[Strategy] My 6 Biggest Mistakes…pt. 1

The first mistake I made was not verifying the claim.

The second mistake I made was walking in the room.

The third mistake I made was confronting inappropriately.

When the customer came and got me, I was busy doing another task and I was switching back and forth. With the small gaps in between the thoughts and the switching. The customer who came and got me said “There’s been disruptions all evening from these people and you and your staff haven’t done anything about it.”

And then, the customer stared at me.

Nonverbal communication drove a lot of this, and with one look, I was prodded into action. But, instead of verifying the claim of disruption (my first mistake) I instead reacted and sprang into action. I hustled down the long hall, into the dark room, where the light from the images flickered across the faces of the people staring in rapt attention. I walked down a poorly lit aisle (my second mistake) and knelt down in front of the people in the general area where I had been informed that the disturbance was occurring.

I said something to the effect of “I’ve gotten a report about a disturbance in this area. I’d like you to quiet down so that other people can enjoy the show.”

The third mistake was confronting inappropriately.

Then, I turned around and walked out of the dark room, into the light of the hallway. I proceeded to head back to the office, feeling a vague sense of self-satisfaction. I tasked switched back to the work I had been doing before the customer initially approached me, and continued to believe that all was well.

I often tell groups that, even though I am a trainer and conflict engagement professional, and even though I can tell you what the right response is, and even though I can tell you how you should respond and manage other people antiseptically, I’m often confronted with the results of my own poor choices in my own life.

At the time that I made these three mistakes in a row, I had the same education and knowledge level that I do now. At the time that I made these three mistakes in a row, I knew much of the literature on response, reaction, and how to navigate both.

At the time that I made these three mistakes, I knew the path, but I was far away from getting committed to implementing walking the path, 1% better every day.

And then, to compound my problems, I went ahead and made three more mistakes.

-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/

[Opinion] New Triggers

Emotions then judgment then language.

The old advice no longer holds in addressing the language of conflict. The new advice can best be articulated as “Sticks and stones may break my bones, and words will really hurt me.”

We often focus on the language of conflict, to avoid addressing the structures of emotions that actually drive the language.

Focusing on the language allows us to hide effectively and to avoid doing the courageous work of addressing conflicts at their root.

Focusing on the language allows us to anchor people to positions, using the language of principles, without ever addressing people’s expressed needs.

Focusing on language allows us to continue to rest comfortably on our assumptions, prejudices, biases, and pre-conceived notions about the other party (or parties) without ever doing the hard work of addressing the impact of their needs on us.

Focusing on language allows us to render quick judgment, maintain the shorthand of conflict, and to continue to allow our own emotions to go unexamined, without self-awareness or change.

Make no mistake, words have meanings, they tell stories, set the table for conflict, and can be used as weapons to create problems.

But if we’re going to be successful in a future less and less defined by equanimity and peace, then we’d better get really good at overcoming our thin-slicing, our first impressions, and our reactions to language—and the words ensconced within them.

Otherwise, we face a conflict fueled future of escalation around eggshell sensitivities and trigger warnings.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Simple But Not Easy

Conflict represents the apex of our emotional tower as a human species: Conflict, no matter how rationally we attempt to approach it, write about it or think about, is a deeply emotional process.

Too many of us are unwilling to engage in the emotional hard work that we don’t get immediate gratification for, that will lead to ascending higher in the emotional tower, rather than descending lower.

Conflict as a process represents the best hope that humanity has of getting us through the hardest questions that seem to bedevil us constantly. Those questions are made of words; and those words that surround conflict—both stated and unstated–have meaning, and language is triggered by emotions.

But approaching conflict from relationship, rather than from religion, and engaging in emotional labor with a desire to grapple with being consciously uncomfortable, and through having our blind spots examined by others, is the only way to de-escalate the most consistently bedeviling public–and private–questions of our day.

Courage.

Labor.

Engagement.

Relationship.

Conscious discomfort.

Educating, advocating, and encouraging people to ascend the emotional tower of conflict with these rhetorical, and actual, tools is not sexy, not flashy, and not celebrated often enough.

It’s simple. But it’s not easy.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Life Long Learning Myth…Busted

Implementation, coaching, mentoring, and supporting through experiences matters more to adult learning in a corporate setting, than sitting in a room for four hours listening to a facilitator.

