The Hook Brings You Back

There are plenty of hooks around for you to get caught on.

The boy Peter Pan knew this.

Adulthood, responsibility, accountability, informed courage, these are traits of a mature individual, on the hook and ready to show up and perform.

The modern conception of “adulting” represents the overall continuation of long-term, troubling, cultural abandonments of the hooks that serve to create deeper meaning in life.

But the thing is, the number hooks that require us to show up and perform, day in and day out hasn’t decreased but instead has increased exponentially.

The 90’s pop band Blues Traveler knew this.

Performance is not the thing, though it used to be. Increasingly, the problem is not that people can’t engage or perform once then engage; the problem is now that too many people choose not to show up in the first place.

If you don’t show up, then you’re not on the hook if anything goes wrong.

And if you’re not on the hook when something does go wrong, blame is easy to cast (“Mistakes were made…but not by me…”) and credit is easy to take (“Oh yeah, I was physically here. That’s all that counts. Right?”).

Paying attention, engaging with content and situations that are uncomfortable, responding to ambiguity with heart and courage, dealing with others with empathy, actively listening for a core idea rather than figuring that you know it already.

These are the parts of a performance that matter as much as showing up, and that can put you on the hook when you show up.

Accepting this reality is the difference between an amateur (or a dilettante) and the practicing professional.

The average marketer knows this.

What brings you back, time after time, is the dopamine hit based feeling of success that comes from accomplishing what no one else believed you could.

Many contemporary organizations, distractions, and entertainments, are built around manipulating the feeling of success, without providing the expected (or necessary) commensurate material, psychological, emotional, and spiritual outcomes.

The hook brings you back.

Marketers, fictional characters, popular music bands and even social networks, rely on the biological power of getting you hooked into a habit—without accepting the hard emotional stuff that should go along with it.

In environments and situations such as these, avoiding conflict as a baseline becomes the hook that is the easiest to get you to come back repeatedly.

But the thing is, conflict is the only hook worth getting caught on, to attain deeper success, lasting outcomes, and faithful engagement.

[Advice] On Influencers

Influential personalities and brands online are about to become even more influential as the years go by.

And mediators, lawyers, and negotiators should take note.

Influencer advertising is tricky to navigate, whether you are trying to partner with the peacebuilding neighborhood association with a vibrant Facebook community or the pop singer Rhianna.

Influencer marketing is only going to grow larger in the coming year for the very same reasons that social media is influential now: Individuals trust other individuals more than they trust brands. In the field of mediation and peacebuilding, where trust is a huge deal, influencers and thought leaders such as Bernard Mayer and Kenneth Cloke bring their substantial influence to academic programs, academic writing, advocacy and other areas.

However, as the influence of those individuals begins to fade, a new generation of influencers is rising in the ranks of mediation and peacebuilding professionals, such as Patricia Porter, Brad Heckman, Cinnie Noble, and others who have begun to leverage social tools and the wide reach of the Internet to make a dent in the peace building universe.

For the ADR professional with limited resources to be able to connect with larger names in the peacebuilding world, there are a few things to remember when considering using influencers to advertise your content, your services, your philosophy, or your processes:

Does the influencer’s brand link well with my brand promise?

Carefully considering how an influencer’s brand (which may range from Bernard Mayer all the way to Kim Kardashian) complements the strengths and reduces the weaknesses of the peacebuilder’s brand promise is key to developing a long term relationship with the influencer. Influencers are people first and foremost, and peacebuilding professionals should be about building that relational knowledge ahead of jumping into a branded relationship.

Is the influencer’s audience an audience that I want to be addressing as a peace builder?

Depending upon who the influencer’s audience is (and audiences range in taste and structure from the 1,000 followers the neighborhood peace builder has on her Facebook page, all the way to the millions of fans and followers Jon Stewart has) the peace builder has to decide carefully if that is an audience worth talking to. The fact of the matter is, every audience that a brand influencer has is not appropriate for a peace builder to talk to, nor is every audience open to hearing a message about peace.

Does the influencer’s message help or harm my message?

