[Strategy] “Bold Colors, No Pastels.”

I never had a color day when I went to school.

But my kids do. It’s a day at school when anyone can wear an outfit featuring a part of (or dominated by) their favorite color.

Conflicts create opportunities to stand up, stand out, and to show your colors. But many people (my children included) would rather wear their favorite color all the time. Or even worse, attempt to blend in to the background by sporting the pastels of “going along to get along,” or through displaying violent colors by creating negative strife, drama, and needless confusion.

My tagline in my Twitter bio (and you can follow me @Sorrells79 on Twitter) is “Bold colors. No pastels.” We all have a choice to make about how we engage with conflicts, disagreements, disputes, fights, and “differences of opinion” in our lives.

When we choose to engage boldly, with an understanding of where our ethics, values, and moral core comes from, then we avoid the pretty—but functionally useless—pastels of disengagement, as well as the sexy—but ultimately useless—violent colors, of conflict.

Instead we take the opportunity to go boldly forward and to role model for others the same principle.

And then, everyday becomes a color day.

-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] The Self-Deception Game

There will always be the option to drink your own Kool-Aid.

There will always be the option to continue believing that “everything will just ‘work out’ somehow.”

There will always be the option to avoid doing the hard work of being uncomfortable while learning a new competency (consciously unskilled) and to just continue reacting to conflicts in ways that have always worked for you.

There will always be the option to continue to be self-deceived into believing that when disagreements, disputes, and fights arise that the best way to react is the way that you’ve always reacted.

There will always be the option to continue to be surprised, follow directions, avoid responsibility, never challenge the status quo, and to continue to avoid absorbing new information.

There will always be the option to disengage, or even worse, to engage selectively with people, situations, and messages that you “like” and that are comfortable for you to understand, accept, and integrate into your worldview—because they already confirm your worldview.

The systems of communication, and the economies of scale growing inside of them, that we are building and the new ways of connecting, are not going to grant outsized rewards to worldviews that are willing to choose among the above options.

In fact, the worldviews that those options represent will continually be exposed to the antiseptic sunlight of other views, shining through the new communication systems that we are constructing.

My grandmother used to say “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” But there will always be the option to construct your own truth—no matter your worldview—in the face of challenging conflict—and hope that it all works out.

Somehow…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Candy Coated World

There is a lot of advice floating around about how to build a better world. Most of the advice though, is similar to that one M&M candy in every bag which when bitten into, collapses revealing nothing underneath the candy-coated shell.

The leaning on symbolism—the candy-coated shell—rather than focusing on the hard work of developing substance—the stuff inside of the M&M—creates confusion, frustration, miscommunication, and more conflict rather than less.

By leaning on symbolism rather than substance, authors direct audiences to bite into the candy-coated shell of nutrition less advice, based in rules and religion, rather than relationship and doing the hard work.

This can be frustrating and unsatisfying, particularly when audiences are looking for advice about how to address a conflict in their lives.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Relational Resonance

Resonance is a term from physics that describes what happens when an object’s natural vibration frequency responds to an external stimulus of the same frequency.

Resonance occurs in nature when an object vibrates without you even touching it. Resonance happens when people fall in love with each other; and, resonance shifts when people fall into conflict with each other.

The reason that litigation is such a poor method for resolving disputes is because most—if not all—disagreements, fights, and “differences of opinion,” are about relationships, built on reciprocation and maintained through common resonance. When the frequency gets disrupted by an external change, the resonance goes away and the struggle to resolution really a hero’s journey back to resonance. Litigation changes the frequency of the relationship between individuals and between individuals and organizations, from one of commonality and vibrating at the same frequency, to one of vibrating at different frequencies.

What does all of this have to do with the conflict resolution professional?

Creating stories that resonate with audiences and clients who are seeking to get back into relationships with resonance, is one of the most important skills that peace builders must grasp in order to design, market, and promote products, services, and processes that will get them revenues.
Creating resonances is about getting to the same frequency—at the same time—that audiences and clients are no matter when and where they are in conflict. Thus, peace builders must consider whether advocating for early-stage interventions (rather that primarily trying to promote late-stage resolution products and services) is a better way to proceed long-term.
Creating the conditions for conflict resolution professionals and audiences to speak the same language—and thus be on the same frequency, will require conflict resolution professionals at all levels to abandon the higher language of “conflict as an opportunity for growth” and move toward the audience language of “conflict as a roadblock to be avoided, accommodated, or attacked.”

The first two are easy. The last is hard.

Peace building is about doing the hard things, doing them well, and doing them consistently—and in a committed way—and building a field and a brand over time that audiences will flock too, that clients will gladly pay money for, and that peace builders can hand down to the next generation of professionals.

Relational resonance must move from the table between clients and the peace builder to the platforms between peace builders and the world.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Different Mediums

The medium is not the message.

Or so it is said.

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 communication scenarios, as well as increases rates of conflicts, and escalations in the course of conflicts. It’s not about everybody speaking the same language (which we often think is the solution, either through training or codifying language in general); 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.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Sometimes Accommodation Works in the Workplace

In the workplace, accommodating bad behavior, poor decision making, and the outcomes of both of those processes leads directly to accusations by others of organizational apathy and confusion.

