[Opinion] Marketing for the Peace Builder V

Focus group feedback is useful to the peace builder.

Here’s how you run one:

The peace builder, working with another party (typically the focus group moderator), puts together some questions in regards to a future product, a current problem, and the solution to both that is offered by the peace builder.

Then, the peace builder gets a room somewhere and invites some people—maybe five to ten—who are in the demographic that the peace builder wants to offer their services to.

Then, the peace builder orders some pizza, the moderator sits down with the focus group participants and asks them the series of questions that have been cobbled together. In addition, the moderator may coax information from focus group attendees through the use of open-ended questions.

The peace builder sits in the room, saying nothing, but taking notes and watching the attendees’ non-verbal reactions, listening to the moderator, and recording responses to the questions.

At the end of an hour, the attendees are thanked for their time, offered the opportunity to take advantage of the product, service, or process that they have been questioned about, and are sent home.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The purpose of a focus group is three-fold:

To determine the reactions and responses of members of your target audience in a low-risk environment where they are rewarded for their participation.
To get feedback about the product, service, or process that the peace builder is developing through a process similar to an interview.
To collect the opinions from the focus group about the motivations of people who might actually use the peace builder’s product and to better understand how they perceive the utility of the product offering.

The savvy peace builder should be using focus groups before they launch workshops, seminars, training opportunities, books, curriculum, or any other product or process designed to appeal to a niche group of people. The savvy peace builder should avoid focus groups entirely when they are developing workshops, seminars, training opportunities, books, curriculum, or any other products or processes that have never been developed before, or which have been developed so long ago, that they have been forgotten almost entirely.

A warning though: Sometimes attendees fall into groupthink, peace builders and moderators, may fall prey to experimenter bias, issues of confidentiality around sensitive information in a group setting, and the fact that peace builders may cherry pick feedback to support a foregone conclusion.

-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] The Heart of Innovation

Leading other people through conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments is the most important leadership labor that many of us will ever do.

But there are a few things working against us:

We are told that anyone can lead, anytime anywhere. This is a unique tick of an American business culture built at the intersection of the myth of rugged individualism and the reality of having to compromise to get along. Many employees believe this idea, but when they are asked, challenged, or offered the opportunity to lead others through uncertainty—without reassurances—many employees fail to even take up the challenge in the first place.

We don’t believe that other people’s conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments, have anything to do with us. Sometimes leading other people through their conflicts requires active listening, engaging in the moment, and caring actively about the other person. This requires leaders to set aside the noise inside of their own head, and to get inside the noise of someone else’s head. Empathy is hard to develop when we are consumed with winning, avoiding, or confronting the chess game of conflicts that we are involved in ourselves.

We don’t see an immediate reward/outcome for engaging, but we do see an immediate reward/outcome for maintain the “status quo.” Conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments sometimes are harbingers that something needs to change in an organization. When they serve as those harbingers, they are a clarion call to disrupt the status quo. But there’s no immediate reward for such behavior in many organizations. As a matter of fact, usually, there is a sanction or unstated penalty. Instead, what gets rewarded with titles, status, and a corner office is going along with the crowd, staying silent, keeping your head down, and avoiding too much responsibility.

The future will be shaped by people who engage courageously in the emotional labor required to lead other people through conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments. The future will be owned by the people (and organizations) who have the courage to go to the other side of the horizon.

That’s innovation.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Contributor] Connecting the Internet of Things

Contributor – Alexander Gault
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

It’s no surprise as time marches forward and technology does the same, that the infrastructure which supports that technology reaches its carrying capacity. This became apparent, on an Internet level, in the 1990s, with the creation of IPv6. It was discovered that any future Internet-based growth would need support from an expansion of capacity now.

Technology has a tendency to advance at a rate far faster than most people expect.

The result of this is the terrible tendency for technology to rub up against the cap of its basic supporting structures, resulting in a stagnation of growth that can be difficult to remedy. Only a constant forward-thinking ecosystem of developers, companies, and providers can generate the environment necessary for uninhibited technological growth.

