[Strategy] Playing Chess in Conflict

Playing chess is something that not everyone does.

In the film Training Day, Denzel Washington tells Ethan Hawke that his moves on the street—playing criminals and cops against each other—are “chess not checkers.”

The strategy and thought process, the impulse control and persistence, and the ability to tap into the emotional content of your opponent on the other side of the board, make chess a worthy game for comparison to people in conflict.

But what happens when one of the parties ceases to respond in the familiar ways of the familiar chess game, and instead kicks over the chess board?

And what happens when one party in the conflict is playing chess, but the other party is playing checkers? Or pinochle?

Not everyone has a brain for managing the emotions of conflict, the responses of the other party, or the emotional ability to dive in with grit and persistence when the outcome may be less than guaranteed.
Not everyone has the courage to care about outcomes in conflicts and disputes that involve them, or the people that they work with or love, and the personal willpower to act on that courage.
Not everyone has the ability to determine when it’s time to move from being a bystander to a situation that could lead to conflict toward being an active participant in attaining a positive outcome.

But, we contend, that everyone has the capacity to learn how to do all of these things. Even if, once they have learned how to do all of these things, they still refuse to act.

Because, sometimes it is easier to do nothing, and even that act of inaction, moves chess pieces around on a board.

-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] Conflict Jazz

Jazz music is a narrative experience that tells a story based in improvisation, riffing and unpredictability.

Just like interactions in conflict scenarios, jazz has underlying rules and a structure, and you can choose to follow it.

If you do that though, the conflict never gets even close to being resolved.

Instead, just like in a jazz jam session, you and your conflict partner can choose to wind up the tension, escalating assertively, and appropriately, until real innovation and change springs forth from the scenario.

Can you do jazz when engaging in conflict?

Of course.

It’s all jazz anyway…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Labor Conflicts

Computers and algorithms, big data and analytics, robotics and wearbles.

We are the first generation that might live long enough to watch our technology outstrip our ambition, our needs, our wants and even our good sense.

There is no software—or hardware—solution for human emotions though. And as we transition from being a society and culture based on economic consumption, we will have to develop a new economy based in creation.

We are going to have to monetize the outcomes, the talent, and the voice that emotional labor gives us.

Finally, mothers’ and feminists’ cries about the disenfranchisation of “women’s’ work” will be answered. We will have to place a monetary value on empathy, story, design and artisanal focus, and move away from the precision that machines can give us.

Conflicts will arise that will be unexpected around issues of access rather than race, gender or economics. The “left brained” people aren’t going to just stop analyzing, using logic and developing new ideas.

And the conflicts that have always existed under the surface in the global economy between the arts and the humanities and engineering will be waged on different ground, more favorable to those who can compose and create, rather than those who can defy logic or program a computer.

Trainers, developers, speakers and presenters, will have the unenviable job security of curating and collating the knowledge that exists all across the virtually infinite space of the infinite web.

Mediators, conflict practitioners, facilitators, and arbitrators will have to be great designers, storytellers, visual artists and—at the furthest end—movie makers, in order to train, educate, convince and convert a population who will be frustrated, disintermediated, and staring a seemingly hopeless, jobless future in the face.

We are excited about the future. There will be more opportunities, more adventures, and even more hope.

But not human generated hope.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] The Minstrelry of Conflict

Minstrel shows were three act structures that were about racism, sexism, segregation, mockery and buffoonery.

At a deeper level, they were also about making up the participants’ faces—both Caucasian faces and African American faces—to obscure the lived, experienced pain of racism, sexism segregation, mockery and buffoonery.

Infantilization, stereotyping, vulgarity and defining deviancy as entertainment, were at the core of minstrel shows. Now, most minstrel shows following the American Civil War, declined in popularity among white audiences. Also, many blacks who had been slaves, and performers, in the minstrel shows, moved into the areas of circuses, vaudeville, variety shows and musical comedy.

Why even address this horrible piece of United States history?

For two reasons:

Many of us fail to talk about the issues of face, vanity and pride and how they are drivers for the seemingly never-ending vaudeville of conflicts in our lives—and the lives of other we know.

Many of us respond to conflicts in our lives with methods and choices that parallel the action and deeper message of minstrel shows.

Think about it.

We put on a “face” consisting of the caked on make-up of personal pride and vanity in an effort to avoid addressing conflicts (primarily ones between our values and other people’s values) and then head to work, school or church.

We are activated by people who are also hiding their own pain and we proceed to studiously dance around (another aspect of minstrel shows was dancing) the conflicts at hand around values that matter.

