HIT Piece 12.29.2015

And the hits just keep on coming.

The end of the year makes people take stock of what they’ve done and who they’ve helped (or hurt) in the year that has passed.

I’m no different in that respect.

However, where I am a little different from some others is that I take stock of the future, rather than the past.

There are all kinds of opportunities available if you’re not bound by your past. If, instead of looking at the past constantly, seeking reassurance, righteous judgment, or even retribution upon thiose4 who have injured you, you instead focus on de4veloping talents skills and abilities to meet the rising road ahead of you.

Many people are bound by the past. And I’m a big fan of history.

This year, in this space, I have used this platform to talk about the past and to encourage and spur my audience on toward the future. The future is, in many ways, an even scarier place than the past, because it seems as though here is no map to get there.

And the hits just keep on coming.

My take on 2016 is that, for many of us, it will be more of the same: The same arguments, the same disagreements, the same fights, the same confrontations. Because too many of us focus too hard on the past and not hard enough on the future.

And I will keep documenting my changes, as I try different things and different methods, hopefully leading to different (but not necessarily always better) outcomes for both myself and the people around me.

More introspection.

More self-awareness.

More HITs.

-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/

The HSCT Reading List – THE BEST BOOKS OF 2014

We here at HSCT think of the question “What are you reading?” in the same way that Joan Rivers asks the question “Who are you wearing?”

So, for all of those who are interested, the following is our 2014 Book List:

Nonfiction

Sales

The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer

Marketing

YouTility by Jay Baer
Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It by Mitch Joel
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk
Launch by Jeff Walker
Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

Conflict Resolution

Influence: The Art of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
Handling Verbal Confrontation by Robert V. Gerard
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler
TongueFu: How to Deflect, Disarm, and Diffuse any Verbal Conflict by Sam Horn
Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Neuroscience

Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Mindsight by Daniel Siegel
Predictive Analytics by Eric Siegel

Entrepreneurship

The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-create Your World Your Way by Wayne Dwyer
David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
The Rise by Sarah Lewis

Physics

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

Fiction

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
Freedom by Jonathan Frazen

All of these books are available through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million and even your small, independent bookstore around the corner can get them.

Check back in 2015 for an updates reading list and email me at jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com and let me know what you think of them!

The HSCT Reading List – THE BEST BOOKS OF 2015

We here at HSCT think of the question “What are you reading?” in the same way that Joan Rivers used to ask the question “Who are you wearing?”

So, for all of those who are interested, the following is our 2015 Book List:

Nonfiction

Sales
Fire Your Sales Team Today by Mike Lieberman and Eric Keiles
What to do When You’re Rejected by James Altucher
Resonate by Nancy Duarte

Marketing

Great Work: How to Make a Difference People Love by David Sturt
Product Launch by Jeff Walker
Tribes by Seth Godin
The Dip by Seth Godin
The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer

Conflict Resolution

Thanks for the Feedback: The Art and Science of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton

Biography/History

Regan at Reykjavik by Ken Aldeman
God, If You’re Up There, I’m F*cked by Darrell Hammond
David Spade is Almost Interesting by David Spade
Now I know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground by Emily Parker
Tin Can Treason: Recollections from a Combat Tour of Vietnam by Terry Nardone

Politics

All Politics is Local and Other Rules of the Game by Tip O’Neill

Entrepreneurship

Prayers That Avail Much for The Workplace by Germaine Copeland
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Beyond the Obvious by Phil McKinney
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Everybody Writes by Anne Handley
What to Do When It’s Your Turn (And It’s Always Your Turn) by Seth Godin

Fiction

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer
The President’s Shadow by Brad Meltzer
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

All of these books are available through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million and even your small, independent bookstore around the corner can get them.

Check back in 2016 for an updates reading list and email me at jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com and let me know what you think of them!

[Advice] Burl Ives Was Wrong…

It’s the eve before Christmas in the Western world, and if you adhere to the Christian faith (or you just like getting and giving) then you’re trying to prepare for a holly, jolly…well, you know…

Personally, I’m annoyed by Burl Ives’s voice, but the fact the matter is, that the holiday season has changed for many people in the United States and throughout the West.

