The Shifting Social Contract

Privacy, the law and the social contract is breaking down.

People want to access the internet and be social privately, secretly and anonymously, but the NSA reads our emails and may soon have access to the data that all the devices in our home will be sharing with each other.

The Lockian social contract is breaking down with technology that Locke could never have anticipated, in an effort to create a Rousseauian-libertine future with no responsibility for what we say and do.

And that’s at a macro level.

Then there is bullying and social break down in social media. Children push each other to suicide. People are redefining the workplace and griping about it on social media. People are making individual economic choices at a rational (and emotional) level to pick streaming over subscription packages.

And that’s at the micro level

So…what does all of this have to do with mediators and conflict?

At the intersection of macro and micro concerns regarding privacy, trust, secrecy, confidentiality and the breakdown of the general social contract, lies a place for peacemakers with skills and talents to train, advise, coach and mentor those for whom active listening, empathy and civil liberties seem to be quaint holdovers from an era of powdered wigs and wine snobs.

-Peace Be With You All-

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

Culture of Busyness

The culture of the workplace promotes a culture of appearing to be busy.

In the daily fog of war of conflict, we appear to be busy in the workplace in order to avoid having to confront the hard things:

The workplace project that isn’t working.
The relationship with the partner or co-worker that’s dysfunctional.
The organization that supports and encourages a culture of conflict as if it’s a gift rather than a curse.

The culture of busyness then pervades our family life, our community life, our social life and we wonder why the results of our busyness seem to produce more smoke that fire.

There are a lot of smoke producers in the workplace.

-Peace Be With You All-

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

Cultural Negotiating

The most important driver for success in the 21st century, as the workplace shifts from being about making things with our hands, to making things with our ideas, is emotional intelligence.

Don’t get us wrong, building physical objects still means something, but the most important building is happening with ideas, a keyboard, and publishing platforms, rather than using hammers, adhering some nails and getting rough hands.

After all, I hear that these days, even a known author can’t get a book deal without an already built-in audience.

With that being noted, cultural competence—alongside emotional intelligence—becomes another tool in the box labeled “FOR IDEA BUILDING.”

Being aware of the personal, political and social cultural backgrounds and ideas of partners on a project (combined with cognitive emotional intelligence) can make navigating differences easier.

In a global world, where the lingua franca is English and everyone can see what you Tweet, post, message or blog, cultural competence (not necessarily sensitivity) becomes even more critical to getting everybody on board.

The hard work now is not only uniting the twelve team members at your table, but also uniting the distributed teams working across the globe–and doing it with a semblance of understanding.

-Peace Be With You All-

Interviewing For Cultural Fit

Culture defines how employees make meaning about the work that they do.

Workplace culture is defined as ways of thinking, behaving and working in an organization that provides boundaries for where employees can and cannot place value.

The issue comes when the personal culture that an employee comes from doesn’t match the culture of the organization that they are joining.

In other contexts, this disruption is noted as lack of product market fit, and typically, in the open market, when an organization makes something that no one wants to buy, they go out of business.

When we think of hiring, the interview process is used as a way to avoid—or minimize—the detrimental results of a lack of product (people) market (job) fit.

However, these days the interview process is so artificial and so unable to determine if a person can actually do the job for which they have been hired, it is a wonder we haven’t done away with it.

Conflicts in the workplace arise from the get-go, because the initial person/organization fit is poor, and then they escalate when two people, tasked to work together to accomplish a company goal, can’t get along with each other and disagree about where they fit in the organization.

Cultural interpersonal conflicts at work are corrosive, damaging and dangerous and could probably be avoided if–instead of asking a series of artificial questions, or filing out meaningless, psychological assessments—the hiring organization could discover each individuals’ story about why they want to work for an organization in a particular position.

Would this be harder, more time consuming and require a deeper level of emotional intelligence on the part of the hiring committee? Sure. But firing and rehiring are just as time consuming and harder still.

-Peace Be With You All-

Christian Peacemaking in a Fallen World – Bully Edition

Bullies are everywhere it seems.

They are at school. They are at work.

Have they always been around or are we only now becoming sensitive to their presence and their impact?

