[Strategy] 20-80-100

80% of the conflicts in your organization will be solved by 20% of the people in your organization.

And, not all of those people will have positional titles, effective job descriptions, or even work in “traditional” departments that “are supposed to” address conflicts.

Pushing the frontier of who gets what, so that the majority gets more value out of the conflict resolution process, should be the goal of all organizations.

But, there’s a ceiling on that value, generated by competing goals and desires, differing value placed on outcomes and the lack of ability for some in an organization to accept the efficacy of pursuing more than one outcome.

As long as 20% of the people in organization are overcoming 80% of the ceilings in 100% of organizations, the ceiling on claiming value will not move effectively.

-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/

The One Limitation on Greatness

The one thing that destroys most negotiations is differing assumptions around value, resources and time.

One party may view resources as limited, value as scarce and time as a precious commodity to never be wasted.

The other party may view resources as approaching abundant, time as flexible and thoughts of value may never enter into their mind.

The destruction happens when one party cares little to nothing about attempting to enter the “headspace” of the other party, in order to see things from a different frame of reference.

They may lack patience, empathy, understanding or even the personal willpower to make that cognitive and emotional leap.

This is why there are so few diplomats, business “moguls,” great salespeople and great orators. It’s also why from the boardroom to the living room, life is littered with the corpses of failed negotiations.

The issue is not tactics—which everybody wants more of—but strategies—which require weeks, months and years to get right.

-Peace Be With You All-

Organizational Climate Change – Part 3

There are veiled threats, open threats, unspoken threats and curbed threats.

Threats come about when people are frustrated, feel as though they are powerless, or when they know that they have the power.

Power, of course, is influence and control of events. But the weird thing about power is that it works two ways, kind of like nuclear forces. There is strong power and weak power.

Strong power controls resources, affects goal achievement and creates dependency.

Weak power releases resources, impacts goal achievement and creates independence.

The presence of strong power creates consequences, as does the presence of weak power.

Threats link power to outcomes that are perceived as negative based upon the perception of the receiver of the threat, not the sender of the threat.

The receiver mistakenly believes that they are rendered powerless by the threat. And in a harmful conflict environment, more disputes arise when a receiver believes that they have no agency or autonomy.

When was the last time you felt the strength of weak power in your organization?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Work – Life Integration

The engaged, consultant maximizes her time, so that she is working on her business, rather than in her business.

This is the difference between a job and an entrepreneurial venture.

Or even, dare I say the difference between golden chains and a golden ticket.

There are spaces between responsibilities to family, meetings, and other gaps in our lives that can be maximized for the greatest level of productivity.

But that’s not work/life balance.

That kind of balance is not attainable.

There’s only maximizing as much productivity and gaps as possible, and then hoping for the best.

The work of an entrepreneur is to minimize the level of risk in her project: To codify and commoditize the process, the product and even the productivity.

Work/life integration is more attainable than work/life balance, which is the Holy Grail of all entrepreneurial ventures.

-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/

[Advice] Caucusing Arete – Part Two

ADR professionals are asked to where many hats, and are often called to wear them all with excellence.

There is much debate over whether it’s good enough to be good enough anymore, or if we all have to be excellence, but in the space of ADR, arête is important.

Arête is the Greek word for the idea of living up to your potential with excellence.

Now, we’ve talked about this before, but the issue becomes more important when we talk about client autonomy and a preservation of client self-determination.

Wearing that hat—for both clients in a dispute mediation scenario—is kind of like holding two thoughts in your head (and in your heart) at the same time.

For the ADR professional, becoming comfortable with pursuing this form of excellence is a strong part of the hard work of building something that matters.

-Peace Be With You All-

We’re Going To Win

Nonviolent resistance is fetishized through cultural memory as being easy, but it’s really not.