Call it the backlash against consumerism, the wreck of the post-Industrial Revolution age in which we all now live or the backwash from the events of 2001 and 2008, but there is the image of the holiday season, pushed and promoted through advertising, marketing and media, and then there is the lived reality.

When the legend becomes reality (or fact) the old admonition used to be to “print the legend.” And while that admonition still holds in too many public spheres, the fact is that much of the Western public, privately has moved on, forging new meaning and new definitions for this time of the year. And the fact that those definitions and meanings don’t show up in a Youtube video, or in a television advertisement, doesn’t make them less valid.

Things have changed in three areas:

Family experiences seem to matter more than gifts: Much is regularly made about how the “definition of family is changing” or has shifted in the last 40 years, but quite honestly, people still travel and communicate with people than they know, like and love over the holiday season now, more than ever before.

Public political proclamations don’t matter much at private holiday get together’s: Yes, Uncle Don came out last year after 15 years of being in the closet and is bringing his husband to dinner. Yes, Niece Sharon is 34 and had a child without a “man” in her life and is bringing the new child to dinner. Yes, Cousin Matt is a political conservative and a business man who just married an African-American woman who is a vegetarian and won’t eat the turkey.

A lot is made of these surface divisions in the media, political writing, and even in marketing, but the fact is, family and friends either get over it, or they fake it like they have until the person (or persons) have left, in order to preserve the peace, aiming at the higher goal of “family togetherness.” This is not wrong, this is not right. This just is. And for all of the family strife that is typically marketed (or displayed) in individuals’ Facebook feeds, the vast majority still gather around a table with people they disagree with.

The gadgets are not anymore the separators than the newspaper and television were 40 years ago: Are people on the screens more often? Yes, because there are more options and more screens than ever before. But while screen time may have increased, the sharing of that screen time with others cannot be accurately measured. The gadgets may separate, but they also draw together, and at the furthest end, are disconnected from when it comes time to engage with meaningful, face-to-face communication.

So, maybe Burl Ives was right, and maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. But while our tools have changed and transformed, the internal stuff that makes us people hasn’t shifted dramatically in a few thousand years.

I think someone else pointed this fact out to stunned crowds without the benefit of high technology around 2000 years ago as well.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Disagreements are Conflicts

No matter what language you use to describe them….

“kerfluffle”

“drama”

“disagreement”

“viewing the situation differently”

“a fight”

“a ‘temporary’ setback”

“…a moment”

“there was an ‘incident’”

…they are all conflicts. And all the cutsey, metaphorical language that we use to not describe them as they are, is, in effect, allowing us to hide from the results of them, the process of fixing them, and making the hard choices to address the other party co-creating them with us.

When we seek to use other language that truthful language to describe the conflicts we are having, in our jobs, in our homes, in our churches, we effectively shift into miscommunication, leaving the door open to future…

“kerfluffles”

“dramas”

“disagreements”

“viewings of the situation differently”

“fights”

“‘temporary’ setbacks”

“…moments”

“incidents”

And though effective conflict competence requires naming before reframing, without accurate analysis and naming, reframing becomes another exercise in either futility or furthering the conflict we can’t describe that we’re in.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 12.22.2015

My wife will tell you that I never take “time off.”

She’ll say there’s no “break from this project” and she’ll tell you that many of my interactions with other people only demarcate interruptions between email, social platform updates, blog posts, product development ideas, and new business operations ideas. Some that might pan out—many that might not.

My in-laws will tell you I’m obsessive about work. And so will my children. That I never “unplug” or I am “always on the computer.” My immediate family will say that I seem distracted and antsy when I’m not working on cracking some project.

They’re not wrong.

It’s hard to be in this project alone, because, even though many people think that it looks romantic from the outside, to truly become even a moderately large sized force in the arena of conflict engagement and corporate training, the person in the arena has to be dedicated 24/7.

