How Crazy Do You Want to Act to ‘Win’ at Nuclear Poker

Playing poker with another party who holds the keys to nuclear weapons (literal, metaphorical, or figurative), and has given indications based on experience that they will be willing to deploy them, is a dangerous game.

The stakes are high, but not for the obvious reasons of total physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological annihilation.

The stakes are high for three reasons:

No one really knows another party’s motivations, needs, or interests. Unless we ask. And far too often our inherent selfishness in pursuing outcomes that benefit us exclusively, blinds us to the simple need to do some discovery about the other party.

Sometimes, only one person has cared enough to explore another party’s motivations, needs, or interests.

But then they use this knowledge cynically, to manipulate and exploit other parties who are more ignorant—and more selfish.

The far rarer case is that the party who has the knowledge and cares, shares; unselfishly, openly, and with the purpose of avoiding—or minimizing—disastrous outcomes.

Egos, self-interest, and selfishness tend to override rationality and logic in even the most innocuous negotiations. When potential destruction is the thing on offer, all bets are off.

The fact is, people at the individual level are irrational and emotional and in moments of high stress, tend to make short-cut choices that relieve tension in the amygdala, but create further problems down the road.

If the other party isn’t talking to a rational actor (such as it is) on the other side of the negotiation table, or leads with principles rather than interests, the changes of an undesirable outcome increase tremendously.

The appearance of being willing to do what the other party is either to scared, to demoralized, or to invested in alternative outcomes (their own BATNAs and WATNAs, for instance) to do, is sometimes enough to “win” the high stakes game of poker played with nuclear weapons (literal, metaphorical, or figurative).

Unfortunately, this sets a precedent in the mind and approach of the “losing” party around the potential for blackmail, coercion, or something even worse—subservience and the appearance of weakness.

The person who is willing to walk into a nuclear negotiation and deal fairly, transparently, and unselfishly with each party in the conflict is the one who wins the day today and tomorrow.

And not just a moral victory either.

Dollar Value of Mediation Skills in the Connection Economy

It’s hard to place a dollar value on human-to-human interactions in the current (and growing) connection economy, because connection is about engaging in acts of caring.

And whoever put a dollar value on acts of caring?

But here are a few challenge questions if that’s your attitude:

Whoever put a dollar value on the act of raising crops in an agricultural economy?

Whoever put a dollar value on the act of building a widget in an industrial economy?

Whoever put a dollar value on the act of providing a customer service in the service economy?

Humanity figured out the dollar value inherent in all the economic transitions from hunting and foraging, to agriculture, to industry, to service and created functioning economic systems—from trading and bartering to late stage capitalism. And humanity will figure out the current global transition we are in right now.

The space between the old system and the new system is a space of conflict, anger, incivility, uncertainty, spectacle, entertainment, along with a healthy dose of depression, worry, and anxiety.

This is a space where the skills of mediation (particularly around distraction, diversion, and deflection) can be helpful (and monetized) at scale.

But whoever put a dollar value on the acts of caring?

HIT Piece 4.18.2017

No matter how rationally argued, if what the presenter, lecturer, teacher, trainer, or interpreter is saying doesn’t resonate with you at an emotional level, you will reject it out of hand.

And you’ll do it in microseconds of microseconds.

Resonance in storytelling is something we know happens with impact at scale, but engagement and decision making at the individual level still matter.

On your part.

Believe or don’t believe.

Buy-in to the idea or buy-out.

But either way, decide.

And by doing so, give the presenter, lecturer, teacher, trainer, or interpreter a break so that they can move on (sometimes rhetorically, sometimes metaphorically, and sometimes physically) to delivering their message to an audience with who it will resonate.

It stops the deliverer from dominating your time and attention as well.

Asking is a Part of Negotiation

Most negotiations don’t happen because many people lack the curiosity to ask for what else might be on offer.

When you have the courage to ask the other party—and open a negotiation—you gain the power to get more.

You also grow the opportunity to move beyond mere transaction to something approaching a relationship.

When the pain points are highly painful (i.e. divorce, threat of imprisonment, illness, personal trauma, etc.) having the courage to ask for more allows the other party to move past their own objections—reasonable and otherwise.

But only if they want to.

When you don’t ask, you can’t receive.

Avoidance is a Worthwhile Strategy for Addressing Conflict

Avoiding a conflict is sometimes a strategic move.

We avoid conflicts for the obvious reasons that dealing with them makes us scared, threatens our sense of security, or we feel as though we don’t have the competency to address them in a way where the outcome will work for us.

But, then there are the non-obvious reasons to avoid conflicts.

One of which is to have the conflict in another way, in another way, with a party that has already been weakened emotionally by engaging in a previous conflict.

