[Advice] We Built This City

There are systems in place inside of corporations, nonprofits and even families to manage everything, from the finances to the logistics of getting groceries.

Human beings create systems, in response to growing external complexity, which creates conflicts, friction and disputes. Think of Dunbar’s number, or the number of people you actually interact with on Facebook.

As the Internet has exploded all around us, the demand for a digital solution to almost every problem has increased, accompanied by the promise of decreased complexity, chaos, friction and disputes.

But this promise is a misnomer at best and a lie at worst, because the solutions to most conflicts lies in gaining greater awareness of self, moving past the need to rely on a system to solve complexity, and moving toward doing the hard work of discovering something about other people inside of ourselves.

There’s no digital solution for human problems, and with complexity of systems increasing, and with human beings outsourcing more and more of that complexity to algorithms in exchange for the ease of leisure, we have no choice but to start down the road of learning about ourselves.

Or else, the interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts between and within people will only grow more pronounced as man’s search for meaning and mattering becomes more and more acute, inside of the systems we’ve built.

-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/

[Strategy] An Antifragile Future

The future conflicts we can’t predict, the ones that come out of the sky and surprises us, are the easiest to prepare for. But we have to work at it.

Interpersonal conflicts come from both places: the places we can predict (that family member who’s “always been a problem,” or that co-worker who “just doesn’t get it…and never has”) and the places we can’t predict (“he was so normal,” or “she never said anything about it before”).

We don’t prepare for the unpredictable for two, major reasons:

It will never happen to me: Actually in the realm of all mathematical, probabilistic calculations, the likelihood that someone getting into a conflict with you whom you did not expect to is pretty high.

I’m already prepared in case it happens: Well, think about the last unpredictable event (for you) that happened? How did you respond to a flat tire in the middle of road? A screaming adult? A disappointed boss or co-worker who had never said anything previously?

We respond with the patterns comfortable to us, to conflicts and stimulus that are unpredictable, because we don’t think about, plan for, or even consider the fact that the unpredictable might actually happen.

This is why we’re always surprised by future outcomes, conflicts and situations, even as we look for patterns in the past, and assign blame or credit, in order to make order, out of the chaos that unpredictability represents.

There are a few ways out of this, none of them comfortable:

Think about future conflicts “tabula rasa”: Begin by thinking about conflicts that could arise with a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Think of the future—and conflicts that could arise in it—as unexplored territory.
Do not look to the past for solutions: The past is exactly that, the past. And it’s not a good predictor of future behavior, actions or choices. The past is merely history. Or, perhaps nostalgia. And sometimes nostalgia can be poison.
Be open to possibility: This one is really hard if people are not comfortable with change and require stability and predictability—or at least the story of stability and predictability—in order to go about their day. Being open to the possibility for conflict opens the doors to being creative in your reactions, and responses to it.
Creativity is the key: Many people struggle with creative ways to explore, challenge and respond to conflict prone situations. This is why the standard responses to receiving a divorce decree is to just accept it and get a lawyer. However, many conflict scenarios—both interpersonal and intrapersonal—can be resolved, accommodated, or even avoided, in a myriad of creative ways. And, depending upon the type of response you’d like to encourage in the other party, responding creatively is better than using past patterns of behavioral responses—and expecting a different result.

Employing some, or all, of these strategies leads to creating systems in families, churches and civic organizations that can be antifragile, rather than collapsing due to fragility, or overcompensating due to a robustness of robustness.

-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/

[Strategy] Don’t Wallow in the Gap

Our heads are the most dangerous place to be in conflict.

We tell ourselves a story about the nature of the conflict, who’s at fault (and who isn’t) and what the solution should be (preferably one that benefits us and makes the other person the enemy).

We then plunge forward, tackling the conflict with the tools that got us into the conflict in the first place: we don’t actively listen, we don’t engage emotionally with the other person’s content around and within the conflict, and we engage (happily or miserably) in the gamification of the conflict process.

We temporarily pause the conflict (sometimes for hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades) and call that pause resolution—when in reality that pause represents a “lull” in the conflict conversation, where more content floods the gap.

And after all of those steps, we look around an wonder why our workplaces, our families, our schools and our churches are not “doing what they should be doing.”

This is not a condemnation, or castigation. We have engaged in all of these steps as well, with conflicts between us and other people in our own life. We engage in some of these ways even still.

