[Advice] What’s Underneath All That Risk…

The trouble with most conversation that leads to conflict isn’t that it’s earth shattering or amazing, but that it’s banal and boring.

This is one of the many reason why there will always be more online content consumers than online content creators. It is hard to be interesting to others when you secretly are not that interested in yourself.

This is one of the many reasons why, in the context of conflicts, many participants seek to avoid any type of conversation that could trigger latent, unresolved conflicts; bringing to the surface old issues and never addressed concerns.

Participants, when asked later, will identify their conflict engagement style as being “avoiding” or “accommodating” of the other person, but it’s really a style that is based in the inability to engage in an interesting, high risk conversation. This inability, however, hobbles the potential in participants for learning new skills to manage, engage and resolve the inevitable arrival of the kind of exciting, conflict driven conversations that they seek desperately to avoid.

There are two things to recognize (other than just the banality of many conversations and the ability to avoid) that can help anybody craft a meaningful strategy for talking when the topic is high risk, but the participants are not:

Fear is at the root of avoidance, accommodation and even assertive tactics—At its root, fear of consequences, outcomes we can’t control, the situation, other people, the material facts of the conflict itself, “getting involved” and many other emotional situations, lead to the desire to pursue continuing the status quo. This fear is why a person at work who causes confrontations because they are addicted to the power rush they get from domination behavior, is “allowed” to continue the behavior, while people whisper behind their backs.

Boredom (and the desire for entertainment) is at the root of banality—The corollary to fear is boredom. Boredom happens when a person is surrounded by uninteresting conversations, uninteresting people, or uninteresting situations. The reason for the rise in conflict avoidance tactics as an interpersonal skill set among many individuals is based in the fact that many in-person social interactions are not exactly intellectually stimulating. And when and entertaining (or intellectually stimulating) alternative is offered people will take it. This is not exclusive to the now: there are many artistic representations of people ignoring each other while reading the paper, while crowded around the radio, or while watching the television.

There are arguments to be made for developing resilience, being polite, knowing enough to have a conversation, and being forgiving of people and situations. But when conflicts (particularly around issues that matter) arise, the default is to embrace the banal, continue to be boring, and hope it all blows over.

Such as it ever was…

-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] Strategic Escalation

Most of the time, in a conflict management scenario, escalation of any kind is viewed as a net negative.

Most trainings—whether corporate, academic, online or in-person—focus on teaching techniques and tactics that will bring the other party from a less defensive emotional position to a more collaborative emotional position.

These are great tactics if each party is emotionally invested in the process and outcome of the conflict, but what happens when the other party is apathetic at best, and disengaged at worst?

Customer center call representatives, from organizations that can’t outsource that service (i.e. local utility companies, local banks/credit unions, bill/debt collectors, etc.), or retail clerks, tend to be emotionally at either one of those two poles: apathetic, or disengaged. Rarely does a employee call a customer’s house, or interact with a customer at a retail store, in a way that reflects emotional engagement and intrinsic care to potentially escalate (even negatively) if the interaction doesn’t go as planned. And the solution to this issue is not more automation, and less human to human interaction, because escalating with a machine is ineffective, time consuming and pointless.

Strategic escalation is the process of positively escalating the other party to a collaborative emotional position, from a net apathetic one. The skills to do this effectively are at the opposite of the skills we all possess (name-calling, judging, moralizing, blaming, threatening, denial, etc.) that we default too naturally if we believe that an interpersonal interaction isn’t going well—and we feel powerless to make it better.

Escalating an interpersonal interaction toward a positive outcome involves:

Complimenting (“You’re doing a good job…”)
Thanking (“Thank you for the help you gave me today…”)
Calling a person by name (“Cindy, that’s great that you got that for me…”)
Taking responsibility for being wrong (“I took the wrong approach to asking for what I wanted…”)
Using positive feedback (“I’m going to tell your manager what a great experience this was…”)

We must shift the ingrained, Industrial Revolution thinking that has us believing that such interactions are meaningless, irrelevant and unimportant, because increasingly, they are the only kind of interactions that matter.

-Peace Be With You All-

[ICYMI] Unpacking Other People’s Laundry

Unpacking assumptions is the first piece of the engagement process with conflicts in your workplace.

It’s hard enough to be confronted by the results of our faulty assumptions, but it is even more difficult to begin to unpack beliefs, values and perceptions that we have held for years.

