[Advice] Fighting on Ground You Didn’t Choose

We often engage in conflicts on ground we didn’t choose.

We go into engagements with people and wander through them, surprised by the depth of the presenting problems, caught off guard by the visceral nature of the emotions, and completely off balance in how to respond.

In addressing conflicts on topics we didn’t choose (the ground) we often take the Donald Rumsfeld approach of engaging in the conflict we didn’t want with the tools we already have, and we wind up in the opposite of the General Grant position of worrying about what we are going to do in the conflict. Our responses become reactions, our reactions become incendiary, and then we engage in conflict avoidance the next time a problem arises on ground we didn’t choose.

There are a few ways out of this:

Make a plan. Never go into an interaction with someone where you know that a conflict will arise, without making a plan for what you’re going to say or do.
Implement the plan. Many plans fail for lack of execution. Many approaches to conflict fail, because it’s easier to rea a list of best practices and then forget about that list, than it is to implement them.
Ruthlessly focus on your goals in the interaction. Make goals in the planning stages and then ruthlessly focus on accomplishing them. Your goals might be to preserve the relationship, to side-step an older argument, or even to hold onto your heart, but no matter what they are, focus on accomplishing them.
Let adults be adults. Don’t own the other party’s emotional content. They can carry it around by themselves well enough without you. Constantly checking in on yourself internally as you engage, may seem like a daunting task, but here’s the thing: it’s even more daunting to just surrender and accept the other party’s paradigm or premise.
Get out. Sometimes, an exit from an interaction is the entirety of the purpose of your interaction. There’s nothing wrong with choosing this as a goal. But how you exit one interaction, sets up how you enter another.

The best case scenario is to engage in conflict on ground you have chosen. Barring that option, engage with intentionality and focus.

-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/

[Advice] Hold Onto Your Heart

In any conflict, the hardest thing to do is to hold onto your heart.

When people mediate conflicts, whether professionally or informally, they run the risk of being demoralized by seeing the behavior of participants in the conflict.

Have you ever heard the joke about the family and divorce mediator who mediated their own divorce after doing this work for many years?

It’s not a good joke.

Hold onto your heart. Hold onto your vulnerability. Hold onto your tenderness. Hold onto your openness.

It’s too easy to let go when everyone around you is letting go as well.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Blogging for the Peace Builder

Blogging is still the easiest, lowest cost, way to build a business, establish a client base, become an influencer, or just to use a voice that matters.

It’s almost free marketing that is always on, always distributed, and always accessible.

There are great ADR professionals such as Cinnie Noble, Tammy Lenski, Victoria Pynchon and a few other high profile ADR practitioners, capitalizing on their blogging efforts. But for many ADR professionals, other than the contributors at Mediate.com (and here at ADRTimes.com), blogging is still viewed as a “one-off, one-time” thing.

There are many objections to blogging from the peace builder, but three are primary:

I don’t have time to blog.
I don’t know what to blog about.
I’m not a writer.

Let’s break those down:

I don’t have time to blog: ADR professionals lead busy lives. They mediate, negotiate and arbitrate complex issues that place psychological and emotional strain on them. Then, they return to homes where they may be confronted by more conflict (Ever hear the joke about the mediator who mediated their own divorce proceeding? I have. It’s depressing.) And, peace building professionals are exposed to more conflicts in social media feeds and from popular culture.

Then, there are children, partners, and responsibilities. By the time the end of the day comes, they are ready to do what their clients do: Go to bed and go to sleep. Then they get up and repeat it.

Who has time to blog?

Well, I’m writing this article in between just having fed my four-year old daughter and working on a client project. What I have found is that there are spaces in the day where thoughts worth blogging about can come flooding in. And, when we sit down at our seats in front of the computer, time becomes available, in spite of distractions, children, clients and other responsibilities.

I don’t know what to blog about: There is so much conflict in the world, at both an organizational and individual level, that I am often surprised by how many peace builders believe this. Peace builders witness disputes in line at their favorite coffee shop in the morning. Disputes occur at local school board meetings, attended the night before. There are disputes in our social media feeds, or even in the newspaper.

When I started blogging regularly, I worried about filling digital space with something meaningful. Then I had a revelation: The number of people consuming content in a digital space will always outweigh the number of people creating content in digital space.

