[Advice] Conspiracy Theories

The standing rule is that people tend to most easily believe in conspiracy theories that they create; and tend to reject the conspiratorial thinking of others.

The trouble with our concerns about fake news, is that they come from a place where critical thinking has been reduced in favor of playing to (and supporting) audience attention spans that rival those of hummingbirds.

The long read, the long form content, the long movie; the challenging idea, the scientific journal, the complicated path to learning a new language; these are all in competition against TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), the 30 second cat video on YouTube, the 6 second looping Vine video, or the easily shareable click-bait article.

Audiences have been convinced by both marketers, and journalists (just marketers in another way) that their thinking and content consumption choices are sophisticated. That they are able to sift through biases consciously (without relying on assumptions and inferences from facts not in evidence), come to rational conclusions, and then act on those conclusions to co-create an orderly world.

Oh, but were that so.

When audiences can pick their own personalized access to “knowledge” and can choose their own “facts” then news that comes from sophisticated marketers (some former journalists) and content creators, becomes the coin of access to the conspiratorial realm. And social cueing, confirmation bias, and attribution activates individuals in the audience to create their own, publicly viewable, and socially shareable conspiracy theories.

Not about aliens landing at Roswell.

Not about the Illuminati running the world.

Not about a rising one-world government.

Not about a coming cashless society.

But conspiracies about stolen votes, illegal voting (and voters), racialism, economic injustice, Big Pharmaceutical companies poisoning vaccines, Big Agricultural companies poisoning seeds, Big Banks ceasing to be allowed to failed, Big Governments seeking to curb natural rights, Big Faith seeking to curb libertine tendencies, and on, and on, and on.

This type of conspiracy theory mongering is particularly subtle and insidious, because it plays on the mistrust and biases audiences already have built in to their world-view and thinking, but it does the play at scale, and one-to-one. This creates a feeling of community (we’re in the know) while also creating a feeling of persecution (we’re on the outside of everyone else).

And people should have expected it. As more knowledge, has become more accessible to the common individual (if you have a smartphone in your pocket with Internet access, you have a supercomputer) we have been encouraged to embrace the conspiracies we like, share them with our friend circle, and then sit back and wait passively for reality to match our frames and worldviews. And when that doesn’t happen, we go back, double-down, and start the conflict cycle.

Mass media (led by the collapsing and panicking journalism field) is complicit in this as well, seeking to drive audience attention to ideas and concepts that are spurious, but that also generate clicks. This is because mass media content production can’t figure out (at scale) how to get audiences to pay for something they can get anywhere for free, but it’s also driven by the ego-based desire to be seen, be acknowledged as an expert, and to grow the network and personal brand of the content creator at the expense of the market, and the audience, gaining new knowledge, or being challenged in any meaningful way.

Fake news—and the environment that allows conspiracy theories to metastasize—is not going to go away. The echo chambers of social platforms are too powerful, with too many voices, too many passive audience members, and too many exclusively self-interested actors.

What is going to have to change is, as always, the hardest piece: Individuals are going to have to decide what they will absorb, what ideas they will believe, and they critically reject other ideas, based on objective evidence and proof.

But if individuals (and audiences) could do that effectively, the placebo effect long-ago would have ceased to be effective.

[Advice] Listening to Hear

Most of the time, in conflicts, we engage in listening to the other party long enough to create a counter-argument that supports the narrative we already have in our heads.

This is not active listening, it’s passive consumption of content while idly waiting for a turn to speak.

This passivity in listening is particularly acute when, in the middle of a statement (or idea) being expressed that we have already dismissed as irrelevant, uninteresting, or not fitting our narrative structure, we pull out the computer in our pockets and start surfing for distractions.

Or our eyes cease to focus on the person making the statement and we begin to look around the room.

Or we begin to fidget and move around, impatiently awaiting the end of whatever is being said.

Children tend to behave like this, and one of the functions of parenting is to curb such ADD-like behavior and channel the energy devoted to not listening to active listening.

And to hearing.

When adults behave like this (as increasingly we are seeing) it leads to the top three cause of conflict: miscommunication, poor communication, and fumbled communication.

