[Opinion] Getting Out of the Ghetto

Human civilization doesn’t need another social network.

3 Easy Pieces

It is a sign of the limits of our present level of creativity and value addition, that the top websites on the Internet right now, tend to be ones that are focused around two areas:

Sharing, collecting and curating information to a wide sphere of government officials, corporations, communities and individuals, who have their own motives and desires.

Shopping and engaging in commerce for the express purpose of either paid consumption of products and services (Amazon.com) or free consumption of products and services (anything in the Google family).

Shopping and sharing dominate the internet, and thus create values in the stock market, because the first generation of totally Internet savvy entrepreneurs, visionaries, creatives and others has not yet come of age.

The current crop of adults (those 21-64) creating the Internet realities with which we all live, are digital immigrants, trapped in the ghettos of their own making—walled gardens of apps, physical mobile technology and bandwidth controlled by companies built on the old, Industrial Revolution models of corporate formation.

But, there is a future coming where the digital immigrants will be left behind. The true digital natives, who will live their entire lives of communication, education, entertainment, consumption and creation in the digital space have yet to come of age.

When they do, they will leave the walled gardens and ghettos that appear so shiny to all of us now, because we lack the imagination—and the courage—to head West into the vast space of the Internet and pioneer something different.

-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/

[Podcast] Virtual Ghettos – The Earbud_U Minute

Ghettos are popping up all over the virtual place.

In the physical world, the ghetto began as a way to segregate Jewish populations from other populations in Italy and all throughout the rest of Europe.  Then, if Wikipedia is to be believed, ghettos came to the US, first as a way to segregate the Irish and Italian immigrants, then as a way to separate African Americans from predominantly White populations.

With that in mind, look down at the screen of your smartphone. How many apps do you have?

How many different neighborhoods, or ghettos, do they represent?

In the virtual space of the Internet, information may want to be free, but people apparently want to be crowded into virtual cities and neighborhoods—with all of the separation, regulation and virtual social norming as informal policy.

As we innovate further—and as digital natives move further and further away from the ghettos that digital immigrants seem comfortable in—the question we must ask ourselves is: Which comes first, the regulation or the innovation?

We have to figure this out as a global culture, because physical ghettos lead not only to segregation, biases and prejudices (which may prove to be minor annoyances in the virtual space) but also to poverty, lack of access to resources and reduced opportunity (which may prove to be even more damaging in the virtual space that in the physical world).

Conflicts between those in the virtual ghettos, those in the virtual suburbs and those on the virtual frontier need to be addressed by people who have experience with emotional intelligence, active listening and strong facilitation ability.

-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/

[Podcast] If We Close Our Eyes… – The Earbud_U Minute

How Americans view the events of September 11th, how a turkey views the events of Thanksgiving Day, and how an HR manager views a workplace harassment claim all have three things in common:

Seeing Red

 

The events themselves are considered unpredictable,

The events themselves are considered out of the “normal” social boundaries,

The events themselves are typically responded to with a mixture of shock, surprise and dismay.

The people (or animals) impacted negatively by each of these events, if given a choice, would rather go back in time and avoid the individual circumstances that lead to the event occurring. Unfortunately, the events appear in hindsight to be both inevitable and linear. Ironically, on the day before the penultimate event occured (in a film, it would be called the climax) the persepctive of the impacted parties was that “everything seemed alright.”

Then, the conflict starts.

The line from difficulty to confrontation to conflict is intersected by an line from fragility to robustness to antifragility. And human beings have arranged systems and set up paradigms that allow us to believe that conflict is an aberration, peace is an inevitability and that nothing really changes at all.

Conflicts within, and shocks to, systems (from family all the way up the scale to nation-states) happen when somebody else has a different idea of how things should work—and acts on it. Keep in mind that for the turkey on Thanksgiving, what happens to it before the moment of the decapitation and defeathering, is just another day in turkey paradise.

Three suggestions for building a system (either at work, in school or in the family) that can withstand the inevitable shocks of predictable people insisting on behaving unpredictably:

  • Tell yourself a more compelling, less predictable story—Many internal stories that we tell ourselves about the circumstances we are in, tend to focus too much on the benefit to us (“WIIFM” thinking) and focus less on the potential for circumstances to change. But the most compelling stories aren’t about us at all, but about change—and how we might respond to it.
  • Eliminate hindsight bias in order to engage in more critical analysis of why a system failed—This is a fancy way of admitting that you were wrong and all of the events that led up to an unpredictable, “Black Swan” type event were indeed just that: unpredictable in themselves. Eliminating hindsight bias enables us to forget the past, focus on the future, and guide others towards potential outcomes that they might not like.
  • Have the courage to acknowledge that the systems we’ve built are not that robust—This last one is the toughest, because it can involve guilt, recrimination and can be a blame focused realization. However, when an unanticipated conflict occurs, the first responses that many human created systems have, is to collapse immediately. However, in nature, building in safeguards and engaging in active, guilt free “what if” adaptations, allows systems to flourish. So, start with the system that matters most (for many people that will be family) and take a hard look at the system and ask the question: “Could our family survive a job loss, a major hospitalization, or another “that only happens to other people and won’t ever happen to us” type event in the future?”

Antifragility is the end goal in all of our systems, from corporations to families. Preparing to survive conflicts and shocks to the system is the only way forward to adapt to inevitabilities we cannot predict. It’s certainly a better option than closing our eyes and pretending that nothing can change at all.

-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/

[Podcast] Whisper Space – The Earbud_U Minute

We give language to our thoughts.

We speak into existence what we believe and—being narrative animals—we weave stories together and create myths for ourselves based on the conscious language of our thoughts.

We look for assurances that our stories are the “right” ones because, to hear something different—or to experience something different—causes a continuum of reactions inside of us, from mild cognitive dissonance to jarring trauma.

Our lizard brains seek comfort, reassurance, quiet and the reserve of the appearance of “normalcy.” Anything that might cause the lizard brain to reject its own, natural story and to create a new one is automatically rejected and dismissed.

Then, when our stories and other peoples’ stories rub up against each other in intimate locations—such as work, school or even church—we have difficulties, confrontations and conflicts.

In the whisper space between confrontation and conflict—a space which can also be referred to as “the dip”—we take a pause before either avoiding a new story, denying a new story, or incorporating a new story into our familiar one, and we hear the tiny voice, urging us to do the right thing.

However, in the impatience to rush to judgement, and give language to our raging emotions, we move past the whisper space—and ignore the choices that we are provided in that space.

And then we blame others, blame circumstances and—ultimately—blame the narrative that caused us to contemplate all of these changes in the first place.

Thus, we give language to our new thoughts—and the added elements to our old, comfortable narratives.

-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/