[Advice] Caucusing Arete – Part Two

ADR professionals are asked to where many hats, and are often called to wear them all with excellence.

There is much debate over whether it’s good enough to be good enough anymore, or if we all have to be excellence, but in the space of ADR, arête is important.

Arête is the Greek word for the idea of living up to your potential with excellence.

Now, we’ve talked about this before, but the issue becomes more important when we talk about client autonomy and a preservation of client self-determination.

Wearing that hat—for both clients in a dispute mediation scenario—is kind of like holding two thoughts in your head (and in your heart) at the same time.

For the ADR professional, becoming comfortable with pursuing this form of excellence is a strong part of the hard work of building something that matters.

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

We’re Going To Win

Nonviolent resistance is fetishized through cultural memory as being easy, but it’s really not.

There’s a story in Malcolm Galdwell’s book David and Goliath that he takes from Diane McWhorter’s book Carry Me Home, where a man is giving a speech and he is attacked. The crowd at the speech at first believes that the attack is part of the speech, but quickly realizes that it is not.

The man giving the speech, instead of responding with violence toward his attacker as a form of defense, became his assailant’s protector, singing him songs and wrapping him in an embrace. Eventually, the attacker is introduced to the crowd as a guest.

The man whispers to his attacker before introducing him to the crowd “We’re going to win.”

How many times in our lives do we respond to an attack with aggression, passive resistance, apathy or even outright violence?

Responding to an attack with nonviolence—and following that response all the way to its logical conclusion, which may involve the potential for death—is the single most courageous act David can perform against Goliath.

“We are going to win.” But, Martin Luther King knew that nonviolence unto death was the only courageous way to accomplish that win.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Courage to Bleed

It’s thicker at the center of a disk.

It’s thinner towards the edges.

That thin edge is called the “bleeding edge.”

The bleeding edge is the place where lack of common consensus, low chance of adoption and a high level of risk, meet to ensure there will be a conflict between the thick, comfortable middle and the thin, dangerous edge.

However, if you turn the disk on its side and look at the down slope, from the height of the thick center to the valley of the thin edge, it appears to be a gentle decline.

But it’s really not.

It’s more like a steep slope where speed increases the closer you get to the edge and the further you get away from the center.

The distance between the thick center—where every organization wants to be—and the thin edge—where every organization starts—can only be negotiated one customer, one conflict, at a time.

Galaxies are shaped like this. So are societies. So are communities, organizations, and families.

Get to the bleeding edge.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Gotta Have Faith

An entrepreneurial consultant without faith is a frog without water. She can go on for a while, but eventually the outside of the project becomes hard, crusty and unappealing.

Faith isn’t sexy to talk about, but even the most atheistic entrepreneur has to believe in something—other people, the power of their project—in order to get up, morning after morning and put the work in.

Particularly when it isn’t working.

The savvy entrepreneur builds her project on the basis of analytics, analysis, and raw data; but also, she builds with gut intuition and emotional intelligence.

Faith should not be confused with religion, which even the most successful entrepreneurial consultant, doesn’t talk about out loud.

But, without a good dose of faith, getting up to dig deeper, push harder and take greater risks can only be driven by fear for so long.

-Peace Be With You All-

Conflict Engagement Systems Design: Real Innovation for Your Organization

Innovation is the “hot” word among all the business thought leaders as we kick off 2015…

There’s “dark-side” innovation, “game changing” innovation and even “shark jumping” innovation, as a recent search of LinkedIn thought influencer posts recently revealed.

But there’s very little talk about organizational innovation focused on the greatest—and most taken for granted resource—that and organization has: its people.

Now, as companies are emerging from the trance of Frederick Wilson Taylor, they are still continuing to treat employees and others as disposable widgets. The current pressure on Marissa Mayer and Yahoo is just a recent high profile example of this.

But, organizations are more than short term ROI and their daily stock ticker price.

Something has to give, if innovation is the key to moving forward in a business environment that is increasingly unstable and unpredictable.

It’s time to hack at the organizational culture that underlies preconceived notions of productivity, innovation and even people.

Conflicts are part of the innovation process and disputes are the result of that process.

Conflict also brings change and can serve as a driver for innovation in even the most entrenched organizational culture.

It’s time to hack a new system. It’s time for conflict engagement systems design for the 21^st century.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 1.13.215-Thoughts About Distribution Models

Content development is not the hard part.

Getting attention for the content through social is not the hard part.

The hard part is finding platforms and venues (or, if you’re in sales, “funnels”) through which to send my content.

