[Opinion] The Listicle is Simple and Seductive

Three points need to be emphasized at the beginning of any training, workshop, or seminar.

Your way of thinking about conflict, communication, and persuasion must shift before anything else can happen.

Your way of consuming information, your attention span, and your level of caring about the content you are about to hear, must shift before any deep learning can happen.

Your way of listening to the delivered content must shift from passive to active, for without that shift, nothing else can happen.

The desire, of course, from some of the participants is for these three things to happen. And these points being made out loud makes those participants relieved.

But there are other desires in the room.

The desire to get the tools, get the skills, get the listicle version of the information, and then to leave.

The desire to get the lecture, get the knowledge, but to not engage in any deeper change. After all, such change is challenging, and if there’s no support in the environment from which you came for change that needs to happen, well then it’s easier to ignore the calls to change.

The desire to not care. This is reflected in the phrases, the questions, the statements, and the observations that spring forth from the participants. Typically framed by some participants as “I hope that you can keep me awake,” or “You kept me awake more than any other facilitator I’ve ever sat through.”

The desire for the listicle version, the shorthand, the summary, the 30-second point, is seductive. But ultimately, changing the philosophy about how we think, matters more than applying shortcut tactics to achieve an outcome we might not enjoy.

[Strategy] I’m Right

The reason why talk of biases (implicit and otherwise) doesn’t connect with audiences listening for tips on how to manage conflict, is that the audience already knows that they’re biased.

And they’re fine with it.

The challenge is not to harangue them until they give in and admit that biases (implicit and otherwise) can be attached to values.

The challenge is to persuade them that their biases aren’t helping them get the results they so desperately crave.

And yes, it’s easier to harangue and force an “I’m right you should listen to me” -argument, on an audience that has already heard your “I’m right you should listen to me”-argument and has rejected it.

It’s easier for the person presenting the “I’m right you should listen to me”-argument that is.

But the audience leaves (mentally, emotionally, or physically), loses interest, or gets distracted by something more entertaining.

And less badgering.

Persuasion serves to manage and resolve more issues in ways favorable for both parties (the biased and the unbiased) alike.

First, connect through persuasion. Then build a relationship. Then change behaviors.

And last, change the world.

[Strategy] If I Were You…

“If I were you…” is the worst beginning to providing feedback to anyone.

The statement merely says, if the person giving the feedback were the person receiving the feedback then this is what the feedback would be.

This is a poorly considered bit of critical shorthand, because if the person giving the feedback were the person receiving the feedback, then nothing would change.

This is a poorly considered bit of persuasive shorthand, because if the person giving the feedback were the person receiving the feedback, then that person wouldn’t be persuaded to change in any meaningful way.

This is a poorly considered method of shortcutting through another’s experience to get to “empathy” and to get around the other party’s defenses.

The thing is, if the person giving the feedback were the person receiving the feedback, they would be acting in the same way that the person receiving the feedback is.

Better to say, “If my brain were in your situation” or “If my behavior could be inserted in between you and the problem,” and be done with it.

[Strategy] How to be the Nicky Barnes of Negotiation

The savvy entrepreneur in an ever changing business environment, should take a page from the book of entrepreneurs in other spaces. Particularly, that least savvy of all spaces, drug dealing.

Now, I am not advocating for drug-dealing, illicit drug use, or engaging in illegal activity.

Far from it.

What I am advocating for is looking at the techniques, practices, tips and trick that individuals who engage in the selling and distribution of illegal drugs use to negotiate in an ever changing, unpredictable market, filled with unpredictable, ever changing, personalities and people.

The business environment for illegal drugs is highly fluid, the market for drugs is inelastic, and the demand curve for illegal drugs is only trending upward (and has been for the last thirty or so years). From these three factors alone, we can also conclude that there is a lot of competition in the market for illicit drugs, thus there are competitors in the market that might be tempted to negotiate with each other with violence rather than with words.

Which is where the power of negotiation as a method of persuasion comes in.

In a situation where drugs are being dealt, contrary to popular opinion, the first move is not to get a weapon and being shooting—that’s actually the last move. The first move is to talk.