There are some ways out of this, and the researcher in listening, Jim MacNamara, offers seven canons of listening (go and check out his talk with the London School of Economics and Political Science. It’s fascinating):

Recognition
Acknowledgement
Attention
Interpreting
Understanding
Consideration
Responding

To get to appropriate responding in a way that acknowledges what was said by another party, listening (which is an active, and transactional act) must become part of the listeners’ conversational DNA.

And in a communication world that rewards impatience, inattention, passive (or little) recognition, endless noise, a lack of consideration, poor interpretation, and inattentive responding, what are we as individuals to do to increase our listening, and decrease our speaking?

[Strategy] We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled ‘HIT Piece’ To Ask A Question

In many parts of the United States, there are people who are addicted to drugs.

We could talk all day about the mechanics of addiction, but there is something that is almost never focused on in any discussion of addiction. We talk about the socioeconomic conditions, familial conditions, societal conditions that lead individuals to pursue the short-term rush of pleasure that come from addiction, rather than seeking the long-term work that comes with addressing any area of our lives.

Compulsion, bad habits, obsessions, addictions; we can all agree that moderation in the material world is best in all things, but when moderation—through individual decision making—begins to warp and change patterns of behaviors in the community of people around addicts, then we all begin to agree that there is a problem.

In the digital space—as in our real lives—brands and individuals are addicted to the short-term impact of paying for attention because of its seemingly immediate results. But once you pay digitally, just as in any addiction off-line, you’ll pay again, and again.

Thus FB can sell ads.

Thus Google and Twitter will have you pay-per-click or per Tweet.

The thing is though, in the digital world, the equity of attention is really expensive in the long-term while seeming deceptively cheap in the short-run, so brands are more than willing to pay, particularly when the cost comes down to a rounding error on their marketing balance sheets. While in the long-term, individuals become impatient, leaping from platform to platform hoping to be done, consistently peripatetic, never really satisfied, and finally abandoning the whole thing in frustration.

But the outcomes for both brands and individuals in the digital space is the same as in the real world. And as the outcomes of this digital addiction become more manifest, the social media commons are wrecked and destroyed (through cynicism over loss of privacy and data selling), messages become drowned out in the cacophony of noise (150 million channels on the Internet and rising), and the audience (always fickle) shifts its focus faster than a goldfish.

I’m not complaining though.

Putting in the work on the long game is the only way to outlast, outplay, and out endure the short-term addicts with deep pockets and little self-awareness. There are three things the smaller people (like myself and other corporate trainers) can do to ensure our survival and longevity (rather than giving up and going home) in this digital foaming red sea:

Share, share, share—someone told me the other day that the reason her company doesn’t do more work in the online space is because she’s worried that she won’t get paid for her content and that she won’t get proper attribution, credit, referrals and revenues. This is backward, Industrial Revolution based thinking where scarcity still ruled in information. I can’t believe I have to point this out, but after 25 years of Google and almost 40 years of the Internet, scarcity rules in attention. So share freely, because if you don’t your competitors will.

Carve, carve, carve—finding a niche is huge in the digital landscape and then mining that niche in the way that it wants to be mined not the way that you think it should be mined, is the path toward long-term longevity. Carving a niche where you own the attention of a few thousand people is the most valuable, long-term form of scaling there is.

Unite, unite, unite—joining with others is the only way forward, whether you’re a digital publisher, or a corporate trainer, or a product person. The big brands in all spaces and niches have seemingly deep pockets. But there is so much white space in collaboration, connection, and growing your network to increase your net worth, that it’s amazing to me how great the level of contraction is that’s currently happening as fear of loss rules rather than anticipation of gain. Uniting together—and keeping that unity through using open source software and collaborative in-person methods—is the only way to combat the fear of loss.

The drug of “I can go it alone.” The drug of “I don’t need to share.” The drug of “I am for everybody.” These gateway drugs lead to other addictions (like gaming short-term attention through paying for it) that then lead to emotional exhaustion, disengagement, and cynicism.

The question you have to ask yourself—and that I’ve already clearly answered—is: How committed are you to the long-game?

-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/

HIT Piece 05.03.2016

The audience for the window dressing has left the building.

The thing is, the audience for whom the window dressing was designed, was probably there against their will for most of the show anyway.

All the way from how teachers present school assignments to how carnival barkers work the crowd, the audience for the show has to buy into the window dressing that covers the content, and they have to have the patience and the desire to be there in the first place.