Every influencer talks to their audience in their own way, using words, images, symbols, and other forms of social cuing that inexorably tie that audience to them.

Some influencers are less savvy than others, but that does not mean that they aren’t sophisticated communications professionals in their own right.

 

[Advice] Building a Subscription Model for Content

Being the last person standing is an underrated tactic in the world of online content creation.

But for the peace builder looking to create a subscription model for content, this may be the best strategy possible.

Three things are working in the peace builder’s favor:

  • the speed of the Internet and the ways in which content consumers access content is increasing, even as the cost of acquiring the tools is decreasing;
  • the rise of ad blocking is causing many organizations to either double down on advertising, or to simply eliminate it altogether as a driver for content;
  • the cost in time, emotional energy, and personal effort (number of “touches”) to acquire a paying customer online is about the same as it is to acquire a paying customer offline.

More content—written, audio, and particularly video—is being consumed by audiences via mobile applications, nested on mobile devices, and accessed via the cloud. This is being seen most visibly in the overlap between subscription based product services (i.e. Harry’s Razor, Dollar Shave Club, Birchbox (for men and women) Trunk Club, Casper Mattresses, etc., etc.), and the ways in which applications, URLs, and even QR Codes are being integrated into the content consumption experience around advertising those services. Peace builders must be aware of these trends to keep their content delivery systems current and updated to get in front of as many audience members in their long-tail as possible.

The rise of ad blocking as a driver for developing a subscription based business model for content development is a key point for peace builders to take in to consideration. Yes, putting content behind a paywall and encouraging people to either give an email address (or pay a fee) to access that content may knock the peace builder in a Google ranking. But if there is an abundance of previously “free” content (audio, written, or video) that can be nested behind a paywall, advertising and ad blocking become less worrisome, in spite of whatever changes Google attempts to make to its search algorithm.

The offline content acquisition experience and the online content acquisition experience are beginning to hew closer and closer together. In the past, both on and off line, there was tremendous friction between the consumer of content and the creator of content. Now, both online and increasingly offline, all of that friction is either being automated, “app”-ed, or otherwise disappearing from interactions. Content consumers in the peace builders’ long tail are still eating, sleeping, buying clothes, and purchasing content from a variety of both on and offline resources. Peace builders must be aware of this friction reduction and move to a world where the frivolous parts of the experience (i.e. signing up, giving an email, taking a payment, etc.), are becoming more friction less so that the actual engagement with the peace builder can happen.

The peace builders that understand these three trends and incorporate the reality of them into their content business model will be the last peace builders standing (and getting paid) even as others drift away.

-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] 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-

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] Building an Arbitrage Machine for Entrepreneurship

In financial markets, in gambling, and even in entrepreneurship, there are two skills that are critical for success: making small bets consistently through developing a model (buying) and breaking an old model (selling), and building an anti-fragile machine that can withstand the shock of either of those small bets failing.

Arbitrage is the process of hedging bets (through the purchase and the sale of an asset) so that, no matter how much is spent, the buyer/seller can always either come out ahead, slightly behind (not enough to be far back, but enough to catch up), or slightly ahead (building a continuous lead). Hedge fund managers and stock traders with fancy algorithms understand arbitrage. So do insurance agents, financial advisors, professional gamblers, and even entrepreneurs.

Many people though, make bad large bets (thus financial collapses and the development of ‘flash’ trading via fancy computer programs) and take massive losses with little to no gains. This is due primarily to ego driven betting that has nothing to do with market conditions, and everything to do with personal psychological and emotional tics. The most successful people bet small, bet consistently—or they don’t bet at all.

Day by day, step by step, entrepreneurs should be building a machine in their unique niche that will arbitrage against their unique market. One that will allow them to see opportunities, take advantage of them, and not lose their livelihoods, their families, or their peace of mind. This does not have to be a stressful process, but it does have to be done.

When the entrepreneur makes those small bets they don’t become business people (business is about maintaining a consistent place in one spot with gradual upticks in growth, rather than about advancing a model) instead, they become evangelists for a new way of doing things. In whatever field they’re in, they begin to make bets that will fundamentally breakdown the model they saw as problematic (which lead them to entrepreneurship in the first place) and will replace it with a new model.