Particularly as a person moves up higher and higher in the ranks of the entrepreneurial, drug-dealing world, talk matters more than violence (of any kind), which is why “foot soldiers” in gangs engaged in drug dealing tend to have arrest records far longer and more extensive than the arrest records of the “big fish.”

Because, much like the CEO of a modern corporation (or a start-up founder) the higher you go in an organization, the less impetus there is for immediate resolution, and the more impetus there is for the tools and techniques of persuasion.

From Nicky Barnes to Frank Lucas and even to Pablo Escobar, negotiation was used first, and then when that didn’t work, methods of persuasion became more direct—and more violent.

But what does all of this have to do with the modern entrepreneur, trying to move units of their latest, greatest mobile phone app? There are a few tips to remember:

Entrepreneurs like a good argument: With the market, with their partners, with their competition, and even with their employees. However, remember that argumentation breaks down into three areas: arguments designed to persuade, arguments, design to advocate, and arguments designed to provide proof of a point. An argument will almost always lead to some issues that negotiation will have to work through.

Entrepreneurs need to remember that negotiation is about trust, reciprocation, commitment, and consistency. Even in the world of drug dealing, (remember, inelastic, highly competitive markets) there has to be a system of trust based in reciprocation (“I do for you, you do for me”) commitment, and consistency, or else every person will be for themselves. Coalitions, agreements, and mutual understandings come about through effective negotiation.

Entrepreneurs are sometimes less interested in persuasion than they are in being “right” or “winning” the argument or the negotiation. Persuasion is about watching language, active listening, rephrasing and paraphrasing, and having an active, engaged memory. In order to engage effectively and persuasively, remember that no negotiation scenario (whether around drugs or mobile phone apps or even a peace building process) is “pure.” There are always emotions, triggers, and other elements that each party brings to the negotiation table that have to be addressed at the negotiation table. When those issues and concerns are ignored, dismissed, or otherwise not acknowledged, resentment and bitterness begin to grow in the heart of the aggrieved party.

Negotiation is a method of persuasion that every entrepreneur should value, no matter what empire (or “dent” in the universe) they are seeking to make.

[Strategy] My Mind is Made Up

“My mind is made up.”

Well…ok then.

Your mindset, your framing of the world and the way that it’s ‘supposed’ to work, your story that you tell yourself about your conflicts, disputes, and differences of opinion, can be changed.

Unlike in the old Ten Commandments movie from back in the day, your ideas and stories developed over time. They weren’t etched irrevocably in granite tablets and then thrust upon you.

Though sometimes it may feel like that.

At least once (or maybe twice) in every training opportunity, there comes a moment to challenge a frame or a mindset, or a story, about how something ‘should’ or ‘ought’ to work. And at that moment, the phrase “your frame—your worldview—got here before the facilitator did” pops out of the trainer’s mouth.

But even this statement betrays a mindset, a story, a frame of references around the malleability of these frames, and the biological ability for a person to change their, already made up, minds.

The ability to shift frames, and to change them based on the persuasion of new knowledge, is not a sign of a lack of consistency—the crowd (e.g. other people) makes sure that you are remain consistent, even unto rhetorical death—instead, it is a sign that the window dressing of our frames, stories, and mindsets, can be changed and are flexible.

Mediation, conflict resolution, conflict coaching, conflict engagement, negotiation: all of these processes exist to persuade you that your mind can be changed; and in some cases, to persuade you that changing your mind may lead to more positive outcomes than the ones that you have been experiencing all this time.

But sometimes, people don’t want different outcomes.

Sometimes, parties in conflict get unnerved by participating what they perceive as processes that involve too much “second guessing” and “over thinking.”

Sometimes parties in conflict want affirmations, reassurances, and confirmation that their story is the right one and the only one with any validity in the marketplace of ideas.

So when one party’s mind is “made up” the question becomes: As the party on the opposite side of the table, are you ready, willing, and able to engage in the hard emotional labor of changing that other party’s mind?

Or is your mind now made up as well?