The drop-off in retention after such an experience is 50% after participants leave the room, and without immediate changes, immediate implementation of the learning outcomes, coaching along the path of uncomfortability, and supervisory mentoring through the tough times, the retention drop-off is 75%.

So why do many organizations still offer corporate training opportunities in all kinds of topical areas, within a formalized “sit down, and absorb” learning structure, syllabi, certificates, and experienced trainers and facilitators who drone on and on for—at most—half a day?

There are three reasons:

Most organizations—whether corporations, training organizations, or higher education institutions—are unwilling (and many times unable) to do the hard work of challenging, breaking, and remaking the foundation of learning established through the last 150 years of K-12 schooling. Schooling which was designed in conjunction with corporate leaders and influencers, and codified with the support of intellectuals and educators, to produce compliant workers, who would sit (or stand) all day and do widget based, industrial work, while leaving the thinking and innovating to others up the chain. The kind of work that was hollowed out by those same individuals starting 40 years ago and now no longer matters much in America.

Many supervisors, managers, bosses, CEO’s, COO’s, and others in the hierarchical structure of many organizations, have come from a background of schooling that they either internally rejected because it was too rigid, or found comforting and conformed too. Such engrained mindsets around the value of learning (and education) do not advance and innovate organizations. Instead, they continue to produce leaders who believe that training (and life-long learning) is either a “nice to have” (rejection mindset) or a “necessary evil” (acceptance mindset). Either way, the mentality shaped through that rejection or acceptance, is reflected in buying, internally developing, or advocating for models of learning for employees based in an Industrial Revolution K-12 schooling model.

Trainers, facilitators, consultants, and others in the wide and deep field of corporate training (myself included) aren’t doing enough of the hard work, often enough, of breaking our own mindsets of how information, experiences, and content is delivered to audiences (online, F2F, etc.). We also aren’t engaging with the hard work of breaking institutional, corporate mindsets from the outside by creating offerings and client deliverables that will transcend the dying model of K-12 education. This means having the courage to stick to our principles around peer-to-peer learning, advocating to organizations that we serve for mentoring and coaching for our learners, encouraging accountability, and at the furthest end, treating adult learners like adults in the training room, rather than continuing to train them (i.e. treat them) in the K-12 learning mold they’re familiar with.

The feedback I always get when I write (or talk) in these three areas typically focuses around the inability of organizations to change, the unwillingness of employees to actually be motivated to do the hard work of working on things that are hard (i.e. engaging with emotional labor) and the inability of trainers, consultants, and others to feed their families based on selling what the market is not progressive enough to demand.

These are all legitimate concerns, but the facts of the 21^st century are clear for anyone with two eyes to see:

The workplace, jobs, labor, and other tasks that people need to be organized into groups to accomplish, must still be done, or else there will be chaos in the world. Hard work—manufacturing work, “blue collar” work, etc.—will still be done in the world, but increasingly due to automation and algorithms, that work will be either outsourced or done by machines. And when it’s not, the people who will do it, will charge an even higher premium for it, to support their continued learning to become better artisans.

An acknowledgement that work matters, that tasks should be meaningful, rather than meaningless, and that employees should be treated like adults rather than like children in the workplace, is growing rather than going away. Calls from researchers, thought leaders, influencers, advocates, and others for more pay transparency, flexible family leave policies, and “flat” hierarchical structures, are only the tip of the iceberg.

The rewards to organizations in terms of prestige (Top 10 Best Places to Work), revenues (The World’s First $2 Billion Company), and public goodwill (Anyone See What Apple Made Today) in America, are drivers for success (or determinants of failure in a transparent media market) more now than ever. And these drivers become outsized to organizations that are willing to take risks, to supervisors that are willing to challenge the status quo, and to vendors who are willing to sell with courage.

Unrest will continue among employees who believe that they are not getting paid what they are worth, are increasingly mobile, and are calling the bluff of the industrialist mindset that has dominated every sector of life for over a century now. This unrest will grow in continued calls for a basic income, the cries against income inequality, and the accusations of a new “Gilded Age” of wealth and prosperity for some.

Wihout meaningful changes the conflicts that will arise if life-long, continuing, robust education is not increasingly, innovatively, and creatively integrated into the work lives of employees in all organizations in all sectors (from small businesses to the Fortune 1,000 companies), will be massive and unmanageable.

