The Multitasking Myth

Multitasking is a myth for many, many reasons, but the one fact that is worthy of focus, is that managing multiple tasks at the same time is exactly that–a mistaken management tecnique that nueroscience has debunked.

Task management is not multitasking. The human mind can only really focus on one thing at a time, biologically and psychologically, we are wired to be narrowly focused.

This is what got us, as a species, from the Great Plains of Africa, hunting wild game in coordinated groups, to managing customer service departments with irate customers on the phone at major corporations.

And in a world of seven second attention spans, and stimulus reward systems based in electronic tools that update with vibrations, beeps and blinking lights, believing in the efficacy of the multitasking myth is mentally and emotionally deadly.

-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/

“I Don’t Believe You. This Stuff Can’t Really Work.”

…yes, it actually does.

but you have to want it to work more than you want whatever technique you are currently employing to “resolve” your situation.

And, if you like what you’re getting, then no amount of engagement, active listening, or prompting toward empathy is going to move your needle.

Other people can only take you 99% of the way. Going that last 1% (or first 1%, depending upon where you’re standing) is up to you.

-Peace Be With You All-

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

The One Limitation on Greatness

The one thing that destroys most negotiations is differing assumptions around value, resources and time.

One party may view resources as limited, value as scarce and time as a precious commodity to never be wasted.

The other party may view resources as approaching abundant, time as flexible and thoughts of value may never enter into their mind.

The destruction happens when one party cares little to nothing about attempting to enter the “headspace” of the other party, in order to see things from a different frame of reference.

They may lack patience, empathy, understanding or even the personal willpower to make that cognitive and emotional leap.

This is why there are so few diplomats, business “moguls,” great salespeople and great orators. It’s also why from the boardroom to the living room, life is littered with the corpses of failed negotiations.

The issue is not tactics—which everybody wants more of—but strategies—which require weeks, months and years to get right.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Roots of Conflict – Biblical Edition

Conflict is a process that allows for changes to happen. It is inevitable because our world has a sin problem from which all our other problems flow like water from the rock.

Conflict grows because we are different and we view our differences through a frame—or prism—of selfishness, rather than selflessness and with a lack of self-awareness of the needs of others.

We see this illustrated in the Bible in several places, most notably, in John 16:33, Acts 15:36-41, Philippians 4 and James 4:1-3.

Between Christians, conflict can be managed, but not necessarily resolved, because conflict is normal and will never go away. There are other people in the world , with their own deeply held philosophies, baked in personalities, and rock ribbed interpretations of the way the world should work. And that will always separate us at a fleshly level.

There are a few things that we can do to manage conflicts better:

Separate people from positions: People are not the problem. The emotions that we have around them are the problem. The position that another individual holds about the problem can be addressed separately from the person. Remember that emotions around the problem and the position that the other person has taken about the problem cause disputes to grow in our hearts.
Use “I” statements: “I” feel, “I” want, “I” am…any sentences that begin with “I” statement perform two critical actions: They diffuse the problem and expose the emotions under the problem. “I” statements also create ownership of your emotions around the problem.
Engage with empathy: When you work from the neck up, you miss a lot. Tactics and strategy to approach another person in conflict are laid out in Matthew 18:15-17 are logical. Emotions are messier and more difficult to address. Empathy requires dealing with our own emotions and being tuned into what is going on inside of us, and also focusing on what’s going on with the other person.

God requires us to be “other-centered.” And in a fallen, self-centered world, it is difficult to operate in grace, forgiveness and with self-awareness.

But at no other time in the history of the world has there ever been a better time to start.

-Peace Be With You All-

Presentation Tips and Tricks

Presentation is the most nerve wracking thing for many conflict engagement professionals, as it is for many other professionals in many other fields.

Many presenters forget a basic fact: meetings, workshops, seminars, classes, podcasts, pitches, elevator speeches and even 1-on-1 conversations are presentations.

Any time that you stand up in front of somebody else and use your words, your voice and your presence to transpose information from your brain to another person’s brain, that’s a presentation.

With that in mind, here are three tips to keep it fresh:

Remember the audience: The average attention span is down, and there are plenty of distractions in the world, so remember that the audience is whoever is in front of you right now.
Lose the crutches: Images and slideshow are too often used as a crutch to support the presenter, rather than as an addition—like spice on food—to the actual meat of the subject matter. The bravest presentations that you can do are those that don’t involve images and a slideshow. This is why the only difference between a 1-on-1 conversation and a 25 person breakout session is scale.
Don’t get intimidated by size: When speaking, people are really comfortable 1-on-1, but the sweat level goes up as the size of the audience increases. Why is that? Why do we get intimidated by size so often? Scale scares us, because it seems as though the risk level increases along with the size. But we’ve got it backwards.

The risk level decreases as the size of the audience expands, but the importance of what you are presenting should increase, rather than your nervousness level.

Any time that you’re in front of a person, that’s an audience, and the real risk is not getting your point across the bow.

-Peace Be With You All-

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

[Advice] The Container is not the Water

Anger is a secondary emotion, or so we have heard.

It exists below the primary emotions of either fear, frustration, grief, disgust, shame, anxiety and more.

When those underlying emotions are not addressed, they become a problem for other people, and for ourselves.

In the conflict process, where disputes between people are a part of the mix, sometimes anger manifests and parties use that anger as a weapon against each other.