But there is a way out of the narrative trap:

Break the language: Language = Thought and thought = language. Take a pause and review the words that you use to talk about yourself, about the other party in conflict and about the content of the conflict scenario. Words give meaning and set up paradigms for future behavior and decisions.
Break the trap of decisions: What got you here to conflict isn’t going to get you there to resolution. The decisions, patterns, and behaviors that got you into the conflict you’re in today (and the ones you’ll be in tomorrow) have to be broken through self-examination.
Break the gap: Being intentional about the outcomes you want to achieve through avoidance, accommodation, assertive confrontation, or any of the other choices for responses that you have in a conflict, is critical to avoiding the gap. That temporary pause, or “lull” in the conflict flow.

These tips seem obvious and easy, but if they were, we would be collectively performing them all the time, rather than stumbling through the narratives we’ve built. Ultimately, the way out of the narrative trap of conflict, takes having courage to take the steps in the first place.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Epidemiology of Resolution

Resolution is not the cure for the disease of conflict. Neither is forgiveness or reconciliation.

Resolution, forgiveness and reconciliation merely name the types of processes that have to occur in the hearts of people in conflict during the final stages of the conflict process.

But do not be deceived: the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked:

Who can know it?

We addressed aspects of the science of epidemiology before, and where that science dovetails with the process of the resolution, forgiveness and reconciliation, is three fold:

Epidemiology involves examining the symptoms of presenting issues and how they relate to the overall disease map, or journey—the process of resolution has presenting issues, and the main one is the presence of a softened heart.

Epidemiology involves examining the roots of diseases to determine why they arose in the first place—the process of forgiveness, true forgiveness, involves looking at the roots of a relationship where conflict arose in the past, present and may arise in the future, and then determining what the roots of those conflicts are.

Epidemiology involves examining how a virus, or disease spreads among an at-risk (or not yet at risk) population—true reconciliation between damaged parties in conflicts happens very rarely, but when it does, the psychological and emotional benefits of moving forward from where the conflict ended, spread rapidly.

In the radio show of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Lamont Cranston was the vigilante known as The Shadow. In later years, Alec Baldwin portrayed the character in a big budget movie. At the core of The Shadow’s war on crime, was the idea expressed in the opening lines of the radio show, later abandoned in the 1994 film altogether:

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The cure for conflicts through the processes of resolution, foregiveness and reconciliation is multifaceted, multi-angled and requires performing hard, emotional labor, that many of us would rather not perform.

But when everything else hasn’t worked, hard work is sometimes all the work that’s left.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What Will You Do With That Freedom?

The two natural processes of erosion and corrosion are long-term, insidious and the body being affected by them does not observe the effects immediately.

Erosion happens from the outside in: It’s a slow, steady, grinding down of the earth by the massive structural forces of wind, water and ice. It takes hundreds of thousands of years to complete and is never really over.

Corrosion happens from the inside out: It’s also a slow, steady process, where natural—or man-made—materials interact at a chemical level with the oxygen in the air. It takes less time to finish its work and is also never really over.

We underestimate the power of corrosion and erosion as entropy based systems that affect the earth, its properties and the things that humans create. But the circle of life—birth, maturity, death—continues inexorably forward.

On this July 4^th, the day that celebrates the United States of America’s founding with the signing of the most revolutionary document ever written (birth) let us ask two critical questions:

Where is our country, politically, ethically, morally, spiritually, and economically, at in the circle of life?
What social, moral, political and economic processes—either erosion or corrosion—are moving our country inexorably forward along the timeline of entrophy?

Countries, nation states and collections of people (tribes, if you will) also erode, and corrode, in their quest toward entrophy. This holiday weekend, let’s take some time, look around, and consider where we are at.

And what got us here.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] You Can’t Get There From Here

Parties in conflict often ask the questions Alice did when she arrived in Wonderland.

The Cheshire Cat, that fictional animal who disappears, leaving behind only a grin was right, if a party in a conflict doesn’t know where they are going, then it doesn’t matter which way they go.

However, many parties in conflict are savvy enough to know (whether they are conscious of it or not ) that what got them into conflict isn’t going to get them out.

The problem is, many parties have a preference for when they would like the conflict to end (at a place of compromise, accommodation or winning) but they have no idea what the process to attain that outcome looks like.

