Who Will Take Up The Banner

We seek experts out because, even in a world where there is no more “secret sauce,” the vast majority of us still take the shortest route to the best possible outcome.

Peace building professionals should have gained knowledge of this, either through practical experiences at the peace building table, or just through watching humanity stumble through this thing called life.

Is it any wonder then, that our professions—from the law to engineering—still view credentialing as the “coin of the realm” and seek to convince clients (who don’t know enough to question otherwise) of the veracity of their pedigrees?

This tendency to seek the shortcut, the easy answer, and to give ideas and philosophies which seem complicated the short shrift, has also lead to a loss of practical, moral wisdom. A loss of Phronesis, if you will.

The peace building professional who seeks to ensure that her clients are self-determined and are allowed the space to enact further damage on themselves and each other, is worthy of far more credentialing than the individual who knew all the right answers on the last State Board exams.

The field of peace building is at a crossroads—and has been for about the last ten years.

The practitioners, credentialers, academics, and others who hold the reigns of power, have to decide if Phronesis is more important than field level shorthand, and whether or not honoring the former rather than the latter, will lead to a stronger field or a weaker one.

Clients and the market can’t direct the field around this, they can’t point the way.

Data and technology will not save us either. Artificial intelligence is just that, artificial, and lacking in profound moral and ethical wisdom. And big data is only information without interpretation and action.

Phronesis is what needs to be acknowledged so that clients’ best interests are protected.

But who will take up the banner?

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtrainining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: 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-

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/

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-

The Courage to Bleed

It’s thicker at the center of a disk.

It’s thinner towards the edges.

That thin edge is called the “bleeding edge.”

The bleeding edge is the place where lack of common consensus, low chance of adoption and a high level of risk, meet to ensure there will be a conflict between the thick, comfortable middle and the thin, dangerous edge.

However, if you turn the disk on its side and look at the down slope, from the height of the thick center to the valley of the thin edge, it appears to be a gentle decline.

But it’s really not.

It’s more like a steep slope where speed increases the closer you get to the edge and the further you get away from the center.

The distance between the thick center—where every organization wants to be—and the thin edge—where every organization starts—can only be negotiated one customer, one conflict, at a time.

Galaxies are shaped like this. So are societies. So are communities, organizations, and families.

Get to the bleeding edge.

-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-

The Brain at Work

The brain is a fascinating organ.

It weighs around 3 pounds and it is in charge of everything.

The mind—the abstract part of us that conceptualizes our relationships between ourselves and the world—has just as much (if not even more) control that the actual physical operation of the brain.

The mind spends most of its time making abstract sense of a world that seems–on the surface anyway–to be irrational, disjointed and arbitrary. This is a 24/7/365 job.

And then, with all of that, we pack ourselves into vehicles, travel to artificially lighted spaces, hang out with people we did not choose and were not born with, and then we wonder why the whole thing just doesn’t work after about 200 years, give or take a few decades.

Our brains betray us.

Our minds flay us.

Our bodies decay on us.

And all we have to show for it is a few little notes with dead national leaders, trees or other objects on 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: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

The Other 95%

Nonverbal cueing involves 95% of human communication efforts.

Professional speakers and presenters realize, at a professional level, what many people know at an amateur level:

What you say with your face and body matters more than what you say with your mouth.

In a dispute resolution process, nonverbal cueing is far more important to coming to resolution that anything that either party may say.

Mediators’ nonverbal cueing can protect the agreement process, or reveal doubt about either the participants or the resolution itself.

Eye contact, micro-expressions and body language are the grout in between the tiles of conflict resolution processes that can either ensure that an agreement remains adhered to by either party—or can ensure that no matter how many “yeah, yeahs” are given, the agreement will fall apart.

-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/

Arbitrary Colors

Railroad engineers decided in the 1830’s that red meant “stop,” white meant “go” and that green meant “caution.”