From Donald Sterling to the workplace bully to the disaffected school shooter, modern Western culture seems to be turning up more and more of the disaffected and the dysfunctional.

Eventually, the societal call will come to violate the inviolable in order to ferret out and better address the impacts of bully pathology.

The conflation between the everyday bully and the societal scourge will become easier and easier as time progresses and peace will become harder and harder to attain.

There will be less understanding, less forgiveness and the road to reconciliation will be even tougher.

The hard work of #BuildingForTheFuture is just beginning…

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 07.29.14

Things I heard at work:

“How can you keep working there with what they pay you?”

“What are you doing wasting your time there?”

“You’re too smart to be working there.”

“The problem with you is that you always took this place more seriously than I ever did.”

I agree.

That’s four of several hundred reasons that I don’t work there any more.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The 1%

Already acquired wealth generates abundance, right?

It follows then, that from wealth a person, organization–or, even an invention or an idea–can spread more quickly, and the people promoting it can decide to be generous or greedy, based upon market forces, government regulation and personal preference.

Right?

But, what if everybody (or, let’s say 60%) of “average people” (those who haven’t acquired wealth) had access to the same tools to disrupt the market, and create abundance, as the people who built the market in the first place?

What percentage of that 60% would use those tools to dream—not just big, but gigantically—to build something world hacking and world changing?

15%?

10%?

5%?

We had a discussion the other day about this very topic—and the conflicts and tensions that such a question raises—and the point was made that if people are unemployed in, or left out of, an economic system that has shifted toward sharing and abundance, rather than staying in the stagnant model of scarcity and parceled out wealth, then those unemployed won’t get a new job…

…they won’t participate in a new economy…

…they won’t play the game.

And the enterprising few who do parlay the access and tools in the abundance economy will be the ones who will make up the upper 1% of a society.With the unemployed generating no revenue, because the jobs they have don’t exist anymore and the industries that they used to work in changed radically.

Ultimately, the unemployed will be left behind in an abundance economy.

This perspective and argument is representative of a “stuff” based mentality that operates on a scarcity principle.

The people who will be unemployed by the disruption of generosity have nothing to worry about.

Neither, as a matter of fact, do the people who will advocate for them, try to pass laws to protect them, or develop charities to feed and clothe them.

We think that the number of those who will be enterprising (or entrepreneurial) enough to take advantage of the tools of a disruptive, abundant economy will remain where they have always been (somewhere around 1%-5% of the overall population) for quite some time, because of one factor that overrides paying bills, feeding a family, paying for college or getting ahead.

Fear.

-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/

On Leads, Or How to Sell What Clients and Organizations Don’t Think They Need

No one needs help resolving conflicts.

People need help communicating. People need help leading and figuring out leadership. People need help managing other people. People need help with figuring out “how to talk to annoying Aunt Janet and Uncle Mike.”

But no one needs help resolving conflicts.

When put on the spot, 9 times out of 10, people will be unable to identify a conflict they are having in their life, that is impacting them at a level where they may need conflict engagement skills services.

However, the person standing next to them—wife, husband, friend, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew—will be able to zero in on where the person is deficient in their approach to a conflict.

But, it’s not the person standing next to the person who can’t think of a conflict they need help with that’s the problem: The problem is that the dysfunction of unresolved conflicts is so normalized that it’s no longer seen as a problem.

Case in point:

Him: “So, what’s your business?”

Me: “I’m a professional conflict engagement consultant. I help small businesses, higher education organizations and churches engage with the conflicts in their lives.”

Him: “So, can I get your card?”

Me: “Sure.”

Him: “So, I guess I would bring you in say if I had problems managing the 40 or so staff members that work for me?”

Me: “That’s precisely where I would be the most help for you.”

Wife: “Hey!” “He could help you out with the argument you had with your daughter this morning!”

Him: “What am I gonna do, huh!? She’s gotta come into work at least once a week. I understand that she’s got an issue, but c’mon already!”

They both laugh. The wife rolls her eyes. They walk back into the restaurant.

No one needs conflict resolved in their lives. Until they actually do.

-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/