But at a certain point adults get tired of formalized schooling and audiences get tired of being yelled at by commercials that are louder than the show they are interrupting and all of us begin to make alternate choices.

Post-school age adults confuse the window dressing of the set-up of the classroom, the routine of the school day, and the frustration of navigating the daily school environment tension between what they would like to have done, rather than what they were supposed to do, with learning valuable information—and almost 45% of post-school age adults never read another book after high school.

Audiences confuse the window dressing of the loud voice, the annoying 30-second interruption, the lack of real relationship, and their desire to have the show come back on, with all advertising that annoys them—and they employ ad blockers online, cut the cord from cable and use on-demand, streaming services, or turn off the television altogether.

I’ve been getting some feedback lately that the window dressing over some of my training content has to go. That audiences are impatient, disengaged, and only willing to sit through bite sized content, delivered quickly, and entertainingly.

But the thing is, the audiences I talk with, who contain individuals in conflicts, disagreements, disputes, and “differences of opinion” at work, didn’t get to where they are before they walked into my facilitation space quickly. It was a slow, steady, build-up of sediment consisting of frustrations, expectations, false reassurances, and miscommunications that got them there.

I don’t specialize in keeping anybody around against their will. And if the audience wants the window-dressing to go, it can go.

But to confuse the mechanics of the learning, with the tools of how and why to learn, merely perpetuates a pattern of disengagement, disillusion, and disheartening outcomes that got the audience here listening in the first place.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Committing to Intentionality

Even as blogs, video, audio, memes, and gifs penetrate the public consciousness via personalized mobile phone ubiquity, companies and organizations still pay a premium for physical billboards alongside our national highways and roads.

Why is this?

Well, part of the the reason was revealed through a statement that a former CEO of Mercedes Benz made at one point many years ago: “If I wanted to sell you a Mercedes, I couldn’t do it by blasting you with an advertisement two days before you wanted to buy one. I have to advertising Mercedes to you from the day that you were born until the day you decide to buy one.”

In other words, billboards, television commercials, and newspaper ads (even in an age of declining readership and growing lack of interest in written advertising copy) still matter, because they serve as a “top-of-the-mind” way to get attention for, and place (or anchor) a, product, service, or process in a potential customer’s mind.

All these forms of advertisement are about increasing the consumer attention in a product, service, or process intentionally. In the same vein, intentionality should be the watchword of any effort, training program, or even new discipline that any person–or organization–embarks on towards change.

Think about it: Without “top-of-the-mind” intentionality to change, without support and encouragement from others, and without feedback that is appropriate, well-timed, and relevant, all the classes, training programs, and efforts that organizations undertake to develop employees, supervisors, or managers, fall on fallow ground.

Intentionality is at the core of follow-up. It’s at the core of how training is designed. It’s even at the core of how people are engaged in a face-to-face training situation.

Intentionality is often avoided, discounted, or not considered, because there are assumptions organizations and individuals make, about the motives of people who assume authoritarian positions, heavy with positional power. People in those positions are assumed to have good intentions; but good intentions do not equate to following through intentionally with new information, approaches, and philosophies that much of training will stir up.

And then there are the situations where what’s ““top-of-the-mind” for the supervisor may not be what’s “top-of-the-mind” for the supervisee. This disconnect happens more often that you would imagine in organizations. And the commitment to actually, meaningfully, changing organizational culture dies in the ditch of the gap between a supervisor’s “top-of-the-mind” and a supervisee’s “top-of-the-mind.”

The digital billboards in Times Square cost around $3.5 million per month per billboard to rent for a promotional message. That’s a lot of money to get the valuable attention of 8 million people, the vast majority of whom are now captivated by personalized digital experiences.

But organizations still look at advertising via billboard in Times Square as a sunk cost. They value the “top-of-the-mind” placement in Time Square more than they value the money they spend, and they are intentional about the advertisements they create and run.

Imagine the organizational outcomes if, for $300,000 worth of organizational training, organizations were as intentional about following up with that spend as they are with advertising a product for one month.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Absorption

This Thanksgiving, let us be grateful for the moments of silence, inside and around the moments of noise.

The most important voices, and the most attention, go to family on this day. And while there may be things left unsaid, conflicts left unaddressed and fights left unkindled, today is the day of absorbing less of the noise that doesn’t matter and more absorbing of the silence that does matter.

