[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-

[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-

[Podcast] The Death of F2F Communication

Our personal assistants have names like Cloe, Clara, Julie, Luka and Amy.

Our devices have names like Alexa, Siri and Cortana.

We are getting the future we were promised, though not evenly distributed (as has been pointed out in the past), and not in the same areas simultaneously. Soon, HAL 9000 will be in our homes, not in a deep space vehicle.

We have FitBits, Jawbones, and Apple and Android Watches. We are slowly getting augmented reality, virtual reality and even electric, automated self-driving cars.

Voice data, movement data, and biometric data collection technologies lie at the “bleeding edge” of future machine-to-human communication technologies. We do not have laws or regulations to deal with the consequences of having these devices; which are always on, always recording, always collecting and always reporting to someone—somewhere.

We have given up our privacy for convenience, and whether or not you believe this is a Faustian bargain, the deal is in the process of being struck even as you are alive and watching it happen. And the people of the future will not lament the loss of face-to-face communication, any more than present generations lament the passing of the horse and buggy.

How should conflict professionals respond to the death of face-to-face communication and the rise of machine-to-human communication?

Get involved in the collection of data, the organizations that collect it, and even on the boards of organizations that make decisions and regulations about the use of it—peace builders have an obligation to no longer sit on the sidelines, hoping that none of this will happen. Getting involved in all parts of the process, from creation ot decision making, is the new obligation for peace builders.
Build businesses that act as intermediaries (mediators, if you will) between Alexa, Siri and whatever is next and the people who will seek to control what those devices reveal about people’s private lives—private conflict communications are about to go public. And peace builders have seen the devastating effects of such publicity on relationships, reputation and understanding through the first level of all of this—social media.
Prepare to address the stress that will be magnified through people curating their lives, tailoring their responses to what “should” be said, rather than what will actually be “true”—with the death of privacy through all of your devices in your house either recording you, tracking you, suggesting items to you, or even interacting with you, the line between what is truly felt, and what you actually say, will become even narrower. Peace builders should prepare through training to address this cognitive dissonance, because it will only take a few generations before more masking of previously transparent communication will occur.

As man and machine begin to merge at the first level with communication, peace builders should be engaging with the process proactively and aggressively, rather than waiting and being caught by surprise.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Does Your Manager Think Managing Conflict is Important

The most often repeated piece of feedback is “The people who should be here in this training/presentation/speaking engagement are not here.”

What does that mean though, other than as a piece of feedback?

Typically, it means that the people in the hierarchical chain above the people attending the training are seen as part of the problem, rather than as part of the solution, by the people in the room.

It also means that the people in the hierarchical chain above the people attending the training are interested in maintaining the organizational “status quo” and not really moving forward to become part of the solution; by role modeling what the future might be like for the people in the room.

Either way, this piece of feedback is indicative of the appearance of members of management not really believing that conflicts, disputes, disagreements, or even fights in the workplace are all that important to deal with at the root.

This feedback also indicates that the attendees will probably continue to experience frustration in the organization; even as they implement all of their newly attained knowledge of how to engage with conflicts better.

And then, as the frustration mounts and the cognitive dissonance really kicks in, employees will either become more disengaged in the workplace—or leave the workplace altogether; creating a cycle of people who arrive, then get trained, get disillusioned and then leave.

Managers, supervisors, and others up in the hierarchical chain, can thwart all of this, but it requires an investment in finding the time many claim not to have in the short term, to play the long game in building an organization doing work that matters, in the long term.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] The Story of Your Fight

The stories of disagreements, disputes, arguments and fights matters more than the disagreements, disputes, arguments and fights themselves, to both the professional peace builder and the public looking for the right advice at the right moment.

The frame, or story, that conflict engagement professionals tell themselves about conflicts that they resolve, their professional strengths, and even what they have to offer to the public, is typically a positive, education based framing.

But the public frames conflict in negative terms, embedded inside personalized frames of reference:

“This happened to me!”

“He’s the problem, not me.”

“I’m right. They’re wrong. You fix it!”

No one needs help resolving conflicts in their lives, and the dichotomy between public and professional storytelling about conflicts backs up this assertion. The story of conflict for the public—and the narrative framing they operate in—is one that does not line up with the product offerings of many in the field of peacebuilding.

Ourselves included.

In the public, there are people who don’t see disagreements, disputes, arguments, fights, or confrontations as relevant occurrences in their own lives. Sure, other people have problems, but not them. The story that they tell themselves is one of floating through the world, disagreement free—and all a peace builders fervent framing efforts aren’t going to persuade them otherwise.

However, when other people around them are privately asked “Who causes the most problems around here?” the answer comes back to those individuals who think they aren’t the problem.