Now, to answer the objections, yes, I understand that material success is nothing without relationships that matter to share it with. And I am doing a better job than I was last year at actually trying to “dial in” to family moments, breaks and respites.

But I’m doing what I love, and I don’t know any other way to get to those outsized rewards in the minimal time that I have left on this planet, than to pursue the results of that love really, really hard for just a little while.

And I do take “time off.” Today is my annual retreat day, where I go to the mattresses (as Clemenza pointed out to Michael in The Godfather) and take some time away from the grind of the day-to-day and reflect on what I’ve done well, what I’ve done mediocrely, and what I haven’t done at all…

Now, I’m headed to Barnes and Noble. It’s the place to unwind, at least while they’re still around.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Manipulation, Deceit and Disagreement in the Digital Age

When most information can be known about other people via the swipe of a finger, the click of an Internet search, or through scrolling through a social media feed, how is it that so many people can still be deceived?

This is not really an information based question, this is a question about one of the key components of persuasion in the digital age, the dark side of it, if you will, deception and manipulation.

When only a few people and organizations used to hold the keys to both Truth and Power, it was hard to find out facts that disagreed with whatever the dominant narrative happened to be. Speaking truth to power was not an exercise for the faint of heart, either in a family, a community, or even in a municipality.

But, after over 25 years of commercialized Internet access to the masses, information (about people, ideas, processes, services, and on and on) seems hard to come by, rendering many people suspicious that they are being deceived but no quite knowing how. This feeling leads to the creation of various digital “tribes” that do battle to “correct the record” and “make the facts known.” But, at the end of the conflict, everything seems murkier than when the disagreement initially began and the residue of mistrust and anger lingers in the air.

Are we more deceived, or more informed?
Are we more oblivious, or more “tuned in?”
Are we more selective (“owning our own facts”) or are we more open to hearing and contemplating the “other side.”
Do disagreements and disputes have more weight online than they do in “real life” and if so, why?
Does anonymity and privacy lead to manipulation and deceit, or are they the only tools the powerless have to call the powerful to task?
What is the middle ground?

There are no easy, quick, or definitive answers to these questions. And after 150 years of “The Industrialization of everything” from education to social services, we in the Western world have been inculcated to believe that quick and definitive is the “new normal,” rather than being aware that, for many questions, there is more ambiguity than there are answers.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Contributor] Repairing the Internet of Things

Contributor – Alexander Gault
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

The connected TVs, refrigerators, microwaves, electrical outlets, cars, and so on have made their foray into the market, and into our homes. But with these new innovations comes a cost, and that cost is one of the most basic of any appliances.

Reparability.

When you have a broken refrigerator, chances are you can call a repairman or the family handyman to fix it. When your refrigerator no longer can stream Netflix, though, it’s less likely that you can call your family handyman, or even some repairmen. And it’s unlikely that the local computer repair shop will know what to do with your appliance either, as they are not typically run on a normal operating system.

The clearest example of the difficulty of repair presented by the connected world is in the car industry.

Since the late 1990s, cars have had increasingly computerized components used in them. Modern cars have MPG calculators, WiFi hotspots, computerized speedometers, thermostat units, and all other manner of computerized units to make it comfortable and convenient for its owners. Even car doors are more complicated than before, with auto-opening features on sliding doors and trunks that can disable a door with the slightest mechanical error.

A few months ago, I was watching a mechanic explain the systems of an Audi. He explained that often, when a car comes in with a service light on, it can be attributed to a simple sensor error, or even a trivial issue that can be resolved without the help of a mechanic. For example, most German luxury cars, including this Audi, have a slew of sensors in their electrical systems, that can detect even a blown trunk light. When the car came in for its routine servicing, the tool to detect error codes turned up multiple errors for cabin and trunk lights, all contributing to error codes on the information panel that worried the customer.

Car mechanics have, therefore, been required to update their methods, and sink much more time and education into their profession than they expected. For those who cannot or will not train, they quickly lose their relevancy.

