[Advice] How to Deal with Less

When organizations want to justify budget cuts, workforce reductions, or a freeze on hiring, they often use the shopworn sentence “Well, we’re going to have to do more with less.”

At which point, in any organization, be it a nonprofit, a corporation, a small business, or even a church, the remaining employees, volunteers or members may feel as though they have one of two choices:

Leave

Stay and do more with less.

The fear and desperation that builds in these situations, serves to highlight, exacerbate or create, conflict scenarios. This is the exact opposite of what happens when an organization is doing “more with more” and everything is papered over “because everybody is getting ‘rich’,” or at the least, doing well.

Personal and professional reactions replace responses and when there is an environment of “doing more with less,” the set-up is perfect for conflicts, stress and disruption.

Compare this to something—a project, an idea, an organization—that is starting out. Much of the time at the beginning, the mantra “doing more with less” is really “doing more, creatively with what we have.” This is a much easier sell to employees, volunteers and members in the start-up stage than it is at any point in the life cycle of an organization, because starting is sexy and exciting.

But going through the middle with no more than what you started with–or less than that–can be disheartening, disempowering and disenchanting.

What’s the solution?

Abandon the “doing more with less” management mantra. Instead, switch to the truth. Whatever that may be about people, money, or other resources. This allows for creativity in the face of reality, rather than fear based responses.
Remember that fear, withdrawal and “hunkering down to weather it out” doesn’t engender confidence, creativity or faith in the organization, the mission, the values or the goals. Instead, erosion from the outside and corrosion from the inside will begin to destroy the organizational fabric.
Empower the people that care. These are not typically shareholders, external stakeholders or other individuals watching from the sidelines in the Coliseum, clapping, booing or calling for blood. The people who care are the people who have been in an organization since the beginning. They deserve to have their faith and hard work rewarded.

No one enjoys the fear, anger, frustration and resentment that can develop when having to do “more with less,” whether in a family, or a corporation.

But how we respond to the bad news of events that are out of our control, contributes more to the overall long-term viability of an organization, than doing the same thing that’s always been done, by everybody else.

-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] The Likely and the Comfortable – The Earbud_U Minute

There is a way that work realities are constructed that betrays a lack of understanding and acceptance of an uncomfortable, likely future reality; and betrays a comfort with creating a reality that is comfortable, but unlikely:

The comfortable reality is that employers keep hiring (albeit at a lower/slower rate) and that they keep on the people that they already have.
The comfortable reality is that college age students will continue to pile on massive student loan debt and the skills that they get in exchange for this debt will somehow be rendered relevant in the future economy.
The comfortable reality is that employees will continue to be compensated at current (and ever rising) levels as the technical skills that they exhibit continue to remain more relevant than the people skills that can’t be measured.
The comfortable reality is that all this technological and software advancement will remain nothing more than a meaningless side show with no value to a corporate bottom line, middle line or even top line.

Considering, pontificating and reassuring that “it’s always been this way and will always be this way” in the form of published bromides and policy assurances, calms the employee lizard brain (the cerebellum where fight/flight/freeze responses live) and such statements and actions soothe and serve to maintain the status quo in organizations.

The likely future reality is much, much more complicated. And scary.

The likely future reality is that technological and software changes in the industrial workplace structure and underlying economy will allow more advancement and innovation to be done with fewer employees.
The likely future reality is that employees will be compensated less and less (and at ever decreasing rates) until the gap in compensation between top individual organizational performers and the next employee down the line, will mirror the current growing wage gap between the upper class and the middle class in the overall economy.
The likely future reality is that college students with crushing debt will struggle to learn and integrate emotional and psychological lessons that the academic world did not see fit to teach them at $7.00 per hour jobs. Or that they did not deem important enough to learn in between the socialization and the outrage. All while paying back five and six figure loans.
The likely future reality is that employers will seek to replace people with algorithms, or computer programs, or software solutions and (at the end of the line) robots, who will demand no pay, no benefits and will have such incredibly high productivity that shareholders will be happy to fire humans as a reflex, even as their returns increase.

Writing, teaching, lecturing or even casually mentioning likely future realities activates the employer/employee/politician/administrator lizard brain and makes fear, avoidance and attack responses kick in at all levels of society, from the C-Suite of an organization to the office of the President of the United States.

True management and supervisory leadership requires clear eyed planning for likely future realities, as well as a sophsticated ability to persuade, cajole and even threaten employees, shareholders, and the public to face likely reality head on. Such leadership will create sustainable economic and social systems that will be antifragile, and able to sustain and evolve from unexpected shocks, rather than attempting to build redundant, robust systems, or constructing fragile systems that fall apart in a heartbeat when the next “it could never happen here” event, happens here.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Getting Out of the Ghetto

Human civilization doesn’t need another social network.

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-

[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-

[Contributor] Future Physibles

Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

Perhaps its bad form to use a word coined by a website dedicated to pirating digital products, but so far, physibles is the best way to describe the next wave of items that exist in the digital and physical worlds.

Physibles can best be described as objects created on a computer and formed in the physical world by computer equipment. While this may sound like another way to describe the production in any mechanized factory, physibles are more akin to a 3-dimensional printed object.