HIT Piece 05.03.2016

The audience for the window dressing has left the building.

The thing is, the audience for whom the window dressing was designed, was probably there against their will for most of the show anyway.

All the way from how teachers present school assignments to how carnival barkers work the crowd, the audience for the show has to buy into the window dressing that covers the content, and they have to have the patience and the desire to be there in the first place.

But at a certain point adults get tired of formalized schooling and audiences get tired of being yelled at by commercials that are louder than the show they are interrupting and all of us begin to make alternate choices.

Post-school age adults confuse the window dressing of the set-up of the classroom, the routine of the school day, and the frustration of navigating the daily school environment tension between what they would like to have done, rather than what they were supposed to do, with learning valuable information—and almost 45% of post-school age adults never read another book after high school.

Audiences confuse the window dressing of the loud voice, the annoying 30-second interruption, the lack of real relationship, and their desire to have the show come back on, with all advertising that annoys them—and they employ ad blockers online, cut the cord from cable and use on-demand, streaming services, or turn off the television altogether.

I’ve been getting some feedback lately that the window dressing over some of my training content has to go. That audiences are impatient, disengaged, and only willing to sit through bite sized content, delivered quickly, and entertainingly.

But the thing is, the audiences I talk with, who contain individuals in conflicts, disagreements, disputes, and “differences of opinion” at work, didn’t get to where they are before they walked into my facilitation space quickly. It was a slow, steady, build-up of sediment consisting of frustrations, expectations, false reassurances, and miscommunications that got them there.

I don’t specialize in keeping anybody around against their will. And if the audience wants the window-dressing to go, it can go.

But to confuse the mechanics of the learning, with the tools of how and why to learn, merely perpetuates a pattern of disengagement, disillusion, and disheartening outcomes that got the audience here listening in the first place.

-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] Clarity, Candor and Courage in Communication

Establishing clarity and getting candor are often confused with the use of profanity and “brutal” honesty in communication relationships too often filled with more noise than substance.

There has long been a desire from audiences—whether in a family, or on the other end of an email communication—for the clear sending of a meaningful message.

Consumers of messages want clarity in order to understand what the sender is asking and candor in order to determine the appropriate level of transparency and authenticity. Because there is so little direct communication in all manner of relationships, elements and techniques of persuasion from the sender are interpreted by the receiver as lying, obfuscation and methods of deception.

Transparency and authenticity cannot be replaced by the appearance of courage, which appears when content creators use profanity in the content they produce.

Accountability and responsibility are sometimes abandoned with this approach; and still, in many communications, candor can be preserved with courage, while also getting to truth.

Which is what every communication is really about; whether it’s an advertising message from a brand or the message a person receives from their ex-partner across a negotiation table.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Future] Unbundling Value 11: Micropayments for Macrovalue

The value add of emotional labor has never been fully quantified in the open market.

Think about it.

How often does American culture put a price tag on a mother’s hug? It can be argued that when a mother nurtures a child, rather than rejecting it, in aggregate, those positive interactions build over time and allow the child to experience all the glories that adulthood has to offer. In addition, it can be argued that nurturing a child encourages productivity and adds to the positive economic growth of the overall economy.

The opposite can also be argued. A mother’s rejection, in aggregate, over time, can lead to a loss of productivity in that individual when they reach adulthood, and a net negative on society and culture in the form of increased conflict, increased likelihood of incarceration and other social pathologies.

Oh, if it were only so cut and dry.

The fact of the matter is, mothers are people and sometimes they hit the mark, sometimes they miss the mark and sometimes the child becomes an adult and does whatever they want, independent of the particulars of their upbringing.

The trouble with monetizing all of those possible outcomes is that there is no clear line to guarentee surety of outcome. The kind of lines that economists, public policy researchers, and politicians like which are simple and make for good sound bites or quippy image quotes. The kind of lines that make for good stories on the nightly news of triumph and tragedy.

What if there were a way to monetize that emotional labor?