We use rhetorical techniques and communication tactics to accommodate outcomes and commodify results that we know are wrong (similar to the vicious racism and sexism that was applauded by the minstrel who audiences) and to try to walk away and remain feeling good.

When we finally talk about the conflicts in our work lives, but not in our home or family lives, we try to say that we have other’s best intentions in mind, which can sometimes come off to others in the dance of conflict as paternalism.

What’s the way out?

Understand and acknowledge that loving confrontation and healthy assertiveness is not aggression or an attempt to “hurt the feelings” of the other party. Confrontation and assertiveness is sometimes preferable to avoidance and accommodation. However, many of us are uncomfortable because of our own conflict vanity, our image/face management and our lack of courage.
Understand and acknowledge that feelings of shame and guilt are mostly in our heads and are driven by our fear-based responses. When fear kicks in we shame ourselves and others as a defense against the guilt around the knowledge that we “could have done more.” But as we mentioned before, courage has always been in short supply…
Understand and acknowledge that risk and reassurance are an anathema to each other and we must pursue either one or the other, but not both. A person cannot take on the risk of moving forward to confront—in love, mind you—conflicts at home, at work or at church, while also seeking reassurance that the relationship will be saved in forms we are the most comfortable with, and that codifies what we believe, rather than capital “T” truth.

The popularity of minstrel shows with the American public declined after the American Civil War, but its imprint and impression remains everywhere in our entertainment, our music, our movies, and even our TV shows.

Hiding the pain of conflict under the caked on makeup of our tendency toward avoidance, our lack of courage, and our need for reassurance, and continuing to do the dance as a public and private show to preserve destructive, dysfunctional relationships, will leave imprints on our lives that will only get deeper, not shallower, over time.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Why We Start But Don’t Finish

There’s no penalty for starting in our overall work culture.

If you start an initiative, a process or even start a project at work, there’s no conflict.

Sure, someone might come along (an employee, a colleague, a co-worker, a boss, a supervisor, a manager) and may make your life “difficult” by muddying up the process of starting. But even with such actions, it may feel like there’s a penalty, but there really isn’t.

Seth Godin in The Dip points this out. This is partially because there are parades and applause for starting throughout our overall culture: starting school, starting a volunteer project, starting a business.

But the cutural opportunity for penalty rises as the expectations of others (and yourself) rise (or fall) in relation to the success (or failure) of the process, initiation or project as it moves forward.

Penalties are reinforced for failure at work and then quitting is quietly proposed, with no fanfare or applause.

Think about the overall cultural language and phrases around quitting: “No one likes a quitter.” Or, “quitters never win.” Or, a more insidious one we have heard in some circles in the past “AA is for quitters.”

There’s a public penalty for quitting and it comes from a toxic combination of other people’s expectations, jealousies and assumptions, our own desires and assumptions about how the project, process or initiative should work, and the ways in which reality rarely dovetails with both of these.

And then, we are shamed for failing and subtly, socially encouraged, to never try again, to shut up our voices and to go along with whatever “the crowd” decides is good.

The way out of this is to begin publicly applauding quitting, quietly acknowledging starting (but not lauding it, or praising it) and having the courage to ignore the crowd, who are often blind, prejudiced, or biased.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Opinion] Training Day

There is a problem with the way that training is used to develop employees in the workplace.

The problem is not that the employees fail to attend the trainings and workforce development offerings on a regular basis.

The problem is not that employees fail to implement the things that they learn and use those lessons to innovate the organization forward even more.

The problem is more complicated than that:

The most critical employees in organizations (managers, supervisors, division leaders and others) are almost never in the room to add their perspective on the issues in the organization which led to the need for training in the first place.

The employees in the organization attending the training tend not to believe they have the courage, the authority or the power to affect innovations around the dominant issues they were called to train on resolving in the first place.

There’s no easy way out of this two-pronged, organizational trap.

And too often, the people who order, organize and even develop the training for employees also serve as gatekeepers buffering the employees in the training room from the people above them.

The difficult way out of this is twofold:

The managers, supervisors, division leaders and other higher-ups need to be seen in the room, endorsing the training and perspective of the development opportunity, the employees are being told to attend.

The statement “I’m too busy to attend” or “That training time doesn’t fit into my schedule” or “I already know all of this, so why do I need to be there” should be banished from managerial vocabulary and scrubbed from supervisory thinking.

Employees need to be provided with opportunities to innovate, such as the type offered to engineers at Google and other high tech companies, on clock time, rather than relegating the power to change to the venues of canned training or fancy bromides on the walls.