The other piece to consider in this, is a thought that many peace builders have that goes “I don’t have anything to say (or write) so what could I possibly write about?” The fact of the matter is, we need more people who are involved in building peace to have the courage to lay out an argument, stake a claim to a position of truth, and then defend it vigorously and assertively. Courage has always been in short supply in the digital space (see the proliferation of Buzzfeed-like listicles and “Top 25” posts) and hiding away from the consequences of taking a position on topics such as neutrality, client-self-determination, or even the area of deep listening, does not negate the overwhelming need for online wisdom. The fact of the matter is, wisdom is also in short supply in a world where every piece of knowledge is a Google search away. We need more peace builder’s wisdom in the online space and the best place to get that wisdom across is through online, long-form, writing.

I’m not a writer: Many people stop writing regularly about the same time they put college (or high school) in the rearview mirror. Writing is hard, but for the peace builder, writing is the best way to explore and develop thoughts about process, procedure and practice and to grow the field. We need more writing, not less.

And, putting together a sentence or two is really all that it takes to begin. Once that happens, the real struggle becomes how to improve writing, rather than how to start.

One last point on all of this: Many peace builders want to begin writing, but fear that when they are vulnerable in the online space; when they take a position, raise their hand and say “this is me, this is what I’m making,” that there will be pushback from trolls, baiters, scammers, critics, and other bad actors (or actors with mixed motives) online. The thing to remember is that, at a practical level, the bad actors, spammers, and trolls are merely seeking negative attention and—even more perniciously—are seeking to place their shame on the person taking a stand.

At a practical level, the way around this for the peace builder to not accept comments on their blog. Or, to moderate them, or even to not read them. But, peace builders should never allow the bad actor to steal their voice, out of their own mouth, before it has even been used.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Curing a Spiritual Disease

Giving every working age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives, will do little to relieve the two states it’s designed to relieve: jealously and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities.

Jealousy and envy are human emotions that often aren’t addressed as motivators for people to work. Envy, vanity, jealousy, and pride (yes, all emotions grounded in negative storytelling) are typically at the root of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect.

Lack of meaningful employment opportunities is also rarely discussed. The era of “make-work” is over; but the things is, we are at the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we make stuff just a little bit better” is also over. Meaningful employment is typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions by many people.

Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the universal basic income in the world is only going to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse.

Work provides spiritual, financial, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those outcomes don’t appear on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless, or not considered in the first place. Universal basic income does nothing to address any of these disparities, emotions, or drivers in people.

It really comes down to giving people money, hoping to cure a disease of the heart and the spirit without the uncomfortable surgery of examining deeper motivations, and instead opting for a placebo.

A sure recipe for increased conflict.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Here’s What’s Instructive…

There’s no other more instructive event for the modern communications professional than a national election.

There’s white space and absence, in the midst of all the noise and the presence. What people do say is almost as instructive as what people don’t say.

Challenge the premise of the question, create a reductionist argument without objective meaning, play to the crowd as if no one is there to watch.

Be a marketable commodity, while also being a unique niche value, all the while, doing the daily narrative dance with the media.

Here’s what’s instructive about all of this:

Who are you for? If you are for everyone, you aren’t going to attract the attention and awareness of anyone.

Who are you against? If you aren’t against anybody, then you better be inspirational or maybe a little insipid, but never both—and never, even at the same time.

Who’s all in? If you aren’t going for the “gusto” then you aren’t going anywhere. Halfhearted attempts peter out halfheartedly.

Communicate strongly, confidently, and incessantly to cut through the noise, but be prepared to have your bluff called, your desires questioned, and your rigor stressed.

The reason only one person can become the head of a party or a country, is that the outcome—at a communications level—is scarce; and getting there is monumentally hard.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Dark Heart of Man

Let’s talk about the kind of communication we want to have.

In person communications have always been fraught with difficulty, misunderstandings, miscommunications, negative escalations, and conflicts. When people talk with each other face-to-face there is always the opportunity for confusion and conflict, particularly if the conversation in question is questioning deeply held stories around values, worldviews, and frames.

It takes a lot of emotional quickening to escalate from a conversation to a confrontation to a conflict to a fistfight to a war. There are many discrete steps in face-to-face communication that social norming has established, developed, and refined for thousands of years to limit such escalation. But, as is always the case, human beings’ tools for communication get better, friction and misunderstanding increases, even as the speed of communication increases, and conflicts flare up.