Too many parties are also like Alice, in that they harbor suspicions of various peace building processes— negotiation, mediation, training, coaching, or litigation—not because they don’t understand the processes, but because they don’t understand themselves.

The prickly questions of:

How did we get here?
Was I in the wrong and not the other party?
Do I have a responsibility to make it better?
What if it gets worse?

And on and on, doggedly insist upon themselves in party’s whisper spaces, before a decision, during the process of getting to resolution (or not) and after the decision is made. On the other side of the whisper space and resolution is the tug at our heart strings of the regret that we cannot go back to the ways things were before.

Or party’s try to go back and only reignite the old conflict.

What got you here (to conflict) won’t get you there (to resolution) especially if each party has no idea what “there” should look like when they arrive.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Persistence and Commitment

Starting anything is easy, as we’ve pointed out before, because the social approval around starting is enormously powerful, positive and affirming.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s an education, a fitness plan or even a battle, starting is easy.

Continuing though, persisting through the slog of the middle, and coming out the other side in completion (whether in victory or defeat) is the hard part.

We were streaming a conversation with a blogger the other day and she mentioned how she had started a book, and then put it away for about a year, while she struggled with the decision of whether to publish, or not.

Starting is easy, the slog of the middle is hard.

She mentioned that, in the intervening time between deciding to write (to start) and deciding to publish (the middle) she had shown her manuscript (a fictional one) to a number of friends of hers to gauge their reactions.

Starting is easy, the slog of the middle is hard.

She mentioned that one of their reactions was to say, “You have gone through a lot.” But this person (assumedly) did not help her write the book, nor is she helping her critique the book.

Starting is easy, the slog of the middle is hard.

Persistence and commitment are the hallmarks of a successful person. But sometimes, human beings get caught in the idea that starting, going through the middle, and ending should follow in logical order, like lines on a map. We perceive the stops in time—and gaps between events—as places of failure, defeat and eventually, the place where everything stops.

Other people and their reactions, judgments and decisions affect us before, during and after the starting gun fires, the buzzer goes off, and the start begins.

But let’s not believe that the people who have the power to applaud, jeer, support, or be neutral have anything to do with us starting. Or getting through the slog of the middle.

That part is always in our power and up to us.

H/T to Jaimee Doriss

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Separating People From Positions

Too many times, well-meaning people cannot emotionally separate the personage of the other party in conflict from that party’s positions.

To do this successfully requires an understanding of (and a caring about) the difference between principles and interests.

Principles are based in values, traditions, and narratives that give meaning to each party in a conflict.
Principles are typically non-negotiable and—when it comes right down to it—parties in conflict view their principles (when they think about them at all) as their “Alamos.” In essence where they land emotionally, psychologically and narratively in a conflict as a last resort.
Principles do not change, they are “baked in.” Principles go to the core of who a person is, and why they value what they value.

Interests are none of these things.

Interests are negotiable, ever shifting, mercurial in their manifestations and outcomes and temporary at best. Interests may have a high negotiating price, but they are negotiable. Interests can unite disparate parties around the pursuit of a common goal, but this unity may sometimes come off as cynical to others, based on avoidance and accommodation of other conflicts, and ultimately damaging to both parties.

In current society and culture in the Western world, there is a lot of confusion around principles and interests. Many individuals and organizations confuse their interests for their principles by using the language of principles while actually expressing an interest. What follows from such confusion is social shaming, public bullying, and even emotional, legal and cultural efforts to engage in destruction of the character of the other party in conflict.

This is part of the reason why many social media based movements fizzle and die: It’s easy to dump a bucket of water on your head to support a cause (interest), but it’s hard to go to a place where people who have different principles from yours gather and actually get to know them as people (principle).

Conflicts in the culture, the workplace, schools and churches grow ever more violent, corrosive and detrimental to all parties as the line between principles and interests becomes more and more confused.

What’s the way out? Well there are three steps, each harder than the last:

Decide what you believe. In a conflict scenario, take some time and examine your own motives, interests and your deeper principles. This seems easy, but much like empathy, active listening, anger management and many other areas of conflict, if you’re choosing not to do it, then it won’t be easy. It will be hard.
Separate people from positions. Positions are always based in interests. Principles are always based in character. Hate the sin, but love the sinner. Easy sounding, but hard to do for each party in a conflict, no matter what the root cause.
Unite with the other party on principles. This is the hardest thing to do, because it requires leaving the comfort zones of separation, demonization, bullying and “othering” and requires each party to go and see “how the other half lives.” By the way, if you think that you know how the other party thinks, feels, and what their principles are because of a few examples of behavior in the past (or present), you really don’t.