Would courageously implementing these to solutions cause organizations to have to do the hard work of shifting mindsets (both of shareholders and owners) toward a truly new conception of what productivity looks like?

Yes.

Which is why the standard is here to stay, at least for a little while longer.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] The Unfairness of Courage

In a conflict, the courageous don’t always win.

And this is not fair.

Winning can be defined as “getting an outcome beneficial to them and their perspective on the issue.”

Winning can be defined as “making change in the face of opposition.”

Winning can be defined as “seeing my ‘enemies’ defeated and driven into obscurity.”

Winning can be defined as “living long enough to see my values and story become dominant and see other values that I oppose recede into obscurity.”

The courageous are those who seek to do three things well:

Engage with the hard emotional labor of dealing with other people and trying to see the world through their lens.
Establish the boundaries and lines that are non-negotiable for them, but understand that the other party might be flexible.
Energize the other party (or parties) with the ability to become allies and friends (at least for the moment) in the pursuit of a greater goal.

If this all sounds hard, that’s because it is.

If all this sounds impossible, it’s really not.

If all this sounds like the purview of diplomats, generals and politicians, rather than auto mechanics, nurses or office managers, it is both.

But, because we deal with other people, with mixed motives, hidden agendas and other issues, the courageous don’t always win.

And this is the output of emotional labor.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Courage

The difference between people who “succeed” and people who “fail” in a conflict scenario is individual levels of courage.

Courage is in short supply and always has been since the days of the playground bully and meeting new people once you got off the bus for the first time in the first grade and Mom and Dad weren’t there to hold your hand anymore.

Courage is not about preparation, learning, discipline or even persistence and grit—although all of those skills and internal factors help.

Courage is about not needing external validation from the world—basically, not needing assurances to do the right thing—and just doing the right thing in the first place.

Which is often the hard thing.

In a conflict scenario, it takes courage to confront in a healthy way, prepare for the feedback you will receive about your role in the problem and then integrating that feedback into your worldview, while also giving feedback to the other person about their role in the scenario.

It takes courage to confront a cheating spouse, explain how what they did impacted you and your family and then to listen to them tell you why they made their choice.

It takes courage to address a difficult employee who has little social skills and appears to have even less desire to develop them, and try to find a middle ground to get tasks done in the workplace.

It takes courage to speak up when you think bad decisions are being made in a fraternal, civic, volunteer, or church organization that you disagree with. And it takes courage to hear and accept why those decisions may not be the best for you, but are the best ones for the organization.

Courage is at the bottom of all resolution. Forgiveness is at the bottom of all reconciliation efforts. Labor is at the bottom of all engagement practices, advice and opinions.

So then the question becomes: How much do you really want to grow as a person before you leave this life?

-Peace Be With You All-

[ICYMI] Acting “As If”

When we first started in the working world—and by extension in the adult world—one of the salient pieces of advice we were repeatedly given by other working people was, “fake it until you make it.”

Now, in most contexts of the workplace, where things happen—projects, ideas, tasks, etc.—underneath the force of organizational inertia, this is perhaps wise advice.

But in the conflict entrepreneurship game, “Fake it until you make it” is terrible advice. So too is the advice to “act as if.”

If the conflict engagement consultant fakes knowing the answer, fakes being empathetic, or under delivers the goods as promised, the client will know immediately.

By the way, bait and switch doesn’t work either, because showing up as one thing, when you’ve advertised another, is a sure way to guarantee never being called again.

Here’s some better advice for the conflict engagement consultant: Being confident in yourself, your approach and your process, comes when you embrace the fear of not being confident. Embrace cannot become paralysis, and self-fulfilling prophecies are like a dose of nerve gas against the conflict consultant.

Walk through the fear, is much better advice.

It’s the only way for the conflict consultant, and her client, to walk out whole on the other side.

Originally published on January 29, 2015.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!

[ICYMI] Does All This Stuff Really Work?

Yes.

But it requires you to engage and be active, rather than passive.

How many people do you know that are passive participants in their own lives?

How many of them are in conflict with others?

Stuff doesn’t just “happen”(no matter what the bumper sticker may tell you) and active participation in choosing to be empathetic, to be a listener or to be positive is tough.

The family won’t save a person in conflict.
The workplace won’t save a person in conflict.
The school won’t save a person in conflict.
The church won’t save a person in conflict.
The society won’t save a person in conflict.

The only person who can save a person in conflict is themselves.

Originally published on November 24, 2014.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!