[Opinion] Getting Out of the Ghetto

Human civilization doesn’t need another social network.

It is a sign of the limits of our present level of creativity and value addition, that the top websites on the Internet right now, tend to be ones that are focused around two areas:

Sharing, collecting and curating information to a wide sphere of government officials, corporations, communities and individuals, who have their own motives and desires.

Shopping and engaging in commerce for the express purpose of either paid consumption of products and services (Amazon.com) or free consumption of products and services (anything in the Google family).

Shopping and sharing dominate the internet, and thus create values in the stock market, because the first generation of totally Internet savvy entrepreneurs, visionaries, creatives and others has not yet come of age.

The current crop of adults (those 21-64) creating the Internet realities with which we all live, are digital immigrants, trapped in the ghettos of their own making—walled gardens of apps, physical mobile technology and bandwidth controlled by companies built on the old, Industrial Revolution models of corporate formation.

But, there is a future coming where the digital immigrants will be left behind. The true digital natives, who will live their entire lives of communication, education, entertainment, consumption and creation in the digital space have yet to come of age.

When they do, they will leave the walled gardens and ghettos that appear so shiny to all of us now, because we lack the imagination—and the courage—to head West into the vast space of the Internet and pioneer something different.

-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] Marketing for the Peace Builder

Peace builder’s have to be willing to get vulnerable in their marketing.

In a professional field, dominated by people familiar with—and comfortable with—the way that the world worked under Industrial Revolution rules, this can be a difficult transition.

Peace builders of all kinds—conflict resolution professionals, mediators, trainers, attorneys, social workers, and on and on—are facing world where permission is no longer granted, and where technology gives anyone the tools to change the rules.

It is important to note, however, that perfection, exactitude and quality are thought of in different ways now. A woman at a conference last week asked us a question: “How can you write a blog post that’s ‘just good enough’ when that is out there and it could show the quality of your work to a potential client?”

Good question.

The answer is three fold:

The line from “good enough” to “perfect” has nothing to do with a potential client’s perception of the work. It has to do with the author’s perception of what they have written or created. Your “good enough” and our “perfect” are going to have different meanings. And thus draw different clients, with different motives.
In a world of endless noise and multiple information options, the higher work is not to be bound to a mythical idea of “quality” based on rules that no longer apply. Instead, quality is now defined as “being out there in a world full of noise with commitment, consistency and persistence.”
The audience decides or the audience doesn’t, but the audience has expanded by multiple factors. No longer are peace builders bound to the television, billboards, editorials, word-of-mouth referrals, and praying that the next client will come in. Now peace builders have an expanded audience to whom they can appeal (see the Long Tail for more of this idea) and with 6.5 billion people on the planet, the audience is global, not local.

Before doing any of this, before writing one blog post, or making one video, peace builders have to be willing to throw away fear, the need for assurances and their preconceived expectations, and dance with vulnerability, to market effectively.

We’ve got an e-book describing our journey through this minefield. Download it by following the link here. And it’s free.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Build Your Own House

When living in a house that someone else has built, there is always a sense of something that could be better, roiling around underneath the veneer of “being comfortable.”

Walking around in that house, the renter (or person paying the mortgage) always notices nails sticking out, annoying rough edges and corners of door jambs and knobs, cabinets that are the wrong height and colors of the walls that are “off.”

But, most people put up with those irritations in a house, because…well…it takes a lot of technical—and emotional—knowledge, to design your own house, to your own specifications, that’s comfortable for you.

It’s the same thing with the houses that we have built on top of the virtually property space of the web: social media platforms, apps, websites and many, many other items.

Too many clever people in the web space complain too much and too loudly, about the houses they are paying rent to live in. And as clever as they are, they are not picking up a pen, a ruler and sitting at a slanted desk, to design and build something of their own.

In order to develop the web past where it is now, we need more clever people building houses, versus renting houses.

And the amount of real estate is always expanding…

-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/

Build Your Own House

For some people, renting is the way to go.

It removes the hassles of having to do yard work, deal with snow removal, or fix the things that invariably go wrong with a house.

For some people, ownership is the way to go.

It allows the person (or couple, or family) to feel psychologically, financially and spiritually grounded in a world of impermanence.

The same parallel can be drawn with organizations and their use of marketing tactics through social platforms.

Some organizations would rather pay the rent to get to eyeballs that the landlords of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pintrest, Instagram, and on and on have decided to charge.

Some organizations are choosing to opt-out and go back to doing the work of building their own platform through the use of their website, their blog and their email distribution lists.

Which strategy is better is really a matter of whether an organization is looking to persist and remain relevant in spite of the changing winds of social platforms, or if an organization is just looking to “make some noise.”