Physibles are the next big thing in consumer goods.

Through a combination of high end printers that more closely resemble the mechanized arms that assemble cars, and programs that feed the proper information to these printers, one can “print” out almost any item they would want. For the most part, this technology doesn’t exist in the public sphere, but it has achieved some major breakthroughs.

For example, the 3D printed car.

But the ability for one to forgo the mainstream manufacturing process entirely, and get the same goods they would have through such a channel, doesn’t bode well for the current economic configurations. Every economic idea that operates in the industrialized nations is created with the idea that people will have to get their goods from somewhere other than themselves. The distinct process of supply and demand governs almost every aspect of the economy, down to the resource-gathering sectors.

If one can shortcut around all of those, with only minor interaction with their computer, their printer, and the resources to create the items, then jobs and businesses will inevitably fail. And depending on the abilities that this technology may reach, perhaps even the resource-gatherers will find themselves out of a job.

Suddenly, at least 27% of the United States GDP is erased.

This lack of jobs, created and furthering the issue that nobody will be buying anything on the traditional market, will pose many issues. Productivity will drop in all sectors, because why would people be working if there’s no value in what they’re earning?

Infrastructure will fail all over the planet, resulting in the failure of almost every device that depends on the electric grid and Internet to create these goods. We’d be back to square one, and depending on the amount of people who decided to remain on and maintain the infrastructure, coupled with how long it will actually take between the start of this process and the failure of the electrical grid and Internet services, it may take years to reestablish ourselves to the previous state.

This being said, physibles becoming a reality isn’t all bad, and the dooms-day scenario previously described is very avoidable. Simply put, for a world were major manufacturing is no longer relevant and people can create all they need from their home, strict limits on home production must be maintained, and access to the forms for the home-printed goods must be put behind a pay-wall to maintain the relevancy of working.

This must remain so until maintenance and construction can be mechanized to such a degree that minimal human interaction is necessary.

As with all major changes to the way people interact with their goods and those who make them, a certain degree of caution and planning must be implanted to ensure that the change is smooth and does not result in any major catastrophes.

The future is bright, but humans must always tend that flame to ensure it doesn’t burn out of control.

Alexander Gault-Plate is an aspiring journalist and writer, currently in the 12th grade. He has worked with his schools newspapers and maintained a blog for his previous school. In the future, he hopes to write for a new-media news company.

You can follow Alexander on Twitter here https://twitter.com/AlexanderBGault.

[Future] Escape From the Coliseums

The building Roman Coliseum was begun by the Emperor Vespasian in the year 72 A.D. and was completed by the Emperor Titus in 80 A.D.

We all know what happened in the coliseum (or colosseum, if you prefer that spelling) and we have used the historical knowledge of “death and violence as entertainment” that occurred there, as a way to justify, or excuse, all types of bad behavior.

In the modern era, our time, an image of the building is featured on the Italian version of the five-cent Euro coin.

There are three things to consider about the coliseum, and the events that occurred there, and how they relate to our own potential, social commons future:

The Emperor Vespasian constructed the Flavian Amphitheatre as a part of the beginning of Imperial Rome’s transformation “from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron.” In essence, the construction of the building and the acts committed in it were the beginning of the last gasps of Imperial Rome.

Historians, politicans and philosophers often get stuck explaining the events at the coliseum. But keep in mind, they were not considered to be out of the ordinary for the 80-90% of Roman citizens who lived at a subsistence level or just above.

Imperial Rome had it’s own 1% issues…

Spectacles, events, and contests between people could—for the Roman crowd—quickly degenerate from merely an observed spectacle to a violent mob action, requiring troops to kill people.

So what, right?

Well, think about it for a second: The social media coliseums that contemporary, Western technologists have built, where bully, hazing, and trolling runt rampant is our own fault, from Reddit to Twitter.

The tragedy of the social media commons, is that when a party (or parties) uses a resource for free and is then tasked with maintaining order in it, the resource is damaged by signs of conflict, bad behavior, and other poor choices.

Similar to the coliseum, the social media commons (some would call them cesspools) seem to allow and encourage any spectacle, no matter how debased, debauched, and damaging to the participants—and the observers.

And, as our world becomes more interconnected, not less, the coliseum grows, to encompass people from different faith backgrounds and ideologies (Has anyone seen the latest ISIS video on YouTube?) who will use the forum of social media to recruit, train, propagandize and in general “do unto others.”

What’s the way out of this?

We don’t know, but we do know this: The circles of the arena are getting larger everyday, not smaller.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Web 3.0 – The Earbud_U Minute

We need to figure out what kind of Internet we want to have.

The business model currently funding and pushing the growth of the Internet is based upon monetizing a base of users who come to a project and use it for free, or for a nominal price.

The user takes advantage of the content/service/process for free. And, as a result, the user is so enamored with the content/service/process that they keep coming back over and over again, building a trust based relationship with the creator/creators of the project. Subsequently, in order to fund the project, there are hopefully so many users that an advertiser has no choice but to put advertisements in front of a group of eyeballs with whom the project owner has built a relationship.