And bosses, managers, supervisors, shareholders, CEO’s, CFO’s, communities, civic leaders, politicians, business owners, corporate training organizations, and others will have to explain in plain terms to their constituencies, employees, followers, and others, the reasons (and their mindsets) for why they rejected or ignored the golden opportunity to implement, coach, mentor, and support in order to transform corporate learning into something meaningful and valuable, in the early 21^st century.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Confusion of Trust

People sometimes say (or think) in an interaction “I don’t trust you.”

And then they go and order a book, a magazine, a car, or even a living space (hotel room) online without much of a thought about who is on the other end of the transaction.

Transactional trust is at the core of most messaging and is the vehicle for the virus of conflicts when the transaction is proven to be not worthwhile, too expensive, or requiring too much emotional involvement.

Transactional trust is what organizational leaders use to ensure that their expectations (and sometimes ours) get met, and the organization moves forward a smoothly as possible. When the trust breaks down however, their expectations (and ours) around sacrifice, loyalty, and expectation shift. And it’s usually a long way back to the original formulation once it’s gone.

In most conflicts, there is a loss of transactional trust, and the message that conflict participants want to send to each other is drowned out by their internal voices, clanging along, declaring quite loudly “I don’t trust you.”

And if the most important thing is sending a message, what do you do when no one is using the same medium that you are, in order to hear the message, you want to send in the first place?

This is the trouble that leads to polarization in modern communications, as well as increases in conflict. It’s not about everybody speaking the same language, it’s about everybody communicating using different mediums.

And when my medium of choice for delivering (or receiving) a message of choice, is not your medium of choice for receiving (or delivering) a message you think that I need to hear, then conflicts, confusion, and escalation are bound to increase, not decrease.

This real confusion around medium, message, and transactional trust has three potential outcomes:

The person sending the message and the person receiving it on the other end now have the option to turn off the other person completely and will exercise the option when the interaction becomes uncomfortable or too demanding, because the bar of trust is way higher and the social penalty for not trusting is way lower.
Both people in the conflict are now comfortable in turning each other off, and are increasingly ensconced inside medium based echo chambers where the same message reverberates from the “tribe” that already supported their initial decision to disengage.
Immoral, unethical, and incompetent “bad” actors now don’t have to encourage followers to seek resolution, collaboration, or even speak a common language. Instead, all they have to do is the easy work of reaffirming fear based transactions that grow trust between them and their “tribe,” trapped in echo chambers of their own making.

The irrationality of our decision-making process served us well in smaller communities, but as interactions that have meaning and mattering begin to scale to global levels, the frictions between our innate irrationality and our need for the security of transactional trust, will only increase.

H/T Seth Godin.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] No More Looking…Just Leap…

Looking before you leap is the message of the world.

We tell our children to “be careful.” We reprimand and lecture people on “their tone.” And we subtly and nonverbally sanction those who get out of line, get off the train, or go in a different direction.

This tendency to caution people before they act on a different choice, shows the power of social proofing—we do what other people do because they do it—and it reinforces the negative tendency of bystander behavior—standing around when something goes wrong—and being unable to innovate when external factors demand a change. Stagnation, bystander behavior, and social proofing work in all organizations, whether they are small (four or fewer people) or large (nation-states).

Look before you leap.

The question on Leap Day is not: “What happens if I do leap?”

The question isn’t even: “What happens if I don’t leap?”

The question is: “Do I have the courage to leap?”

Having the courage to make a change, take an action, do something generous, collaborative, or outrageous, and to do in spite of the dominant culture of your organization is the essence of Leap Day. This courage has nothing to do with looking (you’ve already spent an inordinate amount of time looking already) and has everything to do with stepping out and saying: “I made this.”

There are always two objections to leaping:

What will happen if I am rejected? The answer to that question is: “So what.” Rejection—emotionally, psychologically, socially, or even materially—hurts, and human beings go out of their way to avoid it. Rejection comes in the form of refusing to acknowledge the difficulty of the action, criticizing the process and the outcome, and reacting rather than responding. The power in taking a “so what” stance, comes from knowing that the leap is the correct thing to do, and then doing it while saying to the people who reject the leap: “It’s ok. It’s not for you.”