When we separate people from positions, they transform, from the image that we have of them in our heads to the reality that they are in the world. We get an opportunity to preserve their autonomy, freedom and integrity. And, we don’t take actions to escalate conflicts, pushing the other party toward their personal conflict “Alamos.”

And we avoid pushing ourselves there as well.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] What To Do With A Barking Dog

Nothing is more annoying than a persistently barking dog, whether you are traveling in a Persian caravan across the desert or you are a mid-thirties single woman in Manhattan in the 90’s.

The majority of dogs bark, because of an instinct to do so in situations they perceive as being hostile to the community, or the pack. The dissonance of noise between parties in conflict, surrounding the feedback that many people get in a communication situation, can come off like the endless barking of dogs.

And yet, if we stop screaming at the dogs of conflict to “shut up” long enough to recognize what is actually happening in the conflict interaction. Or, we can decide that the barking is pointless noise, based in fear, apathy, avoidance and accommodation, and then we can move on from the conflict.

In the crowded desert of human interactions—or the empty desert of Manhattan—communication about the Truth of conflict, matters more than the noise around what we didn’t do, what we didn’t say or how we didn’t act, yesterday.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Innovation and Change

The problem stopping most workplace innovation and change strategies, is that too many people–founders, funders, entrepreneurs, owners, and starters–have thought too little about how they personally and professionally respond and react to a culture built on change and innovation.

We’ve addressed this before:

You get up and go to work every morning and work with people whom you have developed third level relationships. You are tasked with accomplishing goals that may have little to no meaning for you. And in exchange, you are compensated with pieces of paper with the pictures of deceased leaders on them.

Then, changes happen (or innovation arrives), both internal and external and you are required to manage the change, manage the disruption you feel about the change and manage the responses and reactions of the other people who are impacted by the change.

In exchange for expending the emotional labor required to do this successfully, sometimes you are recognized and rewarded in ways that matter to you. Sometimes you aren’t. Too many organizations are still led by managers, teams and supervisors at the middle management level who think “Well, you got a paycheck this week. So that’s good enough.” Even worse, many of those same organizations were founded, funded and continued by people with the same Industrial Revolution, Henry Ford mindset.

Some of this is mindset is changing, no doubt.

With the work that human resource researchers, behavioral psychologists and organizational experts are doing throughout the world, the workplace is gradually shifting. As we noted in a workshop that we facilitated the other day, we are all collectively exiting the hangover remaining from the Industrial Revolution.

Innovation for people and organizations, true innovation, will require founders, funders, entrepreneurs, owners, and starters, to turn the corner on two corrosive mindsets that remain, leading to all kinds of conflicts, both internal and external:

We have to stop thinking of innovation as an imposition.

People, whether employees, supervisors, managers or executives, are not prone to behaving in change-oriented ways. Because of our biology, reinforced through work, social and personal cultures, we are inclined to favor the least amount of resistance (or friction) possible. This response, of course comes from the flight and fight parts of our brains. We rationalize these responses in many different ways, but for the most part, people tend to view innovation they did not initiate as an imposition, rather than as an improvement.

We have to stop making change a “value container” for our personal issues.

People make judgements and rationalize their responses to changes in many different ways, but the biggest way is that people determine that change is really a verdict on past decisions. Specifically, an indictment. This pre-conceived judgement comes from the idea that “what came before must have been bad.” This type of thinking paralyzes people in endless meaningless arguments about the validity of past decisions, closes people off to determining how the material fact of change can be integrated into the present circumstances, and blinds people with fear about what other changes the future may hold.

Innovation and change are merely stories, told by people desiring a new narrative.

Innovation and change always comes with conflict and conflict is an incubator of change.

Without founders, funders, entrepreneurs, owners, and starters doing the hard work of laying the groundwork of wellbeing, strengths based leadership, emotional intelligence, and conflict engagement skills training in their cultures from the beginning, organizations will continue to find it difficult to innovate.

Even as the waves of external changes, buffet them back and forth across the blue ocean of business.

-Peace Be With You All-