This is practicing avoidance as a negotiation strategy.

Another non-obvious reason to avoid conflict is that telling the story of avoidance has more resonance with another party we are currently embroiled with, rather than telling a story of resolution and success.

This is practicing avoidance as a storytelling strategy.

Still, another reason to avoid a conflict is that we don’t care how the conflict works out because the conflict “working out” is a short-term strategy that changes the balance of power for the other party in the conflict. And quite frankly, we don’t really care about how they work out their problems.

This is practicing avoidance as a long-game, future-oriented strategy.

The non-obvious strategies matter more in the long run than the short-term reasons we articulate, defend, and promote to other people, the other party, or even quietly to ourselves.

More deliberation—and articulation—of the long-term impact of avoiding a conflict as a strategic move, will serve to move the use of avoidance from a tactic we’re embarrassed to employ and lack the appropriate level of self-awareness to explain, to a strategy that has real benefits for ourselves and others.

Anxiety, Worry and Hurry

Worry about things you can’t control and outcomes that are dependent upon other people responding (or reacting) is at the heart of anxiety.

Our modern struggle with anxiety comes from three areas: Our desire for immediacy of outcome (or resolution); Our lack of internal resilience; Our impatience with process as a method of accomplishing goals.

We narcotize our worry, or anxiety, with food, alcohol, drugs, violence (self-directed and other-directed) and even lately video games, social media, and coloring books.

The thing is, sitting with worry, and then learning to have faith and let that worry go, is the only way to find the peace that we are craving.

The process of getting from worry to letting go of worry can be mediated and adjudicated by meditation, prayer, and journaling (we forget past victories over worry unless they are recorded…memory is a slippery thing) but when we combine the desire for immediacy, control, and impatience, then hurry sneaks in.

And we are too busy to remember past victories. Too busy to engage in a letting go process. Too busy to do anything but worry.

The ways out of this are easy, but they require self-knowledge, self-direction, and self-regulation to work.

Not more distractions.

When You Won’t Need Validation

Recognizing that you once held a belief and that now this belief is changing, is the essence of learning.

And by the time you attain that essence, you won’t need the extrinsic validation from an “A” letter grade, a raise, a promotion, or any other validation that you believe extrinsically motivated you to learn in the first place.

To go a step further, you won’t care if the validation for the learning comes or not, from an external source.

And you won’t need reassurance about the actions you take to implement and execute on your newly acquired self-knowledge.

Building a Memory Palace of Lies

What happens when how I remember an event doesn’t match how you remember an event?

This mismatch in memory—and framing of those mismatches—leads to people constructing palaces to specific memories in their minds. These palaces are filled with feelings, ideas, thoughts, and conclusions that may not be objectively accurate.

And that may be viewed by the other party (who remembers events differently) as a palace of constructed out of lies.

One of the issue with outsourcing our memory of events (and even our memory of truth) to online algorithmically based programs, is that the program remembers quite accurately. But it remembers what its original creator (or “first mover” if you will) programmed it to remember.

And just about as accurately.

Here’s a deeper issue: When I appeal to an outside authority to adjudicate the disagreement between my memory of events and your memory of events, and when that authority has been programmed by a third party with their own attributions and biases, at what point do we stop appealing to authority?

And let bygones, be bygones.

The power of memory truly lies in allowing people to construct their own memory palaces in peace, to remember the past with nostalgia, and to forget (and be forgotten) not as an escape from consequence—memories provide plenty of that on their own—but as a way to experience grace.

Core Emotional Alchemy

Do you care?

This is the binary core question that we avoid asking out loud, or ask each other in unclear, murky, nonverbal ways, or just don’t ask at all.

This is the right question to ask before thinking of strategies to engage in the practice of emotional alchemy. The kind of alchemy that transmutes emotional labor into motivation in other people.

Alchemy has long been considered a joke, but in leadership, conflict management, and emotional labor, the placebo effect of emotional alchemy is just beginning to be part of a core conversation about how to motivate others.

But the fact is, no one knows (really) how to extrinsically, or intrinsically, motivate others, render them “unlazy,” or otherwise get them to do the work that matters at the level you would like them to do it.

And any article that proposes to do so, is selling a brand of alchemy all its own.

What Do You Do With Resonance

Resonance is underrated as a way of sparking change.

There are two things that happen when we hear an idea that resonates with us:

We admire the person who shared the message with us.

We file the message away in the back of minds.

Occasionally there are those people who take the idea that resonates and do something with it.

For those folks, the message (and the resonance) become a signpost on the billboard of their minds.

But there are not nearly enough of them, operating fast enough, with enough courage to make the kind of change that we need to see in the world.

Are you inspired, or are you admiring?