[Opinion] Politik With The Addition of Other Means

The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz noted, about 230 years or so ago, that “War is the continuation of Politik with the addition of other means.”

In a digitally connected world, hacking, data thefts, downloading intellectual property without previous permission, plagiarism without appropriate attribution, are all “added on means.”

Depending upon your frame of reference— of the person or organization being victimized, or of the person or organization doing the victimization—these acts can also be framed as war.

Students of peace in the digitally connected world should become students of the new boundaries of warfare in the 21^st century, in order to educate the masses on the nature, depth and breadth of future conflict.

Because someone is going to have to stop the black hat actors, before they become black hat actors in the first place.

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

[Strategy] WATNA and BATNA

A negotiated agreement is the endpoint of many crucial conversations.

There are always alternatives—worst and best for each party—to getting to that endpoint. The alternatives are detours a negotiation can take that allow parties to migrate away from the endpoint.

If the endpoint of agreement isn’t the point of a conversation, then maybe being satisfied with the best (if we “win”) or the worst (if we “lose”) is good enough.

There are two concerns with this point of view though:

Even though parties can acknowledge with their mouths that the world of negotiated conversations exists in gray areas, very few lived actions following the conversation back that up. Plus, it’s not enough to just be good enough. Now, the challenge is to either be the best or to suck.
Going beyond getting the BATNA or the WATNA (you know, “agreeing to disagree”) there’s a concern as one party seeks to emotionally, or psychologically manipulate, the other party to a previously staked out “truth” through the misuse of persuasive power.

-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/
Website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

[Advice] In The End is Not Soon Enough

Mapmaker William Smith and Mennonite Wilma Derksen were recognized for the impact they created with their projects, their perspectives and their approach to life.

They “got their due in the end.”

Depending upon your frame of reference, their due came either too late or way too late.

It used to be that elites ridiculed innovation because the pedigree from where innovation came wasn’t “right.” Once mass media and mass culture really took off in the middle of the last century, the middle masses began to exhibit the same ritualistic cultural shorthand of dismissing self-belief. The masses also rejected the counterintuitive nature of becoming uncomfortable in order to do the right thing.

Now however, in the midst of the ongoing fracturing of mass media and mass culture, ridicule of innovation has splintered, emanating from multiple areas simultaneously.

People in the field of software applications like to talk a lot lately about “unbundling” and about how “software is eating the world.”

We believe that this is happening, but the real revolution will come when fractured audiences start giving all innovators their due—attention, respect, relationship, revenues—before they are ready to shuffle off this mortal coil instead of after they are gone.

-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/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

Motivation and the Seven Second Attention Span

The well documented decline in the ability to focus has everybody who can focus for more than 7 seconds talking about it for at least the length of a book manuscript—or the length of a blog post.

But, the real estate worth fighting over, for our money, is not focus, but attention.

Focus happens after attention has been attracted. And, with so many forms of noise distracting the masses from messages that may or may not be beneficial for them, attention is at a premium.

But not focus.

Yes, we realize that the immediacy of social media responses and the immediacy of Internet based information has created concern that the human brain is changing—and it is—but the real battle is still not focus.

The reason we believe that the decline in focus is a symptom of the current Social Age, and not the disease, is because the core of attention, intrinsic motivation, has always been—and will always be—a limited resource.

And while we don’t personally believe that resources are limited, we know that society has been arranged to bring into reality the belief that while attention is limited, internal motivation should be limitless.

And yes, we have seen the neuroscience research around attention and focus, as well as the research around Pavlovian operant conditioning, punishment and reward studies and other behavioral studies since the 1950’s.

But, we still hold that as our technology has increased, from the oral tradition to Twitter, there has always been misplaced concern over focus rather than attention.

We really should have a few more books and blog posts about motivation…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Active Listening as Post Modern Art

Paintings, music, stories, and speeches used to be considered artistic pursuits; but, in a world consumed with art as entertainment and media, listening carefully becomes an artistic effort on its own.

In a networking situation, the artistic dance to truly beginning to connect with another person, involves actively listening.

Words are like brushes and the canvas is the networking event. But the person at the event is the artist.

And in a world of shortened attention spans, artistic practice has to filter into everybody’s life, not just the vaunted few who have a TED Talk, or make a movie, or cut a “hit” record, or paint an image in a museum.

Our advice to you: Listen carefully.

Honesty in Human Memory

As they fade into the rearview mirror of memory, events of the past tend to be mythologized, canonized or misremembered entirely.

On a global scale, the one class of people who used to rely on this fact of human memory—politicians—are finding it difficult to deal with the current state of constant remembering that’s going on with the Internet and social media.