When we talk about competence though (or write about it) the general idea seeps through the page that somehow being conflict competent requires abandoning accommodation as a strategy. But it makes sense as a strategy when:

The organization is so entrenched in whatever conflict choices they are making that the only way to resolve them all is to tear the organization down and start over again
The individual who is engaged in accommodating conflict choices has little to no positional authority and views their own power stance poorly in relation to the organization’s power stance
The groups or teams that function inside the organization actually run more fluidly with accommodation as a method of choosing how to address conflicts, because the people who are at the top of the organizational chart have role modeled accommodating as a perfectly valid choice.

If these all sound like terrible conflict modes, you would be correct. But most competency models focus on overcoming accommodation to match the dominant communication style that many organizations mythologize in the United States. Which is one of direct confrontation and attack.

In order to create a new kind of competency model, we have to acknowledge that competency at accommodation is not only a valid choice, but also one that creates space for outcomes to occur that may be suboptimal inside an organizational structure.

As a matter of fact, it would look like this:

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] A Common Confusion

Too often, mere competency is confused with expertise. And just as equally as often, expertise is confused with competency.

In the space of a fight, a disagreement, or a “difference of opinion,” the person who appears to be the most competent (and in the Western world, this looks like controlling your emotions and behaving “logically”) to the party they’re in conflict with, to others looking on from the outside, and to themselves, tends to be viewed as a “winner.”

But the appearance of competency is a strategy that most often comes from an internal place of previously codified passive aggressiveness, avoidance or accommodation responses.

The challenge in 2016 is to reset our assumptions around emotional and logical responses and reactions to the conflicts that are bound to pop-up this year. The challenge is not to manufacture disagreements, or strife, in order to show off how adept we are at defusing the bombs we make. The challenge is to change our perceptions around what true conflict competency looks like, not only for the people we see in conflict around us, but also for ourselves.

If we continue to carry the same confusions, assumptions, and appearances into 2016 that we had in the past year, we will continue to get the same outcomes as we did last year, no matter the resolutions we are making today.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Disagreements are Conflicts

No matter what language you use to describe them….

“kerfluffle”

“drama”

“disagreement”

“viewing the situation differently”

“a fight”

“a ‘temporary’ setback”

“…a moment”

“there was an ‘incident’”

…they are all conflicts. And all the cutsey, metaphorical language that we use to not describe them as they are, is, in effect, allowing us to hide from the results of them, the process of fixing them, and making the hard choices to address the other party co-creating them with us.

When we seek to use other language that truthful language to describe the conflicts we are having, in our jobs, in our homes, in our churches, we effectively shift into miscommunication, leaving the door open to future…

“kerfluffles”

“dramas”

“disagreements”

“viewings of the situation differently”

“fights”

“‘temporary’ setbacks”

“…moments”

“incidents”

And though effective conflict competence requires naming before reframing, without accurate analysis and naming, reframing becomes another exercise in either futility or furthering the conflict we can’t describe that we’re in.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Conflict Management Style

From the boardroom to the bedroom, assertiveness as a mode of approaching all conflict situations, is valued above all other choices in America.

But, what is lauded in a competitive business landscape, driven by media, and advertised to a distracted public by marketers, does not represent lived reality. Reality is messy, unmeasurable down to the final metric, and unknowable all the way up to the point that we are allowed to enter someone else’s headspace.

And even then, we don’t really know anything. We just can measure outcomes.

And the reality is, many people would rather practice avoidance, accommodation or just compromise in a fight, a disagreement, or a dispute, rather than practice any variation of assertiveness.

But if assertiveness is promoted as the “be all and end all” of all possible conflict approaches; and, collaboration is confused with weakness; accommodation is seen as charitable and kind (but not effective); avoidance is paired with fear of conflict itself; and, compromising is too often framed as losing, what is the average person to do?

Well, the fact is that, many people—from the boardroom to the bedroom—rotate through all four styles depending upon the situation, or context, in which they find themselves and the goals they are pursuing within that context.

And while assertiveness may be fine when negotiating a conflict solution across the table from a manager or supervisor, it may not be as appropriate a style to adopt when negotiating a candy exchange with a five-year-old.

But with the pressures and stresses of life compounding, rather than reducing, and with conflicts over resources growing exponentially over time, the value of being able to make healthy, conscious decisions to switch from one style to another—and to let the others around you know that this is happening—is the ultimate goal.

Because in a world where the technologists are here and building a world where human agency will be reduced to a mere shadow of its former glory, in pursuit of brave, new outcomes, the human touch to approaching conflict wisely is the only result that will matter.

-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] #GritFilledLivesMatter

Resiliency in the face of a constant barrage of stressors leads to addictive behavior, poor communication skills, erosion of personal relationships and leads to a reduction in the very resiliency, stressors were designed to develop.

We see evidence of this in communities torn apart by racial conflict, ethnic conflict and religious conflict. When there are too many external stressors 9and even internal stressors), individuals (and groups) cross the line from being “gritty” and resilient to taking up arms, protesting and pushing back.

Sometimes violently.

Which creates a cycle, based not in resiliency (though the other dominant party may resist the protests and pushback through avoidance, aggressiveness, or even passive-aggressive behavioral tactics) but in resistance.

And both sides will claim—either verbally or nonverbally— to be exercising resiliency in the face of unreasonable requests, protests and pushback from “the other.”

“We shall overcome” becomes the stated chant (and unstated belief) of both sides, and the first side to verbalize it, is most likely the side who will endure—or have the resiliency and grit—to make it to the end of the cycles of violence.

The critical question to ask (and answer) thus becomes: Will there ever be a way to encourage the development if grit and resilience in people, families, communities, and even in cities and nation-states, without triggering violent cycles of resistance, retribution and violence?

-Peace Be With You All-