There’s a story in Malcolm Galdwell’s book David and Goliath that he takes from Diane McWhorter’s book Carry Me Home, where a man is giving a speech and he is attacked. The crowd at the speech at first believes that the attack is part of the speech, but quickly realizes that it is not.

The man giving the speech, instead of responding with violence toward his attacker as a form of defense, became his assailant’s protector, singing him songs and wrapping him in an embrace. Eventually, the attacker is introduced to the crowd as a guest.

The man whispers to his attacker before introducing him to the crowd “We’re going to win.”

How many times in our lives do we respond to an attack with aggression, passive resistance, apathy or even outright violence?

Responding to an attack with nonviolence—and following that response all the way to its logical conclusion, which may involve the potential for death—is the single most courageous act David can perform against Goliath.

“We are going to win.” But, Martin Luther King knew that nonviolence unto death was the only courageous way to accomplish that win.

-Peace Be With You All-

Conflict Engagement Systems Design: Real Innovation for Your Organization

Innovation is the “hot” word among all the business thought leaders as we kick off 2015…

There’s “dark-side” innovation, “game changing” innovation and even “shark jumping” innovation, as a recent search of LinkedIn thought influencer posts recently revealed.

But there’s very little talk about organizational innovation focused on the greatest—and most taken for granted resource—that and organization has: its people.

Now, as companies are emerging from the trance of Frederick Wilson Taylor, they are still continuing to treat employees and others as disposable widgets. The current pressure on Marissa Mayer and Yahoo is just a recent high profile example of this.

But, organizations are more than short term ROI and their daily stock ticker price.

Something has to give, if innovation is the key to moving forward in a business environment that is increasingly unstable and unpredictable.

It’s time to hack at the organizational culture that underlies preconceived notions of productivity, innovation and even people.

Conflicts are part of the innovation process and disputes are the result of that process.

Conflict also brings change and can serve as a driver for innovation in even the most entrenched organizational culture.

It’s time to hack a new system. It’s time for conflict engagement systems design for the 21^st century.

-Peace Be With You All-

Systems of the 21st Century

For many organizations, the 21^st century has proven to be pretty much the same as the 20^th century.

People still get hired and fired in much the same ways that they did 20 years ago.

Organizations and businesses still do the core processes of their businesses—sales, finance, marketing, accounting—in the same way that they did—with some minor cosmetic changes—30 years ago.

And, unfortunately, organizations and businesses still handle conflict in the same way that they did 30 years ago. They still view conflict as a process rather than as a product.

They still view the resolution of conflicts—however they are resolved—as “the way we do things around here.” This is reflected in either the avoidance of the process, the accommodation of the tradition of the process, or the attacking of outside interveners with new ideas as “not understanding how we do things here.”

Many organizations still pay outside consultants or have internal offices and departments, designed to “handle” conflicts in the ways that the organization sees as comfortable and preserving the status quo.

In order to do the brave work of the 21^st century, peacemakers must become more and more involved in developing bleeding edge systems for organizations, because the changes to systems that on the surface appear cosmetic, will have deep ramifications for the future.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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/

The Self-Determination of Experts

What is self-determination?

It is an individual and personal equation, involving a combination of autonomy, intrinsic motivation, understanding of cause and effect and the intellect and character to make empathetic choices.

Preserving client self-determination in conflict resolution is the purview of ‘the experts”: People who are more educated than the client in specific areas, whose burden it is to take on the responsibility and ethic of care for the ignorant, inexperienced client.

The unstated message behind the label of “expert” indicates elite-based judgment that creates an atmosphere of superiority, cloistered protection from criticism, a thin skin and an outsized ego.

In an economic world of industrialization, expertise is perceived as the coin of the realm; but, when the world of industrialization fractures (as it is right now) the real power lays not with expertise but with openness.

The field of conflict resolution, based in a foundation of social justice, has developed an affinity for expertise, at the expense of client self-determination.

But, how much information does clients in conflict need before they are informed enough to be “self-determined”?

-Peace Be With You All-