What will happen if I am accepted? The answer to that question is: “Leap again.” Acceptance—emotionally, psychologically, socially, or even materially—feels safe, and human beings are driven to seek and establish safety at all costs. Safety comes in the form of acceptance, relief that the response to the process, or choice, wasn’t “that bad,” and with a feeling of calm. The power in “leaping again” comes from looking ahead, rather than resting, and in agitating to go deeper into relationship, rather than reaction.

This Leap Day, you’ve hid long enough, looking for a way past, a way over, or a way out.

Leap.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Great Sorting

On President’s Day, it’s useful to remember that meaning and mattering matter more now than ever before.

This is reflected in the shift from important impersonal interactions at scale to important personal interactions between individuals. Meaning has always come from relationships and the community and family has always been the first incubator for the rules and traditions of relationships.

But the family incubator is breaking and changing—and has been for some time now.

This breaking and transforming leads to conflicts, disagreements, and disputes that loom beneath larger relationships with their power, their virulence, and their ability to last. Mattering generated through disagreement—what we are against as opposed to what we are for—is the great sorting, occurring as societies and cultures shift from a post-Industrial Revolution landscape to whatever comes after that.

When meaning and mattering only come from the narrative of conflict, the pure function of dysfunction becomes the call of the day, and the larger narrative shatters into a thousand pieces of glass.

What are we to do?

Relationships between people are still going to be the key to overcoming the dysfunction of the broken incubator of family, tribe, and community. Relationships, no matter the overall structure behind them, still matter more than the gossamer of tradition, economics, location, or history.

Narratives between relationships are going to become more strained and less collaborative because the difference between your tribe’s meaning and my tribe’s meaning matters more than the similarities we may share across tribes.

Meaning and mattering will become more elusive to attain, and harder to maintain, as the bonds that used to hold—tradition, family, religion, even the nation state itself—fray from the edges to the center, and those in authority (presidents, politicians, prime ministers) lose their power (but not their authority).

People seek meaning above all else, whether through conflicts, or through relationships. Joining across artificial boundaries pushes this meaning through conflict and relationship to a whole new frontier for humanity.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] A New Mental Model of Trust

The mental model for trust is broken in workplaces.

The old model looked like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) loyally for a period of time (X) and, with enough reciprocation, I stay with you for the remainder of my career.

That mental model is one that only works under the specific economic conditions of the 1940’s through the 1970’s in America. However, since there is one thing that America does really well (the marketing of America to every other country in the world) as the mental model rubs up against changing economic reality, there is friction everywhere, between those people who want that model, and those people who are trying to create a new model. Employees at organizations of all kinds are in the midst of a great cultural, economic, philosophical, and social destruction of that old mental model and at the same moment are carving out a new mental model.

This new model (right now) looks like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) but not so loyally, and I take my accumulated intellectual capital from your workplace to another workplace, whenever it suits me, because you may not be around in five years.

There’s a lot of talk from employees, organizations, management thought leaders, and others about the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change in Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., and the media centers of Los Angeles and New York City. But if you go to places outside of Madison, Wisconsin, or outside of Peoria, Illinois, or travel four hours north of New York City and talk to employees of organizations still struggling to maintain a semblance of the old model, the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change that get talked about breathlessly in those other places, get addressed in tones of defeatism, regret, and anger.

This tone and its lived reality is also a mental model. And the employees who exist inside the new mental model may out innovate, out disrupt, and out change the employees longing for a return to the old mental model; but, there must be ways to develop every potential employee together, without brutal economic and social Darwinism being the answer.

Here are the three ways to shift organizational mental models:

Access to the means of production is the linchpin: As more and more resources, time, and talent gravitates towards developing digital products, services, and processes there are questions about whether “everyone” can be a computer scientist. This is a red herring argument. Access to the means of production means high speed Internet in a neighborhood, whether you’re 50 miles outside of Overland, Kansas, or in the heart of downtown Miami. Such access shifts the mental model of ‘The-Internet-as-an-Entertainment-Vehicle’ to ‘The Internet- as-a- Economic-Development-Vehicle.’