However, never forget: The social media landlords of Facebook, Twitter, et.al., already put in the hard work building a really, really, attractive space for all those tenants whose eyeballs you want to show your content to.

So, are you a renter or an owner?

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

[Opinion] The Center is Holding

The signs of the post-American (some would say post-empire American) world, are all around us, from Trayvon Martin to the latest corporate hacking issues at Sony.

The center is holding culturally and economically, in “flyover country,” where—outside of a very few areas in the economy—failure is still not tolerated, taking risk is still frowned upon, and steady, 40 hour a week values, are still being inculcated into the young.

At the edges though, things are fraying and the Sony hack is the latest example of the fraying edges. Data illegally obtained and then released to the tabloid journalistic community.

And Sony isn’t the only one. JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, Kmart, and now Staples have all experienced this phenomenon.

For the people at the cultural, political and even economic center, this represents a watershed shift from the America that they knew—and that they still want to believe in—to an America that they do not understand.

We have said before that the large looming 21st century conflicts will be between those who have access to technology and software and those who do not, or even between those people who seek to define the future through search (Google) instead of connection (Facebook).

At a global level this will be true, but in the US, the battles coming are between those who believe and seek to shape the culture in post-empire ways, and those out in “flyover country” who are still raising children and inculcating them to believe in the values of empire based thinking: God, family, country.

The role of the peacemaker at the policy table, the entertainment industry, and even in the digital space, is now more important than ever.

-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/

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-

We Built This

There’s been a trend that has advanced as our electronic tools have outstripped our good sense, our common decency and our impulse control.

The trend can be heard in phrases such as “my Twitter feed blew up” or “Facebook melted down.”

When the popular media narrative drives emotional responses to hot button issues, surrounding topics such justice, identity, legal decisions or social depredations to push up ratings and gather attention, the population in the United States now has the tools and know how, to take to Twitter and Facebook and express displeasure, disgust or even to “poke the bear.”

The social contract is breaking down, not because people have the tools to express opinions from the peanut gallery, but because every peanut in the gallery has access to the tools in the first place.

But, we in the field of ADR shouldn’t get mad at the Internet or social media. After all, we either actively or passively, participated in building the media that we have right now.

We shouldn’t throw up our hands in disgust and walk away, tune out, turn off and drop off the “map.” We also probably shouldn’t engage, foment and otherwise stir the pot more, with anything but affirmations of peace and solutions to complicated issues.

We have taken the words of the Declaration of Independence, and the admonitions and arguments of dead 18th, 19th and 20th century white male philosophers to heart, but unfortunately, we have taken them to heart—and to task—using tools and social spaces that weren’t really designed for nuanced observation, conversation and peacebuilding.

The popular narrative is exactly that—a story—and we as individuals are under no obligation to spread the story, comment on the story, or even to believe the story.

We are under obligation, as peacemakers, to point out alternatives to the dominate narrative, no matter from whom—the majority or the minority—it may spring, and offer a path toward the Truth.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 1

There are three hard parts to launching any project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).
The second hard part is getting the necessary hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly when the learning curve is steep.
The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience.

Unfortunately, many people get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively about how hard the three hard parts might be, rather than actually taking concrete steps to complete at least one of them.

-Peace Be With You All-

Christian Peacemaking in a Fallen World – Bully Edition

Bullies are everywhere it seems.

They are at school. They are at work.

Have they always been around or are we only now becoming sensitive to their presence and their impact?

From Donald Sterling to the workplace bully to the disaffected school shooter, modern Western culture seems to be turning up more and more of the disaffected and the dysfunctional.

Eventually, the societal call will come to violate the inviolable in order to ferret out and better address the impacts of bully pathology.

The conflation between the everyday bully and the societal scourge will become easier and easier as time progresses and peace will become harder and harder to attain.

There will be less understanding, less forgiveness and the road to reconciliation will be even tougher.

The hard work of #BuildingForTheFuture is just beginning…

-Peace Be With You All-

At This Point…

…what difference does it make?

This is a question that lies at the midpoint between successfully realized failure and rationally justified escape in any conflict.

We ask ourselves this primarily because we believe that we will fail to resolve a conflict in our favor (or in a way that reconfirms our position—no matter how flawed), so we feel justified in giving up.

We surrender, in some cases, to our basest nature and/or we let circumstances take over a situation that could be well under our control if we engaged with a little self-awareness, a little less self pity and with a little more courage.

We don’t judge the motives of the former senator and former Secretary of State in making this statement, but we do note that many, many people, significantly less prominent in the history of the, world have muttered this quietly to themselves.

-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/