There is one way out of this for the public and two ways out of this for the professional peace builder:

For the peace builder, if the terms “conflict,” “dispute,” “resolution” and others have no meaning for the public (or target market) who you want to buy your products, processes, and services, then change the wording. And peace building professionals know, that when the wording changes, the framing shifts.
For the peace builder, as the framing shifts, turn the in-person and face-2-face moments of the narrative from a focus of trying to persuade the public (or the target market) that they have a conflict, to educating the public (or the target market) on what the impact of the story of the conflict is having on their personal relationships.
For the public, there are moments inside of every disagreement, dispute, argument, or fight, where you seek advice, counsel, and direction in what to do, how to proceed and how to respond to other people. These are the moments to seek the blogs, videos and podcasts of professionals that can entertain, inform and advise—without breaking your story.

When the stories of disagreements, disputes, arguments and fights matters more than the disagreements, disputes, arguments and fights themselves, there will only be more, not less, and the moment for peace builders—and the public—to start talking the same language is now.

H/T to Justin R. Corbett for his thoughts on this.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Does Your Boss Think Addressing Workplace Disputes is Important?

You work in a human resources capacity in an organization and your boss had never shown an interest in progressively resolving the consistent arguments, disputes, disagreements that lead to creating and developing a toxic workplace culture. And you—as the human resource professional—spend days, weeks, months and even years addressing these issues as a regular part of your job function. If this is you, then Conflict-Resolution-as-a-Service products, process and approach may not be for your organization.

One of the consistent pieces of feedback that I receive following a corporate training with supervisors, managers or heads of human resources is that “The people who need to be in this room aren’t in this room.”

My response is always “Well, get them in this room and they can take the training that you just took and we can begin the work of transforming the organization.”

Then, one of three expressions typically crosses the face of the human resources employee: fear, resignation, apathy.

Then they leave the room and I hear from them again in the next year, or through recommendations and referrals that they make to other human resource departments in other organizations.

There are three reasons for the fear, the apathy and the resignation:

Organizational cultural responses to arguments, disagreements, and disputes tend to mirror the emotional and psychological responses of the founders/owners. If the owner/founder doesn’t view arguments, disagreements, and disputes as problematic in their own life (or has an avoidance posture rather than a collaboration posture) then there won’t be a change in organizational culture no matter how much HR advocates for one.
Lack of organizational interest in addressing issues in the past is often seen as evidence that present and future issues should be addressed in the same way. Human beings have limited attention and energy (i.e. bandwidth) and thus seek out mental, emotional and psychological “shortcuts” to addressing issues as they arise. Past performance is often seen as indicative of future performance, not to mention future outcomes and responses.
It is often easier to do nothing because of the “arbitration stance” many individuals in upper management positions default to. The “arbitration stance” happens when an argument, disagreement, or dispute finally rises to the level where upper management is forced to address it. Both the parties in the conflict walk into a meeting separately, they each plead their cases and then a decision in response to the conflict floats out of the black box of the upper management’s office in the form of a meaningless, jargon filled, policy appealing memo. Nobody involved in the arguments, disagreements, and disputes knows what the resolution is, no one understands what the memo means and no one in human resources knows what to do next.

All of the above reasons cause human resources professionals to determine that the upper management (“the boss”) has not shown an interest in Conflict-Resolution-as-as-Service in their organization and never will. Thus leading to acquiring the bare minimum of training (a “nice to have”) and the feedback to the trainer (me) of “The people who need to be in this room aren’t in this room.”

For nimble organizations, where attaining employee-cultural “fit” is more important than making widgets, Conflict-Resolution-as-a-Service is a product whose time has come. For the remaining organizations, the four hour corporate training will remain standard until their organizations change, or go out of business.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Writer’s Block

Very few people complain about being unable to speak.

Even fewer people complain about being unable to nonverbally communicate a message.

But many, many people, when challenged to write down the story of their conflict scenario (in 500 words or less, which is about a page and half of writing) will “freeze” up and complain of writers’ block.

However, those same people will write a post a diatribe about the latest twist in their conflict drama on Facebook. Or they will tweet it out. Or they will post a meme, share a GIF, or “like” a photo that expresses how they feel about a conflict scenario in their life.

I know this seems like a tenuous argument, but follow me:

If the posting, tweeting, liking and sharing are forms of writing—and thus subject to writers’ block—why is it that so few people have so little trouble expressing themselves via these new methods of communication?