From carrier pigeons to riders on horseback to the telephone to mail by airplane to emails and now Twitter, there have always been people who would rather have a fight than share an idea. And as the speed of our tools has increased how fast we get a message and then react to it, (going from days or weeks to micro-seconds) there hasn’t been a commensurate increase in the heart of rational contemplation.

Thus we get to social media communication. Trolls, bad actors, spammers, and others use the immediacy of social communication tools to psychologically manipulate people on the other end of the message into reacting rather than thinking. And there’s really only two reactions such individuals are seeking: fight or flight.

They aren’t looking for a measured argument.

They aren’t looking for reasonable discourse.

They aren’t looking for knowledge or growth.

They are looking for either a respondent’s heels or their fangs.

In the case of the Internet, and the communication tools we have built on top of it, we have exchanged immediacy for escalation, and have confused passion for legitimacy of an assertion. This is particularly problematic for people delivering messages that are outside the “mainstream,” or that rely on dispassionate examination of facts, rather than passionate reaction to opinions.

Ease of access to digital tools also allows communication to be focused on the tawdry and the spectacle—which is short term—instead of the deliberative and the reasonable—which is long-term. The creators of these digital tools—the owners of the platforms—may be publicly or privately traded companies, but make no mistake: the platforms are private property and the Internet, while vast, is not a place where 1.6 billion participants need to (or deserve to) cast a vote on the operations of a series of companies that built the platforms in the first place.

What kind of communication do we want to have?

The answer to that question, at least as is evidenced by the numbers of people using these communications tools, seems to be that we want friction free, painless, non-relational based communication when we want it, how we want it, that allows us to do what we want, when we want, how we want. But this is an inherently selfish and vain position, based in our perception of want, rather than a relational need.

Online communication will always be fraught with difficulty and no amount of changing a name policy, policing speech we don’t like, or building walls and doors into platforms, is going to prevent than difficulty. This is because the tools we use to communicate are the problem because of the assumptions and expectations built into them.

We’ve got to figure this out though, because at a global scale, there won’t be a positive outcome from communications wars between people. We are already seeing the beginnings of skirmishes around the edges of platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. We are also seeing responses to such skirmishes from companies such as SnapChat and WhatsApp, which promise to build platforms with more friendly assumptions around safety, conviviality, and trust built into them, rather than welded on from the outside as an afterthought.

More special interest groups meeting with Facebook isn’t going to solve this communications problem.

More governmental lobbying at scale by Google isn’t going to solve this problem either.

More closing off, disengaging online, or demanding more censorious penalties for people we don’t like, saying things that make us feel threatened, abused, or bullied (the aforementioned trolls, bad actors, and spammers) isn’t going to solve this problem either.

The solution to all of this, as with most things, lies in changing the motivations toward selfishness, vanity, and revenge that lie deep in the heart of man.

And, to borrow from Einstein when he was talking about the outcomes of the development of nuclear weapons, I’m going to bet that the founders of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and many, many other chatrooms, message boards, and email systems since the web was democratized, secretly wish, deep in their hearts, that they could go back in time, and instead become watchmakers.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Will You Read This?

There are a lot of tips, tricks, “how-to’s” and hack based articles, blog posts, and columns, everywhere. And there always have been.

Partially, this is because the people reading the articles want the easy out. This is evidenced in corporate training where attendees will say “I don’t want the theory, just give me the practical tips.” Or, ask “Is there a silver bullet for this?”

The silver bullet.

The easy answer.

Cheat codes in video games.

Will this be on the test?

What’s the shortcut?

I don’t want to hear your story.

I don’t care about the theory.

I want to work smarter, not harder.

[Advice] Engagement-As-A-Service

Imagine if engagement with customers, clients, and others could be measured as a trackable KPI of success in your organization?

Imagine if you actually engineered your organization at all levels to compete not in a race to the bottom on price, product, or service, but instead if you engineered (through reward and recognition) for engagement through failure, risk-taking, and decision making?

Imagine if the digital tools you have laying around that you don’t know what to do with, were engaged in actively and intentionally increasing engagement, rather than just selling?