Anger is only used one of two ways: either as a way to manipulate the other party, (in the form of passive aggressive anger) or to overwhelm and emotionally flood the other party (in the form of attacking anger).

The way to defuse all of this in the conflict process is to focus on two basic, immediate tactics:

People have emotions and emotions may influence and direct interests, and serve to harden positions in a conflict process, but people are not their emotions. The container is not the water.
The process of conflict engagement means moving into the anger and through it with the other party. This may mean walling off your own emotions—for a while—but keeping the other party focused on the higher goals of the process, rather than the presence of unresolved anger, can serve to move them away from manipulation and attack.

The long term strategy is to get the other party to agreement. The tactic is to look at people and the process, independently from the situation immediately in front of your face.

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-Peace Be With You All-

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

On a War Mentality for Peace

Peace (and peacemaking) isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t move the meter of the nightly news or go viral in social media.

Long form presentations about the nature of human beings, the integration of peace into lives, or the hard work of making the hard decisions, to change destructive behavior to proactive behavior, doesn’t make for very good entertainment.

Or so we collectively assert as a society and a culture, by the nature of what we show each other on traditional media, social media and what gets the attention of the seven second attention span.

Conflict and drama are exciting and get the endorphins flowing, but peace and the pursuit of innovative change is only interesting to an elite cadre of therapists, conflict consultants, social workers, lawyers and others.

Right?

Going to peace is just as compelling as going to war. People die, people fail. People succeed and people struggle. So do organizations and nations.

It’s long form drama. But with seven second attentions spans, and the reduction in intellectual understanding to the seventh grade level, how can we expect audiences to be drawn into the obvious drama of making peace?

Education can get us there, but moving the meter on the human heart takes a bit longer.

-Peace Be With You All-

On a Peace Mentality for War

Nations, organizations, and individuals lionize war because it represents the baser human emotions, and cuts through the fog of the everyday and the mundane, making choices black and white in a world of grey.

Nations and organizations mount up and prepare for war through moving troops around, creating new agreements and pacts of protection and creating safe and secure supply lines.

Nations also prepare their populations for the act of warfare through psychological and emotional reinforcement of the reasons for going to war through the use of propaganda, opinion journalism and rousing public speeches.

The war mentality is so ingrained in a population that the positions normally associated with peace—collaboration, cooperation, abundance, and on and on—become twisted to represent other things.

The way to appropriately apply the peace mentality to war, is to use the same steps that countries—and organizations—use to go to war:

Preparation
Relationship building
Information gathering
Information using
Bidding
Closing the deal
Implementing the agreement

But how many organizations, or nations for that matter, end up getting stuck on one of those steps and then throwing the whole process out, and moving into the preparations for war, in spite of “best intentions?”

-Peace Be With You All-

‘All right. All right. All right.’

We laugh at movies featuring the 35 or 40 year old who won’t leave the parents’ house and get a life.

We believe that the current Best Actor recipient once starred in a movie centering around such an animating theme.

But failing to launch (or even failing to recognize the oncoming signs of failing to launch) is not just the provenance of Hollywood scriptwriters and actors, it is a real occurrence in the real world of corporate boardrooms and small business back rooms.

Typically, this failure coalesces around an idea, an innovation or a project that doesn’t get enough organizational political support, organizational money or organizational time. This most obvious failure to launch shows up on the cover of the industry magazine, or as a hit piece on a blog or social media.

But failure to launch also happens quietly, under the radar, lurking like a submarine beneath the conflicts between people in the workplace. And it’s a moment that is so fleeting—so ephemeral—that it’s missed almost all the time.

The failure goes something like this:

Sharon and Bill have a disagreement about a project in which they are both invested. Sharon can’t see Bill’s point of view. Bill thinks Sharon is being obstructionist on purpose. But before Sharon and Bill can really get into it, they both pause—maybe at the water cooler in a conversation with another person, maybe in traffic on the way home—and they have a moment where the thought “Maybe I’m wrong here,” flits across their minds.

Like gossamer.

And just like that, it’s gone. Along with the twinge of regret and disappointment—as well as an oncoming sigh—accompanied by each parties’ resolve, hardening to “Do what is right. For the company.”

The question that makes consultants uncomfortable to ask—and employees and employers uncomfortable to ponder—is the question that on the face seems confrontational and too direct, but underneath is probing. Aiming at the dark heart of what happens in—and out—of the cubicle:

“Have you ever failed personally at resolving a business conflict?”

Or put another way, “When was the last time you failed to launch?”

-Peace Be With You All-

Organizational Climate Change – Part 3

There are veiled threats, open threats, unspoken threats and curbed threats.

Threats come about when people are frustrated, feel as though they are powerless, or when they know that they have the power.

Power, of course, is influence and control of events. But the weird thing about power is that it works two ways, kind of like nuclear forces. There is strong power and weak power.

Strong power controls resources, affects goal achievement and creates dependency.

Weak power releases resources, impacts goal achievement and creates independence.

The presence of strong power creates consequences, as does the presence of weak power.

Threats link power to outcomes that are perceived as negative based upon the perception of the receiver of the threat, not the sender of the threat.

The receiver mistakenly believes that they are rendered powerless by the threat. And in a harmful conflict environment, more disputes arise when a receiver believes that they have no agency or autonomy.

When was the last time you felt the strength of weak power in your organization?

-Peace Be With You All-