Have a Safe and Happy Thanksgiving.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Being Alone and Being Left Alone

In the world that we have built, noise is confused with engagement and silence is confused with disengagement.

This is a problem, because in silence and disengagement, introspection and self-awareness are found. When the presence of noise is confused with engagement, distraction reigns, bouncing already limited attention from point to point, with seemingly no meaning, no deeper engagement and no resolution.

The presence of silence also implies the presence of being alone, which the modern noise distribution system cannot abide. When noise is a garden hose, limited and coming out at a trickle, opportunities to “be alone” or to “get away for a while” are seemingly unlimited. However, when noise is a fire hose, an endless barrage coming out at a flood, opportunities to “be alone” or “get away for a while” are viewed as precious oases, in a desert of meaninglessness.

What does this all have to do with conflict resolution?

When the noise of the world is turned up to fire hose levels, resolutions are less interesting than continuing a spectacle, avoiding learning, and dancing with immediate gratification. Conflict becomes less a static state of change and transforms into a series of endless emotional lurching from “one damn thing” to another.

Resolving conflicts takes time, attention and emotional “bandwidth” that silence, aloneness, and contemplation on solutions, rather than focusing on problems, brings. The pushback is always that “Well there have always been conflicts” and this is true. But there’s also always been resolutions, rather than a state of endless festering under the surface, encouraged by a fire hose of meaningless noise.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The “Willy Loman” Mentality

A “Willy Loman” mentality is slowly growing out there, even as the era of the door-to-door salesman is really about to kick off in a big way.

The mobile phone, and the immediacy with which that piece of hardware allows products and ideas to come to consumers, is the new house door.

Attention spans wane and doors close much, much quicker in the mobile world now, than they did in the physical world of the actual door closing in the Fuller Brush Salesman’s face.

We understand that the dynamism of having to be interesting in seven seconds or less seems daunting, but the same dynamism that depresses, can also allow the savvy, the entertaining and the persistent to scale at or below cost.

That last part is important to remember for those who are daunted, just like it was important to remember when selling vacuums door-to-door.

Persistence in the face of 4.5 billion doors closing in seven seconds or less can be either a deterrent to trying in the first place.

Or, it can be the lifeblood of the salesman that Willy Loman could have been.

-Peace 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/

The Abstraction of Focus

Time, much like values, beliefs, emotions and even the intellect, is an abstraction. In the agricultural past, humanity measured the passage of time by the sun, the moon and the changing of the seasons.

Before industrialization commoditized time as a thing that could be measured in finite amounts, European and Asian explorers took to the seas navigating, first by the stars, then by the clock.

But in our post-industrial world, where everyone is engaged in the cult of busyness, managing the abstraction of time has become a daunting task. This leads many of us to feel inadequate, unfocused and out of balance.

Attaining focus is one of the three key elements in the battle to manage time, followed by mindfulness and managing distractions that come in the form of other people.

Focus and attention—from a psychological perspective—are getting scarcer in our post-modern world, rather than time, which remains a constant. Recognizing the fact of scarcity of focus in our world and ruthlessly pursuing the attaining of focus is worth attempting to cultivate for long-term internal and external success.

-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/

[Advice] In The End is Not Soon Enough

Mapmaker William Smith and Mennonite Wilma Derksen were recognized for the impact they created with their projects, their perspectives and their approach to life.

They “got their due in the end.”

Depending upon your frame of reference, their due came either too late or way too late.

It used to be that elites ridiculed innovation because the pedigree from where innovation came wasn’t “right.” Once mass media and mass culture really took off in the middle of the last century, the middle masses began to exhibit the same ritualistic cultural shorthand of dismissing self-belief. The masses also rejected the counterintuitive nature of becoming uncomfortable in order to do the right thing.

Now however, in the midst of the ongoing fracturing of mass media and mass culture, ridicule of innovation has splintered, emanating from multiple areas simultaneously.

People in the field of software applications like to talk a lot lately about “unbundling” and about how “software is eating the world.”

We believe that this is happening, but the real revolution will come when fractured audiences start giving all innovators their due—attention, respect, relationship, revenues—before they are ready to shuffle off this mortal coil instead of after they are gone.

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-Peace Be With You All-