surface in the global economy between the arts and the humanities and engineering will be waged on different ground, more favorable to those who can compose and create, rather than those who can defy logic or program a computer.

Trainers, developers, speakers and presenters, will have the unenviable job security of curating and collating the knowledge that exists all across the virtually infinite space of the infinite web.

Mediators, conflict practitioners, facilitators, and arbitrators will have to be great designers, storytellers, visual artists and—at the furthest end—movie makers, in order to train, educate, convince and convert a population who will be frustrated, disintermediated, and staring a seemingly hopeless, jobless future in the face.

We are excited about the future. There will be more opportunities, more adventures, and even more hope.

But not human generated hope.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HIT Piece 06.09.2015

I’ve been watching (actually rewatching) the Ken Burns’ film Jazz on Netflix.

The amazing thing about this form of music is that it is uniquely American and could only have come out of the American experience and conflicts that we have had in this country around race and identity.

Music is the place where some of the worst cultural tropes and conflicts get worked out: Between the musicians in the band, the members of the audience and the listeners of the music remotely via a record—or an I-pod—a lot of gossamer is weaved.

I think that macro level conflicts in the culture can be worked out safely through the arts, in ways that don’t really translate at the interpersonal level. At the micro level though, that’s where it gets tough.

Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, or even Herbie Hancock, aren’t going to come into your house and live your life for you. But the music can serve as an intermediary.

And jazz has to be lived, improvised and has to happen on the spot. Just like interpersonal conflict at the micro level.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] The Minstrelry of Conflict

Minstrel shows were three act structures that were about racism, sexism, segregation, mockery and buffoonery.

At a deeper level, they were also about making up the participants’ faces—both Caucasian faces and African American faces—to obscure the lived, experienced pain of racism, sexism segregation, mockery and buffoonery.

Infantilization, stereotyping, vulgarity and defining deviancy as entertainment, were at the core of minstrel shows. Now, most minstrel shows following the American Civil War, declined in popularity among white audiences. Also, many blacks who had been slaves, and performers, in the minstrel shows, moved into the areas of circuses, vaudeville, variety shows and musical comedy.

Why even address this horrible piece of United States history?

For two reasons:

Many of us fail to talk about the issues of face, vanity and pride and how they are drivers for the seemingly never-ending vaudeville of conflicts in our lives—and the lives of other we know.

Many of us respond to conflicts in our lives with methods and choices that parallel the action and deeper message of minstrel shows.

Think about it.

We put on a “face” consisting of the caked on make-up of personal pride and vanity in an effort to avoid addressing conflicts (primarily ones between our values and other people’s values) and then head to work, school or church.

We are activated by people who are also hiding their own pain and we proceed to studiously dance around (another aspect of minstrel shows was dancing) the conflicts at hand around values that matter.

We use rhetorical techniques and communication tactics to accommodate outcomes and commodify results that we know are wrong (similar to the vicious racism and sexism that was applauded by the minstrel who audiences) and to try to walk away and remain feeling good.

When we finally talk about the conflicts in our work lives, but not in our home or family lives, we try to say that we have other’s best intentions in mind, which can sometimes come off to others in the dance of conflict as paternalism.

What’s the way out?

Understand and acknowledge that loving confrontation and healthy assertiveness is not aggression or an attempt to “hurt the feelings” of the other party. Confrontation and assertiveness is sometimes preferable to avoidance and accommodation. However, many of us are uncomfortable because of our own conflict vanity, our image/face management and our lack of courage.
Understand and acknowledge that feelings of shame and guilt are mostly in our heads and are driven by our fear-based responses. When fear kicks in we shame ourselves and others as a defense against the guilt around the knowledge that we “could have done more.” But as we mentioned before, courage has always been in short supply…
Understand and acknowledge that risk and reassurance are an anathema to each other and we must pursue either one or the other, but not both. A person cannot take on the risk of moving forward to confront—in love, mind you—conflicts at home, at work or at church, while also seeking reassurance that the relationship will be saved in forms we are the most comfortable with, and that codifies what we believe, rather than capital “T” truth.

The popularity of minstrel shows with the American public declined after the American Civil War, but its imprint and impression remains everywhere in our entertainment, our music, our movies, and even our TV shows.

Hiding the pain of conflict under the caked on makeup of our tendency toward avoidance, our lack of courage, and our need for reassurance, and continuing to do the dance as a public and private show to preserve destructive, dysfunctional relationships, will leave imprints on our lives that will only get deeper, not shallower, over time.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Preparing for a Keynote

Preparing for a speech—any kind of speech—is something that is conceived of as so challenging that very few want to do it.