Customers, clients, and others don’t have to know what model the entrepreneur is building. As a matter of fact, they don’t really care. But the entrepreneur should care. Otherwise, freelance work is always an option.

-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] 3 Thoughts That May (Or May Not) Intersect…

Three thoughts that may (or may not) intersect with each other:

Thought #1: There’s a lot of high profile, persistent, whining going on in the space of web publishing, content creation, and even in the scrappy world of podcasting. This phenomenon of whining is also extending into commentary around entrepreneurship as the venture capital money that has been floating big bets for years begins to dry up. The thing is though, if you are a web publisher, or a podcaster, or a content creator, or a struggling entrepreneur, the whining has got to stop. The landscape of the Internet is infinite, no matter what the big digital brands are telling you through their marketing.


Thought #2: Attention and awareness are the coin of the realm right now in any digital space, and all you need to be successful (whatever that means) is 1,000 people willing to bet on your reputation, have a relationship with you, then give you revenue, and make a referral for your service or product. The idea that the digital system can be gamified through creating fake followers, fake awareness, and false hype is dying as fast as the money dries up.


Thought #3: In the digital space, and in our off line, real life interactions lately, the substance of truth is seen to not be as marketable as the illusion of symbolism. But this is a false paradigm. Substance based in truth has always grow more followers, attracted more awareness, and generated more revenues (in trust first and money last) for more people that anything else tried ever.

The problem comes when many people—from celebrities to the average man on the street—buy into the frothy hype of the short-term gain at the expense of the long-term relationship. As the bubbles pop all over the place and as web publishers, content creators, entrepreneurs, and others have to get back to the substance of building products, let’s hope they focus on communicating the truth—no matter how scary it is.

-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] Storytelling for the Peace Builder

It’s hard to imagine a world without stories and storytelling; after all, human beings are narrative animals.  And where peace builders are concerned, it’s even harder to imagine a world without conflict.

Conflict is a process of change driven by stories. Stories that, when repeated often enough—and with enough veracity—become capital “T” truth in conflict parties’ minds, hearts and psyches.

Peace builders are experienced in hearing stories of conflict and disruption. They tease apart those narratives to move parties past “who did what to whom” and toward, resolution, reconciliation or even forgiveness.

But, when peace builders have to switch and become brand builders, sometimes they struggle with stories about their business, their peace practices and their approaches to advocating for peace in the world. This has created a space where peace builders are sometimes defined by market forces, rather than acting to create narratives that will drive the market to their door.

Go back and look at that paragraph for a minute: That set of thoughts right there is a story, full of assumptions, truths and values.

All good story making revolves around a three act structure, focused around an epic journey of some type. Any reading this who has studied the books of Joseph Campbell—or seen Star Wars—will know what I’m talking about.

The peace builder as “hero” is a tough meme to construct for many peace builders. It smacks of violating client self-determination. A narrative where the client is the hero and the peace builder fades into the background, never to be seen or heard from again, is comfortable for many peace builders. Such a construct can be seductive, because it reinforces various themes and narratives baked into the structure of many peace building efforts, from education and training to certification and publishing.

But…

The marketplace (i.e. potential clients and customers) enjoys the journey of heroes and even anti-heroes. Acknowledging this fact is not approval of it, so when constructing the story of an approach, process or philosophy, many peace builders would do well to follow three basic rules:

  • The brand client is always the hero—All good, memorable branding stories begin by focusing on the hero first and identifying that person and their role clearly (see the Apple campaign from 1984). When building a brand and a business, the conflicting parties are the heroes; but, they can only be heroic with a little guidance.
  • The brand narrative winds through every piece of content a peace builder creates—When I work with corporate training clients, the second best moment I experience is the moment when they tell me that they recognize me from my “heroic” photo, splayed “Superman-like,” across my marketing (see this here). My best moment is when all that fades as they come to realize, through instruction, training and guidance, that they have the power to succeed or fail if they want to—and on their own terms. When building business brand, images that are selected for your blog posts, your business card, and even your website and print media should all integrate and express the same narrative.
  • The brand narrative you want to send to clients must be consistent—The professional peace builder can send one, two or multiple messages to clients through multiple channels (see the Chipotle campaign here). And in a world with fractured and shortened attention spans—and multiple marketing niches and channels—it may be beneficial to send out multiple messages. Or, telling one story, one time, in one way may work better. Either way, the professional, savvy peace builder must decide on what the message will be—and where and how hard to promote it.