Micropayments, crowd funding, micro-lending and other ways of passing along money, whether in the form of a remittance, a direct payment, or through being involved romantically in a story, all allow the valuation of something that has never been valued (monetarily) before. The labor that matters—not the idea labor that James Altucher talks about or even the manufacturing labor that politicians talk about once in a while, or the digital labor that seems to be hot right now—is the labor of the heart. The micro interactions (positive and negative) that happen between people and lead to small, interpersonal conflicts that mean more than whatever is going on in whatever country “over there.”

Technologies that fund the unbundling of value from labor—such as blockchain—can serve to fundamentally reshape the value of the emotional labor that matters on the open market. This idea is harder to accept than universal basic income, or any other idea that seeks to unbundle work from being paid for that work.

Valuing emotional output has always been a struggle in a capitalistic, Protestant work ethic based culture that exists in America, but our technologies have brought us to the point where we can begin to build—and honor—that emotional output, rather than merely continuing to ignore it.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principle 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/

[Podcast] Web 3.0 – The Earbud_U Minute

We need to figure out what kind of Internet we want to have.

The business model currently funding and pushing the growth of the Internet is based upon monetizing a base of users who come to a project and use it for free, or for a nominal price.

The user takes advantage of the content/service/process for free. And, as a result, the user is so enamored with the content/service/process that they keep coming back over and over again, building a trust based relationship with the creator/creators of the project. Subsequently, in order to fund the project, there are hopefully so many users that an advertiser has no choice but to put advertisements in front of a group of eyeballs with whom the project owner has built a relationship.

This is the model underlying Facebook. The nominal fee model (a subscription-based model) underlies LinkedIn, journalism models, ecommerce platforms and other content/service/process platforms.

Web 2.0 is what everyone is talking about now, but Web 3.0 is really, where the Internet has to move to.

Web 3.0 is beyond just the Internet of Things. Web 3.0 is the Internet as Everything. Web 3.0 is the Internet waging active battle with the last, sticky remnants of the world built through the assumptions of the Industrial Revolution. This is a world created around the rules, laws and policies, created by politicians and people to keep the common democratization of the Internet out of the hands of the common people before the Internet.

Here’s a question: Why is it that there aren’t any internet connected roads?

It has nothing to do with technological innovations such as creating concrete that can communicate with strips on the road. Or with computer chips that can talk to your car. Or signs and traffic signals that talk to the road, the car and each other.

The reason there aren’t roads that are intelligent is not a smart car issues, no matter what Google Cars would have you think.

The issue is really laws and regulations.

Laws are the last bastion of the Industrial revolution world that have yet to fall to the unending sweep of the Internet. We see the beginnings of this with our current thrashing around privacy, data, and “who owns the future” (either you or a corporation) but once we settle all of this we will have new business models that will allows the Internet to be truly “baked in”.

Then, once that happens, the sky truly will be the limit.

-Peace Be With You All-

[ICYMI] No

The word “no” is so compelling because it serves as both a positive and a negative.

We’ve written about this before, here and here, and it never fails to amaze us how much more there is to cover. This is because the crowning question that we asked, from clients to casual observers of our blog and social feeds is: “How do I say ‘no’?”

Saying “no” to an opportunity, a person or a situation is hard for three reasons:

It requires us to articulate the values that we hold dear.
It requires us to make judgment about those values in relation to another persons’ desires and requests.
It requires us to place a potential future best, above a present tangible good.

It is hard for people to say “no” (positively or otherwise) because we feel as though we are letting down other people. And being the social animals that we are, reciprocity and social norming exert a powerful pull upon our psyches, our hearts and even our souls.

The word “no” places a delineating marker between people, ideas, projects and purposes. It segregates, and closes off, even as it opens up other possibilities. This is why rejection is such a hard thing to overcome for sales professionals, marketers and others who engage in the business of persuasion.

“No” ultimately can feel like a rejection of persuasion, rather than a statement of preference:

Preferring the safety of nostalgia over the danger of the new
Preferring the comfort of the present over the uncertainty of the next moment over
Preferring the status quo over a change

What are you saying “yes” to by saying “no”?

Originally published on March 19, 2015.

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