Imagine if engagement were the service your organization offered, and the product (physical, digital, or another form) was actually an afterthought?

Imagine if quality engagement with your employees through open-book management, pay transparency, and treating adults as if they are adults, were the “new normal” rather than a “radical departure.”

We don’t have to imagine. There are organizations at scale that are doing all of these things all around us in all areas of the global economy.

The only question your really have to ask (and answer) in your organization is: Do you have the courage to go past imagining to acting?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] What We Subsidize…

What a society taxes it gets less of, and what a society subsidizes it gets more of.

For various social, economic, psychological, emotional, and other reasons, societies around the world, throughout history, have taxed peace, while subsidizing war.

This is not a statement of judgment, just one of objective observation.

We honor dead soldiers, and only occasionally talk about dead peacemakers.

We have thousands of anonymous soldiers who go out and make war, as we have thousands of anonymous peacemakers, who go out and make peace every day. But only one group has a flame burning eternally for them at Arlington Cemetery in the US.

We honor the dead soldier, because we (and by ‘we’ I mean humanity as whole) value valor, honor, respect, dignity, and the ideals of revenge and justice, far more than we revere those same values at the peacemaking table. This dichotomy is the most obvious at scale, where there are holidays honoring the sacrifice of life of the soldier, but no parades in your town for the generations of deceased divorce mediators.

These are not a statements of judgment, just ones of factual observation.

When we do choose to honor the diplomat, or the statesman, who brought us peace, we tend to honor the ones most vociferously who also guided us through war. Churchill is lauded far more than Chamberlain.

Unfortunately, as was pointed out years ago by the band Pink Floyd, the statesmen turned diplomats are the very same ones who sat in the rear of the line (or sat in an office back at home) and commanded “Go forward!” even as the soldiers in front, out on the line, died by the thousands.

Young men have always died valiantly fighting old men’s wars.

The fact is, we will always have more people willing to make war, than we will have people willing to make peace. This is a sad fact of the fallen state of humanity.

This is not a statement of judgment, just one of spiritual observation.

On this Memorial Day, let us take a moment to remember those who made the peace, as well as honor those who fell in the war, because, if humanity is to move forward in any kind of meaningful way, we need to subsidize the peace, and place a higher tax on the war.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Winning at Nuclear Poker

Nuclear weapons are a touchy subject in geopolitical negotiations.

Almost everyone involved in the negotiations around nuclear weapons knows what the outcomes of launching them against another country could be, which is why, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, regionalism in arms races became a geopolitical concern.

But in reality, the issue with nuclear weapons is not really the weapons themselves. In reality, the issues around negotiating with developers of nuclear weapons is the attitudes, motivations, and psychological desires of the people who run the governments that are either developing nuclear weapons (North Korea, Iran, etc.) or who already have them (Russia, the US, China, etc.)

This is similar to negotiations that go on around issues that are less geopolitical and more commonplace. When you are negotiating with your wife about where to go to dinner, her mindset, attitude, body language, motivations, and your previous history with her, matter more to the outcome of that negotiation, than where you eat.

In our individual and corporate lives there are many nuclear weapons that we hide inside of our interactions. Some of them take years to build and only a minute to deploy and to wreck destruction.

We often don’t talk about our tendency to build up resentment, unforgiveness, anger, bitterness, and hatreds, until they are primed and ready to launch. Exploding on another party. Usually, not the party that we want to have them explode upon.

That person (a parent, a child, a former spouse, a family member, a neighbor, a politician) is usually either too far away emotionally, or too distant physically, for us to actually launch our carefully curated and developed personal stockpile of nukes upon them.

Mob behavior, direct democracy, these are both example of personal nuclear behavior writ large, at scale, and just as destructive as at the personal level. Nuclear poker is played at this level as well: by politicians, pundits, professional prognosticators and others. But here’s the thing, from the geopolitical level all the way to your individual level of your individual world:

Nobody knows how anybody else is going to respond to a nuclear strike—either personal or global.
The appearance of being crazy, or dysfunctional, enough to destroy everything can sometimes act as a deterrent to people actually going ahead and pushing the button to destroy everything—either personally or globally.

The personal (and global) question in any negotiation where the threat of nuclear destruction is on the table, is: How crazy do you want to be to ‘win’ at nuclear poker?

-Peace Be With You All-