There are three things at work here:

The rate of formalized reading decreases exponentially after a person finishes high school and many people (other than for work) never pick up a book for reading (either fun or otherwise) ever again. But the immediate entertainment factor of social sharing short circuits this tendency.
Sharing and communicating via electronic platforms is so new (comparatively) as an adaptation of human culture that the “rules” of communicating are being written (and rewritten) even as the platforms shift and develop. This makes social communication and social sharing truly the “Wild West” of communication styles.
Formalized writing is often viewed as the purview of business, academics, and government, with little “real world” applicability to the daily lives of many people. This is a more subtle shift that has occurred culturally (at least in the post-Industrial world) even as the nature of work has changes to become less about brawn and more about brains.

These three factors (combined with the idea that providing the space of attention and focus for formalized writing to occur is still viewed as a luxury rather than a need) lead to people literally “freezing” when asked to write down what happened to them in a conflict scenario.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Fences, Boundaries and Good Neighbors

Does the admonition my mother gave me during my childhood still ring true in an era of refugees, immigration and fears?

Natural boundaries have existed since the dawn of human existence to separate “them” from “us” and, once Dunbar’s Number kicked in at scale, political boundaries existed as stories that developed into myths designed to separate “us” from “them.”

In the 21^st century though, the illusion of noise as communication has convinced many people that boundaries (natural and otherwise) are the provenance of a time long past, and a people long dead.

The ability to erect an artificial barrier(anyone remember the Maginot Line) or to manipulate a natural one (“Don’t bring troops across the Rubicon River…”) has always acted as a trigger in the human psyche to the prelude for greater conflict. This is not necessarily always cast in military or political terms but, as human beings are conflict prone and naturally political, it often comes across in such ways.

And then we throw race, gender, national origin and culture into the mix and things get really dicey.

Which leads me back to my mother. When I was a child and my two sisters and I would have a conflict, unless we could work it out between ourselves (most often we could) my mother would separate us with the admonition that “Good fences make good neighbors,” and would put use each in our rooms—with the doors closed. This would precipitate a “cooling off” period before the real negotiation/resolution would begin.

Political boundaries existed as symbols, designed to protect and grow cultural stories around “us” and “them” and to allow people in charge to manipulate power, create conflicts, control resources and at the furthest end, start larger conflicts.

This all seems so illusory in an era of the 24/7/365 news cycle and the false dichotomies of conflicts. But in the world that average people live in, fences, borders and boundaries are still fiercely enforced, from families to neighborhoods and even at scale. And without such stories—which is all that those political boundaries really are—the chances of conflicts arising and becoming more virulent as those stories change and grow due to the reactions to the human choices to make war, migrate, emigrate or to have fears, is more and more likely.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 2

There are three hard parts to launching any peace building project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).

When launching a peace building project, the savvy peace builder often doesn’t think too hard about the first part. In peace building fields from mediation to law, attaining technical knowledge is considered a rite of passage. Which is why peace building is so dominated by the presence of volunteer labor at one end (mediation) and highly paid labor at the other end (litigation) and there is a squeeze in the middle. As a result, many peace building practitioners continue to fund a self-perpetuating economy of training and certifications, rather than doing and experiences. This is a hamster wheel for another reason: The training and certifications are to reinsure that the peace builder continues to remain proficient in old skills they already know and practice (i.e. mediation skills) rather than training and certifying them in new skills that might be uncomfortable fro them to learn and practice (i.e. marketing, sales and business development).

The second hard part is getting the hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly if it is new.

When launching a peace building project, learning new hardware (or software in the case of many entrepreneurial peace builders) is the second hardest part. Admittedly, there are ton of applications and software solutions that can be cobbled together to create the operational infrastructure for a functioning business model. But too often peace builders (as do many other entrepreneurs) become so focused on avoiding learning the new application (or fiddling with it constantly) that they miss completely the third hardest part of developing and launching a peace building project—sales.

The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience to genrate a lead, create a relationship and to close a sale.

When launching a peace building project, content development—books, articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, workshop/seminar content, and on and on—is seen as the most overwhelming aspect of launching. At the core of most content development practices are three objectives for the peace builder to consider:

What do I want my content to do? (i.e. drive brand recognition, drive sales, create actionable leads who will pay, etc., etc.)
Where do I want my content to be distributed? (i.e. from a workshop, from a blog post, from a podcast, etc., etc.)
Who do I want my content to target? (i.e. women with children, business owners with conflicts, men in divorce, judges in arbitration, etc., etc.)

Unfortunately, many peace builders get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively out of fear on “how to make money” rather than focusing on “how to make a difference.” To be successful as an entrepreneurial peace builder, the things is to manage thinking about how hard the three hard parts might be to accomplish collectively, rather than avoiding actually taking the concrete steps to think (and act) differently about at least one of them individually.

-Peace Be With You All-