Valuing and incentivizing emotional labor:I talk about this repeatedly, but it bears writing yet again: The mental model of what constitutes work in the workplace has to shift towards valuing and incentivizing employees who can collaborate, get along, and manage conflict in a competent and healthy fashion in a dynamic, globally competitive environment. This is the core of laboring with mind and emotions, versus laboring with hands and muscles. Both can be rewarded, but the incentives toward the labor which can be repeated until a person is on death’s door must be made infinitely more robust in workplaces.

Hiring for mental models rather than personality traits: As algorithms and computers have entered more and more into the hiring matrix of organizations, more and more creative, innovative, and change oriented people with growth-mindsets are abandoning all hope of being hired in some organizations, and are migrating to large cities where their value can be rewarded. Abandoning all of the hiring tools is not the point. The point is, how people perceive their agency in the world, based on what they’ve accomplished in the past (stuff that’s not listed on the resume and doesn’t get picked up by the algorithm), will matter more and more for discovering and hiring employees of value.

If organizations can shift their own mental models around these three areas, then they will survive and thrive as the century continues to unwind, with employees all over the world, who will be loyal, trustworthy, innovative, and change oriented. This new mental model may share some aspects with the old model, but it will survive future economic, social, technological, and cultural shocks which we can’t see coming.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Future Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We have nothing to fear but, fear itself.”

“I have a dream.”

“We do these things because they are hard.”

One of the more terrible losses in our contemporary age is the loss of soaring rhetoric, with allusions to classical Western literature (e.g. Shakespeare, Greek and Roman texts, the Bible, etc.), appeals to the common good, and an unwavering belief that Americans, together, can just “do” things.

[Opinion] The Future Martin Luther King, Jr.

This Image Does Not Belong to Us

This contemporary loss due to three things:

Americans no longer share a common language around problems because of the fracturing of the media environment, with a million tiny voices crowding out one large voice. There is no longer a single voice of authority, such as a Cronkite, a Vidal, or a Buckley. Instead there are multiple voices whose sources believe they are competing for authority, but in reality they are competing for attention.
Americans are no longer commonly educated in the writings of the past, partially because the Western literature canon has fallen to the wiles of multiculturalism, social engineering, and the desire to see education as a technical good, rather than as a way to link current generations to past meaning. In our efforts to replace the technical efficiency that used to be valued when we were a manufacturing country, we have moved to making education serve technology rather than wisdom.
Americans have blown up the tendency that we always had, toward being independent individualists (“get in your Conestoga Wagon and go West”), and have fetishized it to a degree never before attained by a population in human history. Since the Myth of the West has collapsed, we see this tendency most visibly in the retreat to individualized, mobile experiences, the popularity of streaming shows on Netflix, complaints about Academy Award film selections, and the overwhelming silence from populations in the center of the country who are never questioned except once every four years during elections.

The reason I’m bringing all of this up today, on Martin Luther King day, is that from Franklin Roosevelt (and earlier) all the way through Ronald Reagan, presidents, statesmen, politicians, and social leaders at least shared a common education, language, and a tendency toward a collective sense of commonality with the American people they were looking to persuade. They used that sense to make appeals to a higher good, all the while acknowledging that not everybody, including them, would make it to the end, but the journey would be glorious anyway.

This is not to say that there wasn’t separation, there wasn’t strife, and that there weren’t two views of America. If you think that the current age of fracturing is new, then take a look at newspaper headlines, political advertisements and rhetoric from the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th century. There was far blunter commentary, outright conflict, and rhetorical viciousness than would be allowed today in our tamped down rhetorical climate.

What is new is the lack of common language and the results of that lack have served to create deeper political, social, and cultural fault lines, all the while, playing on the natural American tendency toward liberation, freedom, and autonomy.

Appeals of “We’re gonna’ go get ‘em,” or “Hope and change,” or whatever the catch phrase was of the eight years of the Clinton Administration (“I did not have sex with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky”) don’t ring out quite as commonly. They don’t appeal to the better nature of our common American experiences. They are not as fluid, nor will they be remembered by history when certain proscriptive policies and efforts fail (or succeed), except as punchlines in YouTube videos, with a trail of bitter comments in the threads below the video.

On this day, I wonder what Martin Luther King, Jr., a preacher who read Greek, studied the Bible closely, and who knew all about the moving power of common rhetoric designed to unite people (both white and black), would think about the current restless mire America is in?

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-