[Advice] The Epidemiology of Resolution

Resolution is not the cure for the disease of conflict. Neither is forgiveness or reconciliation.

Resolution, forgiveness and reconciliation merely name the types of processes that have to occur in the hearts of people in conflict during the final stages of the conflict process.

But do not be deceived: the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked:

Who can know it?

We addressed aspects of the science of epidemiology before, and where that science dovetails with the process of the resolution, forgiveness and reconciliation, is three fold:

Epidemiology involves examining the symptoms of presenting issues and how they relate to the overall disease map, or journey—the process of resolution has presenting issues, and the main one is the presence of a softened heart.

Epidemiology involves examining the roots of diseases to determine why they arose in the first place—the process of forgiveness, true forgiveness, involves looking at the roots of a relationship where conflict arose in the past, present and may arise in the future, and then determining what the roots of those conflicts are.

Epidemiology involves examining how a virus, or disease spreads among an at-risk (or not yet at risk) population—true reconciliation between damaged parties in conflicts happens very rarely, but when it does, the psychological and emotional benefits of moving forward from where the conflict ended, spread rapidly.

In the radio show of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Lamont Cranston was the vigilante known as The Shadow. In later years, Alec Baldwin portrayed the character in a big budget movie. At the core of The Shadow’s war on crime, was the idea expressed in the opening lines of the radio show, later abandoned in the 1994 film altogether:

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The cure for conflicts through the processes of resolution, foregiveness and reconciliation is multifaceted, multi-angled and requires performing hard, emotional labor, that many of us would rather not perform.

But when everything else hasn’t worked, hard work is sometimes all the work that’s left.

-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] You Can’t Get There From Here

Parties in conflict often ask the questions Alice did when she arrived in Wonderland.

The Cheshire Cat, that fictional animal who disappears, leaving behind only a grin was right, if a party in a conflict doesn’t know where they are going, then it doesn’t matter which way they go.

However, many parties in conflict are savvy enough to know (whether they are conscious of it or not ) that what got them into conflict isn’t going to get them out.

The problem is, many parties have a preference for when they would like the conflict to end (at a place of compromise, accommodation or winning) but they have no idea what the process to attain that outcome looks like.

Too many parties are also like Alice, in that they harbor suspicions of various peace building processes— negotiation, mediation, training, coaching, or litigation—not because they don’t understand the processes, but because they don’t understand themselves.

The prickly questions of:

How did we get here?
Was I in the wrong and not the other party?
Do I have a responsibility to make it better?
What if it gets worse?

And on and on, doggedly insist upon themselves in party’s whisper spaces, before a decision, during the process of getting to resolution (or not) and after the decision is made. On the other side of the whisper space and resolution is the tug at our heart strings of the regret that we cannot go back to the ways things were before.

Or party’s try to go back and only reignite the old conflict.

What got you here (to conflict) won’t get you there (to resolution) especially if each party has no idea what “there” should look like when they arrive.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-

[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/

[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-

[Advice] 3 Steps to Eliminating Hurry

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry in your life.

Many time management seminars and productivity hacks, mobile applications, in-person trainings and coaching sessions, skirt around the core problem at the heart of modernity: There are only 24 hours in the day.

The problem is not that people have too many tasks in their adult lives (we do); the problem is not that people are constantly busy with priorities that don’t really matter to them (we are); the problem is not that people are stressed out, frazzled, feeling like they are browsing through life, and deeply emotionally and spiritually unhealthy (we are).

The problem is that most of what we read, absorb and try to put into practice focuses around moving around the priorities we don’t like, and trying to squeeze one more ounce out of the 24 hours we do have—so that we can do more things we don’t like.

All while telling ourselves the story (in this case, the lie) that “Well, if I just do THIS thing, I’ll have more time to do what I want to do.”

Really, the issue comes down to patience. In our American culture (and if you’re reading this another country, or from another cultural background, this statement may or may not apply to your experience) we value impatience, hurry, and idolize the cult of busyness, over many other areas.

We resent people who appear to have more time than they know what to do with. And we envy in our hearts people with wealth, who at least outwardly, appear to have no worries about time at all, and appear to have boundless energy.

Then, we read the articles on productivity, time management, wealth creation, the “1%” and on doing more with less, searching for assurances that we are right and “they” who appear to have more than us, are wrong.

But, what if we tried three other things rather than just moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic one more time?

Say “no” more…and mean it—“no” to promotions that we don’t really need and that take more time from priorities we said were “non-negotiable,” “no” to obligations that come packaged as opportunities and “no” to productivity and time management “hacks” that don’t get at the core of what we really need. Which is the courage to say “no” in the first place.
Eliminate hurry—don’t hurry. That’s it. Just slow down to a crawl. Take time to talk to people in front of us, rather than the people on Twitter (we are deeply guilty of this one, so we are are talking to ourselves here as well). Take time to drive in the slow lane for a month at the posted speed limit. Do the old things (like writing and reading) that require us to put aside the things that don’t matter (like work) and put in front of us the things that do matter (like self-improvement).
Get active—55% of mobile phone users go online through their phones. Most of this is browsing, shopping and in general, watching what other people are doing. Television used to be the driver for passivity, but we now have a TV/computer/radio in our pocket all the time. But getting active in our own lives requires us to stop watching the escapades of people who are already active in their lives.

Difficulty in balancing seemingly competing demands is the first stop on the road to conflict. For many people, difficulties begin with the management of their perception of hurry, patience, stress, and other people. When we have the courage to ruthlessly eliminate hurry, stress is reduced and difficulties become manageable, rather than events that can derail an entire day with anger, stress, and impatience.

-Peace Be With You All-

[ICYMI] CRaaS for Your Organization

Conflict resolution skills are not just for human resource professionals.

As our workplaces shift away from being industrial based to being intellectually based, workplace locations are shifting from being physical to being ephemeral.

But as we’ve noted in this space before, conflict stays the same because, while the jury may be out on whether or not Google is making us stupid, our brains as biological organisms still engage in conflict with other brains.

Human resource professionals in organizations are more burdened than ever before with dealing with regulatory changes, endless legal issues and addressing perceived “soft skills” based issues such as bullying and harassment.

Conflict resolution skills become more critical in this type of environment, but who has time to develop the “human resources” in their intellectually based organizations doing intellectually based, customer service oriented work?

The answer is, much like the offering of Software-as-a-Service most recently, to take the learning of conflict resolution skills outside, off-site and “to the cloud.”

Conflict Resolution-as-a-Service becomes the only viable option in this shifting landscape of workplace evolution.

Originally published on July 9, 2014.

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

[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!