In a conflict, we fail to unpack three areas:

Our Assumptions: The things that drive us are the things that hold us back. Typically they begin with the words “should” or “ought.” Our assumptions also color how we deal with (or ignore/dismiss) the other two areas.
Their Assumptions: The things that drive the other party are either dismissed, ignored or not fully understood by either party. Those drivers typically are prefaced by “they should” or “they ought.”
The Problem’s Assumptions: “There is only one way to solve an issue and it’s the way that benefits us the most. And, people are most always the problem because they won’t change. Oh, and there’s nothing wrong with me in this situation that solving the problem won’t solve.” These few sentences serve to build a foundation for continued disputes embedded in the conflict process. They assumptions inherent in them act as a concrete base, never allowing the problem to inch toward resolution and shutting down engagement.

With the level of knowledge to which we have access these days, the hard work that matters involves caring enough to seek out resources that can help get past the uncomfortability, fear and cowardice of the results of unpacking before engaging in the process of resolution.

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

[Strategy] Don’t Wallow in the Gap

Our heads are the most dangerous place to be in conflict.

We tell ourselves a story about the nature of the conflict, who’s at fault (and who isn’t) and what the solution should be (preferably one that benefits us and makes the other person the enemy).

We then plunge forward, tackling the conflict with the tools that got us into the conflict in the first place: we don’t actively listen, we don’t engage emotionally with the other person’s content around and within the conflict, and we engage (happily or miserably) in the gamification of the conflict process.

We temporarily pause the conflict (sometimes for hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades) and call that pause resolution—when in reality that pause represents a “lull” in the conflict conversation, where more content floods the gap.

And after all of those steps, we look around an wonder why our workplaces, our families, our schools and our churches are not “doing what they should be doing.”

This is not a condemnation, or castigation. We have engaged in all of these steps as well, with conflicts between us and other people in our own life. We engage in some of these ways even still.

But there is a way out of the narrative trap:

Break the language: Language = Thought and thought = language. Take a pause and review the words that you use to talk about yourself, about the other party in conflict and about the content of the conflict scenario. Words give meaning and set up paradigms for future behavior and decisions.
Break the trap of decisions: What got you here to conflict isn’t going to get you there to resolution. The decisions, patterns, and behaviors that got you into the conflict you’re in today (and the ones you’ll be in tomorrow) have to be broken through self-examination.
Break the gap: Being intentional about the outcomes you want to achieve through avoidance, accommodation, assertive confrontation, or any of the other choices for responses that you have in a conflict, is critical to avoiding the gap. That temporary pause, or “lull” in the conflict flow.

These tips seem obvious and easy, but if they were, we would be collectively performing them all the time, rather than stumbling through the narratives we’ve built. Ultimately, the way out of the narrative trap of conflict, takes having courage to take the steps in the first place.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Persistence and Commitment

Starting anything is easy, as we’ve pointed out before, because the social approval around starting is enormously powerful, positive and affirming.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s an education, a fitness plan or even a battle, starting is easy.

Continuing though, persisting through the slog of the middle, and coming out the other side in completion (whether in victory or defeat) is the hard part.

We were streaming a conversation with a blogger the other day and she mentioned how she had started a book, and then put it away for about a year, while she struggled with the decision of whether to publish, or not.

Starting is easy, the slog of the middle is hard.

She mentioned that, in the intervening time between deciding to write (to start) and deciding to publish (the middle) she had shown her manuscript (a fictional one) to a number of friends of hers to gauge their reactions.

Starting is easy, the slog of the middle is hard.

She mentioned that one of their reactions was to say, “You have gone through a lot.” But this person (assumedly) did not help her write the book, nor is she helping her critique the book.

Starting is easy, the slog of the middle is hard.

Persistence and commitment are the hallmarks of a successful person. But sometimes, human beings get caught in the idea that starting, going through the middle, and ending should follow in logical order, like lines on a map. We perceive the stops in time—and gaps between events—as places of failure, defeat and eventually, the place where everything stops.

Other people and their reactions, judgments and decisions affect us before, during and after the starting gun fires, the buzzer goes off, and the start begins.

But let’s not believe that the people who have the power to applaud, jeer, support, or be neutral have anything to do with us starting. Or getting through the slog of the middle.

That part is always in our power and up to us.

H/T to Jaimee Doriss

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Managing Muscular Development

Here’s a simple calculation:

Managing yourself + managing other people = a full time job.

Don’t let people fool you. There’s plenty of full-time work out there. But there’s no pay. And the cost for failing at it is high.

We underestimate the power of disputes (as a part of the conflict process) to go viral, through the stories that we tell other people about the conflicts we are embroiled in.

Conflict engagement requires that we understand our own inner lives, and move from being selfish (inwardly focused) to being self-aware (knowing what’s going on with us internally, without becoming overwhelmed and focused on it). This is the core of the first part of the equation.

Conflict management requires that we understand (or at least acknowledge) the presence of emotions and the depth of their impact, on other people in with whom we are in dispute. This is the core of the second part of the equation.