I am approaching 400 articles on the HSCT #Communication Blog, but no one asked me to distribute the content I created until they saw me distribute it—consistently—through other places.

And, by the way, everything is content—images, videos, podcasts, and the blog.

But, building a distribution model from scratch?

Well…that’s like building Rome inside of ten years…

[For more on how to starts this process, look here and here.]

-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/

HIT Piece 1.13.2015

I am fascinated by diagnostic instruments.

These are tools, such as DiSC, the STRONG Inventory, the MBTI, the Thomas-Killman Instrument and others, that purport to help people understand what’s going on inside of their own motivations.

Unfortunately, these diagnostic instruments have not evolved over time to reflect advances in neurobiology, psychology, sociology and even anthropology and linguistics.

I believe that this is a problem, particularly as leap-frog advancements in high tech, computational fields have allowed people (at the individual and group level) to integrate more and more reacting and responding with their prosocial tools.

I think we should take apart some of these old diagnostic tools and test some assumptions, before foisting them on a generation who’s brains and responses have been socially molded by advancements that weren’t even dreamed possible at the time of their creation.

[Shout out to Sherrill Hayes for turning me onto this.]

-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/

Build Your Own House

For some people, renting is the way to go.

It removes the hassles of having to do yard work, deal with snow removal, or fix the things that invariably go wrong with a house.

For some people, ownership is the way to go.

It allows the person (or couple, or family) to feel psychologically, financially and spiritually grounded in a world of impermanence.

The same parallel can be drawn with organizations and their use of marketing tactics through social platforms.

Some organizations would rather pay the rent to get to eyeballs that the landlords of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pintrest, Instagram, and on and on have decided to charge.

Some organizations are choosing to opt-out and go back to doing the work of building their own platform through the use of their website, their blog and their email distribution lists.

Which strategy is better is really a matter of whether an organization is looking to persist and remain relevant in spite of the changing winds of social platforms, or if an organization is just looking to “make some noise.”

However, never forget: The social media landlords of Facebook, Twitter, et.al., already put in the hard work building a really, really, attractive space for all those tenants whose eyeballs you want to show your content to.

So, are you a renter or an owner?

-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/

Conflict Engagement Systems Design: Why Its Past Time

In the 21^st century, the innovative difference between organizations that succeed, and organizations that fail, will be in how they address disputes between their employees.

As an employer, are you agnostic on this? Well, consider the following statistics:

So, here’s the question, if employees are increasingly disengaged and losing productivity, but innovation is expected to increase in 2015, where is the breaking point?

We have blogged before about conflict competence, Conflict Resolution-as-a-Service and even how HR can be used to innovate with people. But this is not enough.

The fact of the matter is, it’s time for all of us to get busy, designing new systems and process that exist, both outside and inside current and future, legal and ethical frameworks, that will protect employee self-determination and employer innovation, in a dispute scenario.

Disputes are the natural outcome of a conflict process. Employer responses to those outcomes have been broken for many years. It’s time to innovate a different way in 2015.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Crack-Up of The New Republic

Watching old industries get disrupted is a painful thing, and nowhere is this more evident than with established media companies.

From the New York Times to the New Criterion, everyone is feeling the pinch from digital disruption and “vertically integrated” media companies, such as Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, who rely on click-bait articles to justify the spending of advertising dollars.

And all of this is happening in a world of declining audience attention spans, increased distractions and with the ever present specter of “content shock” on the horizon.

In case you missed it, The New Republic, recently purchased by Chris Hughes, is cracking up. The media driven articles about the methods and responses to this change, serve as another sign that, what was once thought secure and assured in an open market, is now not so much.

This is what happens, when digital replaces physical, all methods and modes of communication have to change in order to adapt to the new market realities.

In other words: It had to happen.

Content distribution channels remain the ultimate arbiter of content market value. They are—as they always have been—agnostic on the substance of that content: uplifting or entertaining; progressive or conservative; educational or vapid.

Look, digital disruption is taking out everyone, even the old gray lady is offering payouts to journalists who want out because they can’t adapt to the new rules. Say what you may about the direction of The New Republic, and about whether or not it becomes “vertically integrated,” the underlying hand-wringing for “educational long form content” getting out to “the masses” is misplaced.

Content, is content, is content. Long form, investigative, journalism has never been immune to forces of digital market disruptions.

This is a time for excitement, not dread. A time for hope, not fear. A time for response, not blind, reaction.

-Peace Be With You All-