On an individual scale, we still have the expectation that other people will forgive us our trespasses, even as we can forever hold their trespasses against them, with the help of our new tools.

However, all of this electronic remembering hasn’t led to more honesty. In fact, as the tendency toward tribal social sanctioning has grown exponentially to a global scale, there are more and more media driven conflicts over who owns the narrative, rather than whether or not the narrative was honest and truthful in the first place.

This is part of the core reason why the masses no longer really pay attention when it’s revealed that someone—most importantly politicians—lied about something consequential, because honesty is no longer the coin of the realm.

Instead, who owns the narrative, for the next 24-48 hours, is what’s important. After that, well, the masses can repost in their Facebook feeds all they want, because it won’t matter whether truth (capital “T” or small “t”) was served or not.

At an individual scale, cries of hypocrisy still ring out, but the sound grows hollower with each passing year, as individuals learn from the masses, that ownership of the story is more valuable than the veracity of the content.

-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/

Trust Me

“Trust me. I got this.”

If there is any other phrase that precedes a sense of oncoming dread and mistrust, it’s this one.

If there is a statement that preceded eventual conflict more than any other, we aren’t aware of it.

Trust, when freely given, often operates as a noun, describing a person, place, thing or an animal. In such a context, trust transforms a relationship from one level and moves it into a far more intimate level.

However, in the above statement, trust transforms from a noun to a verb, requiring the giver to transform into a passive actor in their own drama. In such a context, trust transfers control from an active actor, engaged with their own outcomes, to another active actor whose motives may not be—well—trustworthy.

The sender of the phrase is looking to reassure the receiver and, typically, this sentence means that the reassurance is not working.

The professional peacebuilder should probably avoid the transformation of trust from an active noun to a passive verb, unless the relationship that she is building is long-term enough to warrant such a change.

Otherwise, she’s just asking for trouble.

-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/

[Opinion] 10 Year Overnight Success-Vol. 2

10,000 hours is a long time to persevere and continue without gaining competence, much less mastery.

The human mind seeks shortcuts, quick answers and easy solutions, because it likes the status quo and seeks to maintain equanimity and order in a world of chaos and conflict.

Yet, without those hours, every single one of them, there can be no catharsis. There can be no learning.

When we were still actively engaged in the visual arts, we used to hear, “Every artist has 2,000 bad pieces of art inside of them.” This statement was met with incredulity at the time, but it turned out to be absolutely true.

And here’s the other thing about those 2,000 bad pages, by the time the artist gets to page 1,999, he—or she—doesn’t care about what other people think about all the pages that came before.

10,000 hours does more than pound the path toward competence and mastery. It forges the will of iron to continue in the face of rejection, dismissiveness, ignorance and misunderstanding.

So that, at the end of those 10,000 hours, the human mind has become used to the very things that it feared.

-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/

This Too Shall Pass

Black Friday is a creation of marketers.

Almost specifically designed to get the average person to buy more stuff, it is a conflict resolution practitioners’ dream fake social “holiday.”

People engage in shopping rituals, while also engaging in conflict with each other, over the acquiring of stuff.

People fall for the commercialism (advertisements) that subtly intimate that choosing not to make purchases, or too engage in the ritual, that somehow a person is a Scrooge.

People report an uptick in feelings of depression, dissatisfaction and other mental health issues.

This comes about due to a falsely generated feeling of collective belonging around this season, tipped off by the false shopping ritual of Black Friday.

During this day, the words attributed to either an Eastern monarch, or King Solomon, should ring in our ears, both as a blessing and as a curse.

Because, the sun is going to rise tomorrow and the rituals of one, man created day, have little to do with the vicissitudes of the future, or even the inevitability of conflict.

-Peace Be With You All-

Conflict in Your Organization

Have you ever heard the one about the consultant who mediated their own divorce?

No?

Neither have we.

We’ve just heard the story many times before and wondered how much of that could have been avoided with some conversations.

As a professional consultant though, in the area of conflict, or in any other area, you are going to face conflicts in your organization.

There are going to be people who disagree, dissemble and even will attempt to deceive you. Some of these people you will hire and it will amaze you the number of ways that they can harm your organization.

All of this can be avoided by having open, honest conversations about your organization, your motives, your dreams and—most importantly—your goals for their involvement in your project.

You know, the same kinds of conversations that you would have with an intimate partner, so that you don’t wind up mediating your own divorce.

Or, negotiating a firing.

Conflict is inevitable, but the responses to it—and preparation in advance of it—does not have to be.

-Peace Be With You All-