The coming Internet of Things, where any one house may have hundreds of connected items, all relying on that houses Internet connection to operate as expected, will require a drastic change in the capacity of Wi-Fi or wired routers and the connections that link those routers and modems out to the rest of the Internet.

While there is no recognized limit to the number of devices that can connect to any one Wi-Fi hotspot, there may soon be a limit on how much one can use their Internet connection.

It’s no secret that the big cable corporations of the United States, and perhaps the rest of the 1st world, all have one thing in common.

They’re terrible.

They charge too much for subpar service, they never send service people out when they say they will, and they throttle your internet connection down when you use it too much. Of course, those same companies are looking for other ways to protect their profit margins, especially with the entrance of Google Fiber to the scene. This new Google service provides fairly inexpensive fiber-optic Internet to its available neighborhoods, and for those who can’t afford or don’t need those speeds, Fiber offers a free standard-speed connection, with only a construction fee of $300.

Cable companies have been buying out areas where the only connections available are DSL and their own services, and working to box the companies we thought were the future of Internet connections (Verizon and AT&T with their respective fiber-optic networks) out of future expansion. Now, Frontier owns a chunk of Verizon’s previous FiOS and copper networks.

The second phase of cable’s limiting of fiber optic systems in the United States is their introduction of usage-based billing.

That’s right, your home Internet connection may become just as limited as your mobile Internet connection.

Cable companies hope to achieve a one-two punch on the expansion of the Internet infrastructure, by limiting most Americans to their services and then to limit those people again to metering out their Internet connections to avoid overage fees. After the FCC ruled in favor of net neutrality (where one connection cannot be favored over another one based on subscription level), the cable companies are searching for another way to reap as much as they can from their Internet subscribers.

Now, while this may all seem like a non-issue right now, as most people only have and need a standard Internet connection, this will not always be true. In the near future, the number of Internet-connected devices in an average home may double or even triple, and the data they send through that home’s Internet connection will become more and more specific and data-heavy.

Imagine if your fridge were to send you your grocery list every week, complete with images and amounts, and even nutrition information. The data for that message alone could equal one hour browsing the web. Combine that with your stove sending you minute-by-minute updates on the status of your soufflé, your car notifying you that its rear passenger side tire is leaking air, and your spouse and kids streaming their respective entertainment, a usage-billed, standard speed Internet connection would be like plumbing a whole modern city with one Roman aqueduct.

Simply not up to the task.

For the Internet of Things to be an attainable reality in the near future, things like usage-based Internet billing, copper-cable based infrastructure, and boxing-in of consumers between two sub-par methods of connection, must be avoided at all costs.

HSCT #Communication Blog Contributor, Alexander Gault-Plate is an aspiring journalist and writer, currently in the 12^th 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

[Advice] Why Don’t We Value Compromise?

Ian Bannen’s words from the 1995 film Braveheart, echo through the collective unconsciousness of many organizations—schools, businesses, churches–when people in them consider compromise: “It is precisely our ability to compromise that makes a man noble.”

Many in the workplace associate compromise, not with negotiation strength, but with weakness around positions and principles. Passion is not associated with compromise, nor is exuberance, excitement, or energy. Compromise is typically roundly mocked and is too often viewed as the last outpost of the deceitful and the conniving.

Why do employees in the workplace, members of religious organizations, or even the staff and students of schools, see compromise as something both shameful and necessary?

How negotiation happens, our views on what constitutes a “win” and a “loss,” and our personal passions around the positions we hold, reveal quite a bit about why compromise gets such lousy marketing, yet is still the way that many negotiations around issues that matter, get done.