Conflict as a full time job is requires us to recognize that conflict sometimes serves the other person and their motives, sometimes it serves us and our motives, and sometimes it serves nobody at all. Conflict will never go away, and sometimes the management of the process requires us to be tuned in (almost to have a sixth sense) about how power, story and emotions wind around issues of advocacy, policy and process.

There’s plenty of full time work out here. But too many people would rather defer the hard work of figuring out the parts of the above equation today, in the hope that tomorrow will just be a slightly better version of the past they just left.

This is neither engagement, nor management. It is mere avoidance.

And mere avoidance atrophies our emotional muscles as surely as a lack of exercise atrophies the physical muscles.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtrainining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] The Wider World

“How are you planning to scale?”

“You’ve gotta have a plan to grow this thing.”

“I don’t see that as a viable business model.”

“You can’t scale that.”

“Consulting never scales.”

The savvy peace builder will have to get used to hearing all of these statements (and multiple other variations) when they take their project to the wider world, for three reasons:

The wider world tends to understand and accept things that relate to the experiences, thoughts, feelings and dreams that already experienced or that are already known quantities.
The wider world tends to be skeptical of progress, differentiation and innovative thinking, because the human brain favors the safety of the status quo, the known, the shortcut and the predictable.
The wider world isn’t always against the savvy peace builder (though it may feel like it). But they are sometimes lacking self-awareness while at the same time being incredibly self-focused.

The savvy peace builder has to build their “no” muscle. This is the muscle that comes into play, every time such statements (and many, many others) that reflect doubt, disbelief, or a lack of understanding about the project they have begun to build.

Using this muscle builds determination, persistence, grit and resiliency in the face of trial, error and even failure.

The wider world only understands what it already knows. It is up to the savvy peace builder to commit to doing the hard work of changing the frames and perspectives, so that something new can be seen.

Scaling is not the be all and end all. And once the savvy peace builder’s “no” muscle is strong, she will be able to answer the underlying, unstated doubts, concerns and critiques in order to truly bring her product to center stage when she is ready.

And not a moment before.

-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] Trust is not Scalable

Conflict resolution is not scalable, because trust is not scalable.

Make no mistake though, the products of trust are scalable. And the results of trusting an organization, a brand or even another person are scalable.

But trust is not scalable.

And the reason that it’s not is nuerologically and psychologically complicated, but basically, trust wanes the further removed my relationship is from another person. Not a brand, and organization or a system, but a person.

Conflict resolution in organizations, thus becomes unscalable, because the trust at the core of resolving conflicts doesn’t exist in the first place, because the parties involved are far too separated by the barriers of organization, values, culture, mindsets, behaviors, beliefs, etc.

This is the reason mediation works so well for neighborhood disputes, but not so well for sexual harassment lawsuits. When conflict resolution processes become a strategy, rather than part of an overall organizational culture, they fail miserably. Mediation, conflict resolution and other forms of ADR, should be at the core of a culture’s development as an organization grows, so that the products of trust—increased revenue and productivity to mention just a couple—become expected.

And so that, when disputes arise—and they will—the trust is already there and litigation (and even more untrustworthy, unscalable process) becomes unthinkable.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] The Power of Story

Stories lie at the core of the human condition.

Stories, myths, fables and legends serve a psychological need that human beings have for connection and understanding. The people in professions that understand this, from priests and pastors to marketers and con men, can weave stories so fabulous that they can sell a person anything, from a washing machine to the cannibalistic sacrifice of virgin flesh.

Psychologists and psychiatrists know the power of stories.

They spend years in the medical and mental health fields, carefully mapping the ways in which cognitive connections develop and then the ways in which those connections are externalized with the outside world. Therapy is just a refashioning of a story that you have told yourself for so long that it has become true for you.

When we talk about stories, we inevitably have to talk about fiction and fact, truth and lies. Content and Context serve an important function here, because the ways we determine what the truth is (both “for us” and “for the other”) are important. What may be truth for you in a story may be an out and out lie for me.

Mediators specialize in getting to the truth by first acknowledging that everybody tells a shaded truth: Not necessarily a lie, as in, a story told with the intent to deceive, but a truth that is bent and shaped through content and context to service a particular interest: theirs.

The third factor that influences all of this is power. Now, social justice practitioners and thought leaders talk a lot about power: who has it, who doesn’t, and who is using it to oppress or to privilege.

Power, however, is also based on content and context. This is a tough truth for true believers in social justice, and why the panacea of a socially just future will never be fully recognized.

There are too many competing stories.

When every story competes for primacy in the external realm of an open, capitalistic market, some stories win and some stories lose. The story of Coca-Cola is obviously a winner in the marketplace.

The story of all kinds of insurance—from life and health to car and home—is neither winning nor losing. The story of MySpace is definitely losing: As did the story of Pets.com, Borders and Woolworths.