This is the future for all handymen, those who make it their profession to repair things. In 10 years, your refrigerator will be automated, telling you when you’re almost out of food. And when it continually shows “Out of Milk”, or even worse, orders more each time it queries the sensors, you’ll have to find a mechanic relevant to the current decade.

Alexander Gault-Plate is an aspiring journalist and writer, currently in the 12^th grade. He has worked with his school’s newspapers and maintained a blog for his previous school. In the future, he hopes to write for a new-media news company.

You can follow Alexander on Twitter here https://twitter.com/AlexanderBGault

[Strategy] Open A.I. Disagreements

In a world with responsive, predictive artificial intelligence, operating behind the veneer of the world in which humans operate, a philosophical question arises:

Will the very human tendency toward conflicts increase or decrease in a world where the frictions between us and the objects we have created is reduced?

From the Open A.I project to research being done at MIT, Google, and Facebook, the race is on to set the table for the technology of world of one hundred years from now.

As with all great advances in human development (and the development of artificial intelligence capabilities would rival going to the Moon) the applications of artificial intelligence at first will be bent towards satisfying our basest desires and human appetites and then move up the hierarchy of needs.

But a lot of this research and development is being done by scientists, developers, entrepreneurs, and others (technologists all) who—at least in their public pronouncements—seem to view people and our emotions, thoughts, feelings and tendencies toward irrationality and conflict, as a hindrance rather than as a partner.

Or, to put it in “computer speak”: In the brave new world of artificial intelligence research, humanity’s contributions–and decision making–is too often viewed as a bug, rather than as a feature.

However, design thinking demands that humans—and their messy irrational problems and conflicts—be placed at the center of such thinking rather than relegated to the boundaries and the edges. Even as humans create machines that can learn deeply, perform complex mathematics, created logical algorithms, and generate better solutions to complex future problems than the human who created the problems and conflicts in the first place.

Eventually, humans will create intelligence that will mimic our responses so closely that it will be hard to tell whether those responses are “live” or merely “Memorex.”

But until that day comes, mediators, arbitrators, litigators, social workers, therapists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, poets, and writers, need to get into the research rooms, the think tanks and onto the boards of the foundations and the stages at the conferences, with the technologists to remind them that there is more to the future than mere mathematics.

Or else, the implications for the consequences of future conflicts (human vs. human and even machine vs. human) could be staggering.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Conflict Management Style

From the boardroom to the bedroom, assertiveness as a mode of approaching all conflict situations, is valued above all other choices in America.

But, what is lauded in a competitive business landscape, driven by media, and advertised to a distracted public by marketers, does not represent lived reality. Reality is messy, unmeasurable down to the final metric, and unknowable all the way up to the point that we are allowed to enter someone else’s headspace.

And even then, we don’t really know anything. We just can measure outcomes.

And the reality is, many people would rather practice avoidance, accommodation or just compromise in a fight, a disagreement, or a dispute, rather than practice any variation of assertiveness.

But if assertiveness is promoted as the “be all and end all” of all possible conflict approaches; and, collaboration is confused with weakness; accommodation is seen as charitable and kind (but not effective); avoidance is paired with fear of conflict itself; and, compromising is too often framed as losing, what is the average person to do?

Well, the fact is that, many people—from the boardroom to the bedroom—rotate through all four styles depending upon the situation, or context, in which they find themselves and the goals they are pursuing within that context.

And while assertiveness may be fine when negotiating a conflict solution across the table from a manager or supervisor, it may not be as appropriate a style to adopt when negotiating a candy exchange with a five-year-old.

But with the pressures and stresses of life compounding, rather than reducing, and with conflicts over resources growing exponentially over time, the value of being able to make healthy, conscious decisions to switch from one style to another—and to let the others around you know that this is happening—is the ultimate goal.

Because in a world where the technologists are here and building a world where human agency will be reduced to a mere shadow of its former glory, in pursuit of brave, new outcomes, the human touch to approaching conflict wisely is the only result that will matter.

-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/