How negotiation happens—Many people believe that negotiation is a process in which everyone “wins,” there are no “losers,” and all parties can somehow get along. A few people believe that the process of negotiation is one in which many people “lose,” only a few people can “win,” and the parties who lost deserve what happens to them. Both of these views associate the conditions of having to negotiate in the first place with moral failings, rather than associating the conditions of having to negotiate with a systemic, structural failing. Both of these view associate compromise with moral, political, or ethical failure and look upon the need for compromise as a temporary “defeat” in the pursuit of greater, more transformative goals. There are a very few people who view compromise as necessary, process oriented, and frame the negotiations as “win-win” or “lose-lose” for all parties involved.

What constitutes a “win” and a “loss”—Many people misuse terms “winning” and “losing” and project their own desires, thoughts, and collectively accumulated wisdom onto the negotiation process. And when the process fails, the failure is a reflection on them as people, rather than on the process itself. There are very few people who can “lose and laugh.” The vast majority of us inject our personal views and beliefs on fairness, right and wrong, and who has power and who doesn’t into determining which party has “won,” “lost,” or compromised unneccessarily in a negotiation.

Our personal passions—This has been noted before, but it bears repeating that principles are based in values, traditions, and narratives that give meaning to each party in a conflict. Principles spring directly from deeply held passions, but too often we use the language of positions to express (or to obfuscate) our passions. Many individuals and organizations confuse their interests for their principles. What follows form such confusion is social shaming, public bullying, and even emotional, legal and cultural efforts to engage in destruction of the character of the other party in the negotiation.

Ian Bannen’s other line from Braveheart also rings true: “Uncompromising men are easy to admire.”

How difficult is it to be uncompromising in your own conflicts in your own life?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Three, Episode #2 – John “Jack” Amoratis

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Three, Episode #2 – John “Jack” Amoratis, iOS Swift and Linux Developer, AWS fan, Theologian, Cutting Edge Deep Thinker and Educator

[powerpress]

I’ve known a lot of people in my life but none have lead such a life filled with twists and turns–and considerations about both the here and now, and over there and later–as has our podcast guest, John “Jack” Amoratis today.

The higher things often aren’t talked about, like theology, philosophy, and spirituality. Instead, we tend to focus a lot of our rhetorical firepower on religion, rules, and rituals.

Which, I guess is more comfortable for us because theology, which is the study of the nature of God and belief, continues to stymie modern man with how complicated and complex it really is.

Don’t get me wrong, we have arguments about religion—which is all about the rules: say this number of Hail Mary’s, or position yourself that way when saying a prayer—but that’s all ritual and, for the most part, ruled by humans.

We also have arguments about relationships—who’s up, who’s down, who’s in control—and, just like religion, those arguments consist of many ritual and rules, made up and enforced by humans.

But every great theologian, from Thomas Aquinas to Soren Kierkegaard has wrestled with the nature of God and what that means for us down here on Earth. Because, at least to my knowledge, only one person in the history of humanity has ever claimed to come back from the dead to tell us what comes after all of this.

Two other thoughts about this are covered in this episode as well:

Technology is advancing by leaps and bounds these days, and the nature of what is possible is going to be limited by our collective imaginations. Transhumanism is this idea that humans and machines will join at some point and transcend even the nature of God.

The second thought is that with all we are gaining in advancing technology, we are forgetting the truly radical things that we had to do to get here. I don’t care what you think about Jesus, Mohammad, or even Confucius, you had to go through those guys to get the IPhone you’re listening to me on right now.

As usual, I have no answers for any of this. It’s too complicated and interdisciplinary. And by the way, Jack doesn’t either. But we give it a good shot, and we find out more about how a theologian comes to the technology space and what he would like to see happen next.

Check out all the ways below to connect with Jack today:

Jack’s LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackamoratis

Jack’s Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/users/3078326/jack-amoratis?tab=reputation

Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackamoratis

Jack’s GitHub: https://github.com/jamorat

Jack’s website: https://www.jackamoratis.com/

HIT Piece 1.26.2016

The noise of the world seeks to crowd out the silence of being alone. The modern world eschews being alone as a sign of some sort of pathology, but this is merely more crowding out.