-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/

[Strategy] Peace Building is not a Commodity

There are commodities, massive amounts of resources, products, and even ideas, that consumers use and discard at mass.  Commodities can also be traded for money and generate outsized revenues because they are so valuable to consumers and can be differentiated across so many secondary and tertiary products in the market.

An obvious commodity is oil.

Another obvious one is meat, such as hogs or cattle.

And yet another obvious commodity is metal, such as steel, copper, or gold.

The price of a commodity fluctuates over time, as the amount of it either decreases or increases. So when new oil deposits are accessed through new technologies (e.g. the hydraulic fracking process) the cost of that commodity decreases as the available amount for consumers to use increases.

There are non-obvious commodities as well. We see this in the job market when too many people trained, or graduated, from one academic area to the working world, and then they ‘flood’ the market. Currently, the legal field is seeing a classic increase in the commodity of educated graduates, followed by the commensurate decrease in the salaries that they are able to command.

Another non-obvious commodity is information. We see this on the Internet, where the search giant Google has made the ease of accessing all the world’s collected knowledge (not wisdom mind you) a cornerstone of their business model.  When access to information becomes cheap (the commodity increases) then the revenues provided to people who used to guard access to that knowledge (e.g. journalists, writers, commentators, academics, social authorities, etc.) decreases.

Until the revenues generated from the exploitation of non-obvious commodities hits zero.

The reason why this phenomenon doesn’t happen with obvious commodities is because obvious commodities have a limited shelf life (meat rots if not processed), they will eventually run out (anybody heard about peak oil lately), and they become less valuable as new ways to do old things are discovered (cutting down trees for paper versus recycling old paper).

The trouble with selling peacemaking in light of this unconscious thinking and valuing in the market of obvious and nonobvious commodities is three-fold:

  1. People in conflict value trust (a non-obvious commodity) at a higher level than process (another non-obvious commodity) and thus will ‘pay’ more to the peace builder—in terms of attention—who works on trust first rather than process.
  2. People in conflict view disagreements, disputes, fights, ‘differences of opinion,’ and other interactions with other people as an obvious commodity. For many people conflict is something to be avoided, and they have worked out sophisticated processes in their own brains to justify, avoid, delay, or surrender, to the conflicts in their lives. The approach that many peace builders take of trying to ‘sell’ resolution as a transformative, evaluative, or even facilitative process, does not strike a chord with such people.
  3. People in conflict don’t view making peace as a commodity. Instead, litigation, escalation, negative confrontation, revenge, ‘getting what I’m owed,’ or even ‘getting a reckoning’ are viewed as rare commodities (even though they aren’t) worth paying a premium for in time, money, attention, and emotional labor. When peacemaking as a process and a goal is not viewed as a commodity worth pursuing by people who see themselves as powerless, rather than powerful, peacemaking will not be valued by the open market as highly as all those other processes.

Understanding how peacemaking as a process is viewed and valued by an open market, can go a long way toward encouraging the development of realistic goals, timelines, and plans for the academic training, professional development, and business development of peace builders from all backgrounds and stripes in the world.

-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/

[Strategy] Selling for the Peace Builder I

The sales process for a peace builder in the open market is wrapped up with impressions, ideas, concepts, and intuition that the peacebuilder has in their head about every sales film, sales call, and selling situation they’ve ever been involved with.