Now, the idea of red indicating danger goes backward in history, beyond the Roman Empire itself and no one is really sure whether natural or social evolution is the driver here.

So, it’s arbitrary. We could just as easily have decided that green meant danger.

Well, wait a minute:

When we are angry we talk about “seeing red.”
When we are talking about conflicts we sometimes use the term “blood on our hands.”
When we talk about war, the banners of war tend to be the color red.

Even our blood is red.

Humanity has embraced the color red in an arbitrary manner that is indicative of how we embrace conflict. It is no coincidence that our language around conflict is colored red.

Marketing is the most arbitrary practice in any organization, though the outcomes can be objectively measured through analytics and metrics.

Just as the metrics of stoplights and “go” lights can be measured in the reduction of traffic accidents at a particular intersection.

Conflict communication management—and it’s unmentioned cousin, reconciliation—is considered equally arbitrary, but the outcomes of training, workshops, interventions, discussions and feedback, can be objectively measured through sophisticated analytics and metrics.

But, too many organizations would still rather arbitrarily pick a color for a stop light at the intersection of their workplace conflicts, rather than purposefully pick a series of solutions based on measurable, agreeable outcomes.

The hard work in an organization is not picking a stop light color. The hard work is agreeing that there should be a color for the light at the intersection in the first place.

-Peace Be With You All-

On Insurgency

On this day, in 1776 an insurgency began.

Think about it:

Tweet: The world’s largest empire at the time was categorically rejected by a country with almost no standing military,no domestic governmental structure and no hope of ever defeating the much larger empire.

The insurgency was formulated by men who had multiple goals and motivations (as do all men, at all times) but the ultimate mission of all of their goals was the establishing of a country founded in a set of principles.

The insurgency took over 200 years to become established as apple pie, Mom and, well…the flag.

Makes you wonder where all of the modern insurgencies going on now will end up in 200 years.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/
Blog: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

When Isn’t It About YOU!

This isn’t about me. It’s about YOU.

But then again, when ISN’T it about YOU!

Look, you see yourself one way. The world sees you another way. Very rarely do you have an opportunity to look at yourself through the eyes of the world.

It starts with YOU. It ends with YOU.

Intrigued yet?

Branding expert and leading authority on the science of fascination, Sally Hogshead (@SallyHogshead), is launching her new book How the World Sees You on July 1.

To celebrate all of the new insights she’s learned over the past decade of research, she has started Project Fascination, with a goal to show 100,000 people how their personalities add value.

To do this, she’s given me a special code BL-JSorrells79 to give the first 100 people who use it her Fascination Advantage® assessment for free! This has never been done before, and will only last until July 25!

And the best part is – they want this to be a chain reaction. So when you take the assessment using BL-JSorrells79, you’ll receive 100 assessments to share with your circle for free too! That’s $3700 of free market research at your fingertips!

So how do you take the assessment? Simple.

Go to www.HowTheWorldSeesYou.com/You and use code BL-JSorrells79.
Once you’ve taken the assessment, Sally’s team will load 100 assessments into your new account. Rinse and repeat.

That’s it.

Now you’re ready to discover how your personality is custom built for certain situations, and which situations you should learn to avoid.

And it only takes 5 minutes (you can even do it on your phone).

28 questions. 5 minutes. A whole new way to communicate.

Remember, the best way to empower someone is to show them their own highest value.

Our goal together is to show people the very best of themselves – the qualities that makes them more successful, more authentic, and more fascinating.

Remember that your code will expire July 25. Don’t let this $3700 value go to waste. Take the assessment today and encourage your friends and followers to do the same to do the same.

Your Fascination Advantage Report is the first big step into knowing how your personality can be heard and remembered in an overcrowded market. And sharing the assessment will help others do the same. Find everything you need to put this knowledge into practice with your co-workers, close friends and significant other in Sally’s new book, How the World Sees You.

-Peace Be With You All-