This is the model underlying Facebook. The nominal fee model (a subscription-based model) underlies LinkedIn, journalism models, ecommerce platforms and other content/service/process platforms.

Web 2.0 is what everyone is talking about now, but Web 3.0 is really, where the Internet has to move to.

Web 3.0 is beyond just the Internet of Things. Web 3.0 is the Internet as Everything. Web 3.0 is the Internet waging active battle with the last, sticky remnants of the world built through the assumptions of the Industrial Revolution. This is a world created around the rules, laws and policies, created by politicians and people to keep the common democratization of the Internet out of the hands of the common people before the Internet.

Here’s a question: Why is it that there aren’t any internet connected roads?

It has nothing to do with technological innovations such as creating concrete that can communicate with strips on the road. Or with computer chips that can talk to your car. Or signs and traffic signals that talk to the road, the car and each other.

The reason there aren’t roads that are intelligent is not a smart car issues, no matter what Google Cars would have you think.

The issue is really laws and regulations.

Laws are the last bastion of the Industrial revolution world that have yet to fall to the unending sweep of the Internet. We see the beginnings of this with our current thrashing around privacy, data, and “who owns the future” (either you or a corporation) but once we settle all of this we will have new business models that will allows the Internet to be truly “baked in”.

Then, once that happens, the sky truly will be the limit.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 07.14.2015

I was sitting with another consultant the other day and was having a conversation.

In passing, he happened to mention—after hearing my response to his question about how long I’ve been in business with HSCT—that I have actually succeeded.

I paused for a moment, and then corrected his term “succeeded” by saying “No, I think I’ve just survived.”

The line between success and survival is thin. And it’s perceptional, based on who’s looking at the line—and the place where they’re standing.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] 3 Reasons the Future Won’t Be the Same as Now – The Earbud_U Minute

Nostalgia for the future is a terrible thing. As a matter of fact, we have heard recently that nostalgia for the past might be poison.

Human beings, without much great reluctance, tend to romanticize the past, and believe that the future will be exactly the same. Only slightly cooler.

However, three facts mitigate against this view:

Peace is not the absence of conflict. It’s the management of change.
The “good old days” were just as filled with uncertainty, suspicion, anxiety, awe, nostalgia (both forward and rear facing) as the current time is.
The same conflicts that occurred in the past, will continue to occur both now and in the future, but the impacts of those conflicts will seem faster and more immediate.

Case in point for all of this is the recent 75^th anniversary commentary around the 1964 World’s Fair. None of the changes that we currently take for granted were even thought of then.

Or, to make it even more bald: We are currently living in the future that Blade Runner promised us, just without it raining all the time and us all wearing the same drab outfits.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principle 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/

[Strategy] An Antifragile Future

The future conflicts we can’t predict, the ones that come out of the sky and surprises us, are the easiest to prepare for. But we have to work at it.

Interpersonal conflicts come from both places: the places we can predict (that family member who’s “always been a problem,” or that co-worker who “just doesn’t get it…and never has”) and the places we can’t predict (“he was so normal,” or “she never said anything about it before”).

We don’t prepare for the unpredictable for two, major reasons:

It will never happen to me: Actually in the realm of all mathematical, probabilistic calculations, the likelihood that someone getting into a conflict with you whom you did not expect to is pretty high.

I’m already prepared in case it happens: Well, think about the last unpredictable event (for you) that happened? How did you respond to a flat tire in the middle of road? A screaming adult? A disappointed boss or co-worker who had never said anything previously?

We respond with the patterns comfortable to us, to conflicts and stimulus that are unpredictable, because we don’t think about, plan for, or even consider the fact that the unpredictable might actually happen.

This is why we’re always surprised by future outcomes, conflicts and situations, even as we look for patterns in the past, and assign blame or credit, in order to make order, out of the chaos that unpredictability represents.

There are a few ways out of this, none of them comfortable:

Think about future conflicts “tabula rasa”: Begin by thinking about conflicts that could arise with a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Think of the future—and conflicts that could arise in it—as unexplored territory.
Do not look to the past for solutions: The past is exactly that, the past. And it’s not a good predictor of future behavior, actions or choices. The past is merely history. Or, perhaps nostalgia. And sometimes nostalgia can be poison.
Be open to possibility: This one is really hard if people are not comfortable with change and require stability and predictability—or at least the story of stability and predictability—in order to go about their day. Being open to the possibility for conflict opens the doors to being creative in your reactions, and responses to it.
Creativity is the key: Many people struggle with creative ways to explore, challenge and respond to conflict prone situations. This is why the standard responses to receiving a divorce decree is to just accept it and get a lawyer. However, many conflict scenarios—both interpersonal and intrapersonal—can be resolved, accommodated, or even avoided, in a myriad of creative ways. And, depending upon the type of response you’d like to encourage in the other party, responding creatively is better than using past patterns of behavioral responses—and expecting a different result.

Employing some, or all, of these strategies leads to creating systems in families, churches and civic organizations that can be antifragile, rather than collapsing due to fragility, or overcompensating due to a robustness of robustness.

-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/