But here’s a few tips to get started:

Don’t start with the speech.

Instead, start blogging. Once you get into the habit of publishing written content everyday (or every other day) then you’ll be able to work through arguments that you may want to use for developing a speech later on.

Listen to podcasts from people in parallel industries.

You know who are good presenters?

Comedians.

Forget the funny jokes for a moment.

There is nothing more nerve wracking than standing in front of a crowd of intoxicated people at nine o’clock at night and having to tell them jokes.

Podcasting is a way to discover beats, pauses and the power of the human voice. Also process and procedures. Jay Mohr’s podcast as well as Marc Maron’s are good ones to begin with.

Write the way that you watch a movie or a TV show.

Your speech should be in the form of a three act structure. Just like a film or a TV show:

Act One: Introduce the problem.
Act Two: Expand on the problem.
Act Three: Offer the solution and summarize.

Don’t give it all away. Lead your audience into the problem, but know what you’re speech is for.

A call to action should be obvious, but should also exist in the “white spaces” of people’s perceptions about what you said.

The best orators, from dictators to corporate titans, allow the listeners in the crowd to “fill in the blanks” and empower them to take the action that the speaker wants them to.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Why We Start But Don’t Finish

There’s no penalty for starting in our overall work culture.

If you start an initiative, a process or even start a project at work, there’s no conflict.

Sure, someone might come along (an employee, a colleague, a co-worker, a boss, a supervisor, a manager) and may make your life “difficult” by muddying up the process of starting. But even with such actions, it may feel like there’s a penalty, but there really isn’t.

Seth Godin in The Dip points this out. This is partially because there are parades and applause for starting throughout our overall culture: starting school, starting a volunteer project, starting a business.

But the cutural opportunity for penalty rises as the expectations of others (and yourself) rise (or fall) in relation to the success (or failure) of the process, initiation or project as it moves forward.

Penalties are reinforced for failure at work and then quitting is quietly proposed, with no fanfare or applause.

Think about the overall cultural language and phrases around quitting: “No one likes a quitter.” Or, “quitters never win.” Or, a more insidious one we have heard in some circles in the past “AA is for quitters.”

There’s a public penalty for quitting and it comes from a toxic combination of other people’s expectations, jealousies and assumptions, our own desires and assumptions about how the project, process or initiative should work, and the ways in which reality rarely dovetails with both of these.

And then, we are shamed for failing and subtly, socially encouraged, to never try again, to shut up our voices and to go along with whatever “the crowd” decides is good.

The way out of this is to begin publicly applauding quitting, quietly acknowledging starting (but not lauding it, or praising it) and having the courage to ignore the crowd, who are often blind, prejudiced, or biased.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] Training Day

There is a problem with the way that training is used to develop employees in the workplace.

The problem is not that the employees fail to attend the trainings and workforce development offerings on a regular basis.

The problem is not that employees fail to implement the things that they learn and use those lessons to innovate the organization forward even more.

The problem is more complicated than that:

The most critical employees in organizations (managers, supervisors, division leaders and others) are almost never in the room to add their perspective on the issues in the organization which led to the need for training in the first place.

The employees in the organization attending the training tend not to believe they have the courage, the authority or the power to affect innovations around the dominant issues they were called to train on resolving in the first place.

There’s no easy way out of this two-pronged, organizational trap.

And too often, the people who order, organize and even develop the training for employees also serve as gatekeepers buffering the employees in the training room from the people above them.

The difficult way out of this is twofold:

The managers, supervisors, division leaders and other higher-ups need to be seen in the room, endorsing the training and perspective of the development opportunity, the employees are being told to attend.

The statement “I’m too busy to attend” or “That training time doesn’t fit into my schedule” or “I already know all of this, so why do I need to be there” should be banished from managerial vocabulary and scrubbed from supervisory thinking.

Employees need to be provided with opportunities to innovate, such as the type offered to engineers at Google and other high tech companies, on clock time, rather than relegating the power to change to the venues of canned training or fancy bromides on the walls.

Would courageously implementing these to solutions cause organizations to have to do the hard work of shifting mindsets (both of shareholders and owners) toward a truly new conception of what productivity looks like?

Yes.

Which is why the standard is here to stay, at least for a little while longer.

-Peace Be With You All-