A leader, thinker, or developer of any kind needs to be alone to be effective. In the silence of being alone, one can learn to motivate others and yourself. Schedules, calendars, emails, all of these create background chatter that move, push, and manipulate many people into feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and never done.

I love it when my character evolves, and is challenged, in the sounds of silence, which I seek to make more space for in my work life, even as my responsibilities increase. This silence—and creating and preserving the conditions for such silence to begin and endure—is where all the work is.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] A New Mental Model of Trust

The mental model for trust is broken in workplaces.

The old model looked like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) loyally for a period of time (X) and, with enough reciprocation, I stay with you for the remainder of my career.

That mental model is one that only works under the specific economic conditions of the 1940’s through the 1970’s in America. However, since there is one thing that America does really well (the marketing of America to every other country in the world) as the mental model rubs up against changing economic reality, there is friction everywhere, between those people who want that model, and those people who are trying to create a new model. Employees at organizations of all kinds are in the midst of a great cultural, economic, philosophical, and social destruction of that old mental model and at the same moment are carving out a new mental model.

This new model (right now) looks like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) but not so loyally, and I take my accumulated intellectual capital from your workplace to another workplace, whenever it suits me, because you may not be around in five years.

There’s a lot of talk from employees, organizations, management thought leaders, and others about the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change in Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., and the media centers of Los Angeles and New York City. But if you go to places outside of Madison, Wisconsin, or outside of Peoria, Illinois, or travel four hours north of New York City and talk to employees of organizations still struggling to maintain a semblance of the old model, the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change that get talked about breathlessly in those other places, get addressed in tones of defeatism, regret, and anger.

This tone and its lived reality is also a mental model. And the employees who exist inside the new mental model may out innovate, out disrupt, and out change the employees longing for a return to the old mental model; but, there must be ways to develop every potential employee together, without brutal economic and social Darwinism being the answer.

Here are the three ways to shift organizational mental models:

Access to the means of production is the linchpin: As more and more resources, time, and talent gravitates towards developing digital products, services, and processes there are questions about whether “everyone” can be a computer scientist. This is a red herring argument. Access to the means of production means high speed Internet in a neighborhood, whether you’re 50 miles outside of Overland, Kansas, or in the heart of downtown Miami. Such access shifts the mental model of ‘The-Internet-as-an-Entertainment-Vehicle’ to ‘The Internet- as-a- Economic-Development-Vehicle.’

Valuing and incentivizing emotional labor:I talk about this repeatedly, but it bears writing yet again: The mental model of what constitutes work in the workplace has to shift towards valuing and incentivizing employees who can collaborate, get along, and manage conflict in a competent and healthy fashion in a dynamic, globally competitive environment. This is the core of laboring with mind and emotions, versus laboring with hands and muscles. Both can be rewarded, but the incentives toward the labor which can be repeated until a person is on death’s door must be made infinitely more robust in workplaces.

Hiring for mental models rather than personality traits: As algorithms and computers have entered more and more into the hiring matrix of organizations, more and more creative, innovative, and change oriented people with growth-mindsets are abandoning all hope of being hired in some organizations, and are migrating to large cities where their value can be rewarded. Abandoning all of the hiring tools is not the point. The point is, how people perceive their agency in the world, based on what they’ve accomplished in the past (stuff that’s not listed on the resume and doesn’t get picked up by the algorithm), will matter more and more for discovering and hiring employees of value.

If organizations can shift their own mental models around these three areas, then they will survive and thrive as the century continues to unwind, with employees all over the world, who will be loyal, trustworthy, innovative, and change oriented. This new mental model may share some aspects with the old model, but it will survive future economic, social, technological, and cultural shocks which we can’t see coming.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] An Easy Dismissal…

To dismiss positions, parties, and interests that we’d rather not acknowledge exist in the first place, is a sign of the inability to negotiate deeply.