But, in order to be successful in the open market, where noise and multiple messages reign, the peacebuilder must become comfortable with establishing their value in the market early—which is the first step in starting the sales process. The struggle for the savvy peace builder is how to find clients who will pay (marketing) and then how to “close” them ethically (sales). The only way for the peace builder to sell ethically is to build a fulcrum (from Seth Godin and his 2006 book Free Prize Inside) and to become a champion for peace. Through such a process, the peacebuilder becomes the “free prize” inside the value they add to the client.

All sales are relational in nature, but, in order to “sell” and “close” on the promise of peacebuilding for clients in conflict, the peace builder must become a champion of peace. This requires a changing in the thinking of the peace builder around the sales process.

The second step after marketing then becomes, not the “ask,” but the process of building a fulcrum to demonstrate value and become a champion, and then leveraging that value and championing to grow the revenues of relationship, trust, and money.

The practical steps in building a sales fulcrum involve:

  • Determining if the customer you’re selling to as a peace builder thinks the work of building peace is worth doing.
  • Determining if the customer you’re selling to as a peace builder thinks that you are the person to build that peace.
  • Determining if the customer you’re selling to as a peace builder believes that the outcomes of work of building peace are actually an added benefit to them, their organization, or their lives.

[Strategy] Selling for the Peace Builder I

Illustration from Seth Godin’s book Free Prize Inside pg. 69, available on Amazon.com. All Rights Reserved to Seth.

By definition, all of these practical steps are hard for the peace builder to answer, because they are based in assumptions, ideas, and a worldview that is unproveable, unknowable, and unquantifiable, until after the work of building peace is already in progress—or already completed.

This is why building the fulcrum should be front and center of any peace builder’s sales process. Too many peace builders get caught up in the easy part (creating the product (i.e. early, mid, or late stage intervention) that the client in conflict can use); or get focused on talking about the unpleasant part (entering structures (i.e. families, companies, schools) from the outside w/no leverage or trust to build a fulcrum); while avoiding the hard part entirely (building a fulcrum in spite of rejection, hopelessness, or the inability of clients to close).

All of peace building, from negotiation to mediation and every intervention at every stage in between, is built on needing other people to act.

When you need other people, you must leverage them.

What they think matters.

What they think about you matters.

What they think about peace and peace building matters.

-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] Relational Resonance

Resonance is a term from physics that describes what happens when an object’s natural vibration frequency responds to an external stimulus of the same frequency.

Resonance occurs in nature when an object vibrates without you even touching it. Resonance happens when people fall in love with each other; and, resonance shifts when people fall into conflict with each other.

The reason that litigation is such a poor method for resolving disputes is because most—if not all—disagreements, fights, and “differences of opinion,” are about relationships, built on reciprocation and maintained through common resonance. When the frequency gets disrupted by an external change, the resonance goes away and the struggle to resolution really a hero’s journey back to resonance. Litigation changes the frequency of the relationship between individuals and between individuals and organizations, from one of commonality and vibrating at the same frequency, to one of vibrating at different frequencies.

What does all of this have to do with the conflict resolution professional?

  1. Creating stories that resonate with audiences and clients who are seeking to get back into relationships with resonance, is one of the most important skills that peace builders must grasp in order to design, market, and promote products, services, and processes that will get them revenues.
  2. Creating resonances is about getting to the same frequency—at the same time—that audiences and clients are no matter when and where they are in conflict. Thus, peace builders must consider whether advocating for early-stage interventions (rather that primarily trying to promote late-stage resolution products and services) is a better way to proceed long-term.
  3. Creating the conditions for conflict resolution professionals and audiences to speak the same language—and thus be on the same frequency, will require conflict resolution professionals at all levels to abandon the higher language of “conflict as an opportunity for growth” and move toward the audience language of “conflict as a roadblock to be avoided, accommodated, or attacked.”

The first two are easy. The last is hard.

Peace building is about doing the hard things, doing them well, and doing them consistently—and in a committed way—and building a field and a brand over time that audiences will flock too, that clients will gladly pay money for, and that peace builders can hand down to the next generation of professionals.

Relational resonance must move from the table between clients and the peace builder to the platforms between peace builders and the world.

-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/