When we think of the personal brands that we present online, from our social media presences to our tendency to spam and flame each other in the “below-the-fold” comments section of our favorite online articles, stories and storytelling become even more important.

Case in point:

I read an article here http://tinyurl.com/q98wp8c, which served to activate my own stories that I tell myself about writing, famous authors, the nature of public opinion, online journalism, Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, obscure Viennese writers, World War 1 intellectualism, racism, social justice, wealth inequalities and the ubiquity of online blowhards.

And that was in the first two minutes after I had finished reading the article.

A couple of hours later, I was talking to my lovely future bride and her son and relating the story of the article, further embellishing the story I was telling myself about the article that I had just read.

This is the power of a story and of storytelling. I start out reading someone else’s words and end up making my own meaning of them. Then, to make matters worse, I influence others in how they create their own stories and how they intersect with the external world, featuring myself, the article, the people with whom I interacted and, of course, the stories that they tell themselves.

When conflicts happen, the circle closes, reopens and closes again on the stories that we tell ourselves. Because while conflict is change and conflict is dynamic, it is disruptive, disjointing and personal. The stories of conflicts vary, but they typically begin with:

“They did thus and so to me. And I turned around and did thus and so to them, but they are at fault and they owe me an apology because they started it, I’m innocent and that’s the truth.”

And there it is. The two most important words in any story, whether it’s a marketing story to get you to buy a car or a religious story to get you to buy a belief, the most important thing in any story is the Truth.

Writers, bloggers, journalists, poets and others have long known the power of the truth in a story, which is why stories work so well. They appeal at a deep level to something in the human psyche that very few ever talk about: the desire to be entertained.

This desire is why fiction outsells nonfiction.
This desire is why “reality” TV is always scripted.
This desire is why, even in the midst of a terrible trauma or a horrible conflict, resolution is so hard to come by: Either one, or both, of the parties is being—at some elemental, cognitive level—entertained.

Dopamine is a neural chemical that is triggered in the midst of pleasure and pain. It lulls a person to sleep even as it creates bonding by also releasing that other neural chemical, oxytocin.

The desire to be entertained is intimately linked to the desire to be lulled and pleasured by connection. And the ultimate way to connect is through storytelling.

Forgiveness, reconciliation, anger management, deep breathing, mediation, mindfulness, are all hard and require work to maintain. They require the frontal cortex where creativity, art, poetry, music and all the other hard things live, to be activated and used.

Power enters into this in the area of telling the truth, versus telling a story. Power equals control and he (or she) who has the power (mostly power “over” another person) gets to make the rules.

Power used to be concentrated in the hands of the very few, however, as technological advancements have occurred; power has dissipated to even being in the hands of the very young and the very old. Social media, the Internet, blogs all are forms of communication that give everyone the same power and the same access, though outcomes will vary.

And thus we close the first part of the loop: Stories, fables, legends and myths serve a purpose. They allow us to categorize, compartmentalize and make sense of the world. Stories that we tell ourselves are the most important stories of all. This is why motivational speakers the world over talk endlessly about having a positive mindset; which allows us to tell ourselves stories that are positive and uplifting.

But, what do we do when the stories aren’t that great: When the trauma, dysfunction and conflicts lie at the core of our stories?

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

[Strategy] “Yes We Can!”

“Yes we can!”

Boy, isn’t that a catchy phrase.

The word “we” is synonymous with enabling others to act, but there are a couple of other pieces that go along with that word:

There are two kinds of power—Many leaders resort to “power over,” when they lose faith or trust (more on this in a minute) in their followers to accomplish the goals that leaders have articulated. Leaders with bad visions (i.e. Hitler, Stalin, etc.) do this more often than leaders with good visions (i.e. Steve Jobs, Moses, etc.). But “we” creates the second kind of power, “power with.” It empowers followers to see the vision and implement it in their own way.
Trust is always an issue—When leaders “let go” and truly begin trusting “the masses” to move a vision forward, some followers aren’t going to get the message right. Some followers are going to be deceitful and self-serving. And some followers are going to fall away when it gets to be too hard. Martin Luther King, and Gandhi both experienced this, but it did not diminish their faith and trust in their followers.
Carrying capacity increases—A leader who doesn’t have to control the “scope creep” of a spreading vision, is not really a leader. Part of acting on a vision is that when action starts, so do reactions: from friends, enemies, circumstances and opportunities. How does a leader know when to say “yes” and know when to say “no”? Well, when the number of followers increases because of trust and empowerment, then the ability to say “No, I can’t right now…but give it to Sally over there” becomes a statement of collaboration, rather than a principled rejection.

We without empowerment, trust and collaboration is just a word with smoke but no fire and followers can easily become cynical when its overuse transforms from inspiration to cliché.

“Yes we can!”

Ok. How will you?

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