A Fundamental Breakdown

Depending upon who you talk to, the social contract is either breaking down, or being renegotiated, with terms that favor the disaffected, the previously ignored and perennially held back.

Fundamental Attribution Error, correspondence bias and the attribution affect—all cornerstones of modern social psychology—describe the contemporary social contract in two basic ways:

External: If something goes wrong, other people are to blame and should have controlled their situations better.
Internal: If something goes wrong, I am not to blame because situations happen that are beyond my control all the time.

When we seek to blame others—or blame circumstances—for our misfortunes, disputes and conflicts, we shift the social contract in subtle and profound ways.And, depending upon whom you talk to, personal responsibility, or powerful institutionalized forces, are to blame.

But, when there’s no one to attribute cause and error to, and when there’s no set of circumstances that can be forgiven, how is conflict to be resolved?

-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/

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-

How to Really Break the Internet

The reason why there is so much meaningless content in your Facebook feed is that the platform has developed into an advertising platform, rather than a connection building platform.

If you are building a business as a conflict communication consultant, mediator, arbitrator or another type of practitioner, we can discuss the viability of paying for advertising in your connections’ Facebook feeds.

But this is about the conflict evident in the tension between what Facebook—and other platforms—used to be versus what they are now. The marketer Seth Godin made the point in a recent blog post that when a company goes public, it’s purpose ceases to be about changing the world and begins to be about ticking up the share price point for investors.

That creates tension.

The other factor that creates tension is the difference between what users expect from the platform based on past experiences versus what users are experiencing everyday. This is a tension evident in the fact that the users who engage with the platform the most have the greatest chance of getting their content in your feed.

Which means, Aunt Ida who only uses Facebook once every month won’t know that you aren’t seeing her content as often as you are seeing the content being shared and reposted by good ‘ol Trent who is unemployed and has been on Facebook everyday of the week for the last four months.

That creates tension.

Eventually, when another, viable, connection platform (and no, Ello isn’t it) comes along (as it will) Facebook will go the way of TV and become just another luxury advertising platform that charges more and more to push content to an ever more fractured and shrinking audience base that will be paying less and less attention.

That creates tension.

-Peace Be With You All-

Big Conflicts, Big Data, Big #IoT

As part of the continuing, half a century long hangover that economies, industries, governments and individuals are experiencing as a result of the collapse of the Industrial Revolution and the ushering in of the Idea Age, humanity still longs for “bigness.”

Big profits.
Big mergers and acquisitions.
Big Data.

The current collective panting that everyone from Wall Street wizards to social scientists are doing about Big Data—and the collection of every bit of information that platforms can get about customer and client preferences—reveals two disturbing, collective beliefs that will have wide ranging implications if not checked:

The first implication is that of our collective belief that bigger is somehow better, more secure and safer. With the number of incumbent bad actors (i.e. hackers, criminals, black hat actors, etc) looking to take advantage of the inherent security flaws in the collection of Big Data—not to mention the flaws inherent in size itself—this idea should die a quick death.
The second implication is less talked about but is just as important: What happens when everything gets bigger but the human heart shrinks? The collecting of every possible piece of data on people’s actions, choices and preferences and the storage and manipulation of that data, can only inevitable lead to more conflict, not less.

The coming era of connected physical items to a virtual world, provides us another opportunity to address these implications and answer these questions. In the Industrial era that we are rapidly leaving behind, “bigness” was the way that things got done in the most effective way possible.

But now, in an era of decentralization and disruption, the human heart—and it’s size—must be considered more carefully.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Shifting Social Contract

Privacy, the law and the social contract is breaking down.

People want to access the internet and be social privately, secretly and anonymously, but the NSA reads our emails and may soon have access to the data that all the devices in our home will be sharing with each other.

The Lockian social contract is breaking down with technology that Locke could never have anticipated, in an effort to create a Rousseauian-libertine future with no responsibility for what we say and do.

And that’s at a macro level.

Then there is bullying and social break down in social media. Children push each other to suicide. People are redefining the workplace and griping about it on social media. People are making individual economic choices at a rational (and emotional) level to pick streaming over subscription packages.

And that’s at the micro level

So…what does all of this have to do with mediators and conflict?

At the intersection of macro and micro concerns regarding privacy, trust, secrecy, confidentiality and the breakdown of the general social contract, lies a place for peacemakers with skills and talents to train, advise, coach and mentor those for whom active listening, empathy and civil liberties seem to be quaint holdovers from an era of powdered wigs and wine snobs.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Presenting to the People Who Matter

There are people who matter and people who don’t.

The tough thing is telling the difference between the two.

The line between the successful consultant or coach and the “also ran” is the one who strikes a balance between knowing who are the smartest people in the room…and who are just hanging out waiting to applaud.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells
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/

[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-

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/

The Political Body

The monumental conflicts of the 21st century will revolve around who owns your privacy.

Think about it: When you engage in social sharing–and, increasingly all of the Web works because you decide to share pieces of yourself with others–you tacitly provide approval and permission to your personal life.

Carol Hanisch had it right, but not the way that she thought. The body even is going to be turned to the benefit of the social Web, collected data, and politicized privacy.

But the core question remains: Who owns you, your data and even your body? Women have a right to choose, but does everybody have a right to privacy in spite of wanting access to the social web, wearable and even methods of payment, that collects their data?

Intriguing questions, and ones that are already being asked, but not answered, by ethicists, moralists, lawyers, philosophers and others. We know this: where there are no easy answers, black and white seem to be the only ways forward.

Which leads inevitably to more–not fewer–shades of gray.

-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/

[Opinion] We Would Prefer Not To

In light of the current interest around Big Data and the privacy issues made relevant through Wikileaks, Edward Snowden revelations and Google’s recent EU “slap-down,” we wonder how the people who choose not to be enfranchised will be cajoled (or forced) into the developing systems of the future.

Typically, late adopters hang out at the end of the bell curve, waiting around for the latest I-phone iteration to arrive on the discount aisle at Wal-mart, but even these days, the distances between the areas on the bell curve is becoming more and more compacted.

The conflict then arises between those who are the early adopters (the “cool” people”) and those who, for whatever personal, psychological, or emotional reasons, would prefer to still run down that awesome eight track recording of Supertramp.

Most marketing thinkers and wizards of smart continually claim that, eventually there will be enough niches for the people who would rather not participate in the future to still hang out and take advantage of the fringe benefits of the future, without having to actually become an early to mid-adopter of the future.

Problem solved.

Right?

But, what if the real conflict comes from the powers that be in government, corporations and other large organizations, who would prefer to have the convenience of having everybody (even the fringe folks) participating in the “whiz-bang” future, in spite of their objections?

It turns out, that Bartleby (and his late adopter followers) wins in the end, but with the cruelest dénouement possible.

And then the question becomes, what’s the early adopters’s Alamo?

-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 Artistic Part of Marketing

Brands and corporations assume that consumers are either always listening to their bullhorn and noise, or are never listening at all to anything and thus must be shouted at via a bullhorn.

However, if that doesn’t work, then brands get depressed, defensive or melancholy and stop trying. And ultimately disappear.

Or revert to ever larger and more unseemly spectacle.

The reality is something much more mundane–and hopeful.

Consumers’ interest and attention ebbs and flows like a river. It is fickle, unfixed and ever changing.

The hard work for brands is to remain consistently interesting, engaging and relevant so that when consumer attention comes back, the brand hasn’t changed.

The hard work of overcoming the fear of being irrelevant tomorrow and the anxiety to just keep yelling today, is the artistic part of marketing.

-Peace Be With You All-