The terms that are used to dismiss those positions, parties, and interests that we’d rather not acknowledge exist in the first place, include (but aren’t limited to) “Well, the consensus is…,” or “The conventional wisdom says…,” or my personal favorite “Everybody knows that…”

When a dismissal is preceded by any of these three statements, it reveals a lack of empathy, curiosity, or even ability, to get inside another party’s mental model of how “the world” works. Such dismissals also reveal a deeper fear: That maybe our own position really isn’t as black and white as we think that it is; and, that disagreement, dispute, or dismissal of our own position by the other party, might be on the horizon.

A dismissal in a negotiation, indicates that we have made the negotiation less about accomplishing goals, getting to agreement around interests, and establishing common ground. Instead, a dismissal shows that we have made the negotiation content personal, the desire for a favorable outcome for us paramount, and that there is emotional residue that we must address on our own part.

Hiding behind conventional wisdom, making appeals to “what everybody knows” to be “true,” or drawing on consensus to persuade, is not a sign of confidence in our own position. Instead, it’s a rallying cry for someone to come and support our right position and to negate the other party’s wrong position.

In negotiations around value based interests, the ability to empathize (but not agree) with the other party, and to do so using language that elevates supporters and reassures detractors, is the sign of a true statesman.

How many statesmen are in your workplace?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] “It’s Too Hard”

“It’s too hard.”

Yep.

It’s supposed to be.

At work, it’s difficult to start becoming competent at a new way of approaching conflict (say switching from avoiding to engaging) and to have success at it immediately. When employees, managers, and supervisors are challenged to switch approaches (either through feedback, evaluation, or training) they respond by rejecting the premise of the challenge entirely and returning to their old ways.

When we consciously realize that we are unskilled, we have the opportunity to go toward initial ineptness, and forge a new path toward competency. However, many of us at work, when faced with conflict scenarios, challenges, disagreements, fights, and other disputes, default to what we know rather than pursuing new knowledge. This tendency is based in fear and the overwhelming human need for reassurance in the face of risk.

In our post-industrialized work culture, reassurance, avoidance of risk, hiding from outcomes, and fear of taking a chance to make a change in the ways that we respond to each other when we don’t, can’t or won’t get along will have fewer and fewer outsized rewards attached to it. Being consciously emotionally uncomfortable to gain competencies in a different way is the emotional labor of the 21^st century. In an organizational context, the way to ensure that employees, managers, and supervisors follow through on their challenges is to provide three consistent supports: encouragement, positive feedback, and monitoring of implementation of the new way.

The worst part of the hangover that organizations are suffering from the end of the heady days of the Industrial Revolution, is that the inner, emotional, response that we believed did not matter that much, matter now more than ever. And empowering, encouraging, and developing consciously skilled employees, managers, and supervisors in their approach to conflicts in organizations, is the only way to end the hangover.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Dysfunction in Your Workplace

In any discussion of conflict competence in the workplace, damaging communication patterns come up as an issue. Damaging communication is preceded by its forefather, dysfunctional communication. Dysfunction leads to damage as surely as water makes things wet. And at work, dysfunctional communications typically begin through “the grapevine” and come about in five different forms:

Gossip—includes idle talk or rumor, especially about personal or private affairs of other employees, co-workers, customers, etc.

Rumor—involves some kind of a statement whose veracity is not quickly, or ever, confirmed. Depending on the organizational structure and history, and where rumors originate in the hierarchy, rumors spread intentionally can serve as propaganda to manipulate employees or teams.

Innuendo—an innuendo is an insinuation or intimation about a person or thing, especially of a disparaging or a derogatory nature. Most innuendo’s start as “innocent” jokes, and tend to fall in the gap between what people think about other people’s behavior, and the reality of that behavior.

Tall Tales—a tall tale is a story with unbelievable elements, related as if it were true and factual. In the workplace, tall tales almost always involve whispers and can seem like rumor, but usually they are driven by external factors or pressures on the organization.

Myth—a myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind assumed their present form, although, in a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story. Myths are at the bottom of many organizational models and serve to explain occurrences that people otherwise think they have no explanation for. The fact is, myths do the most long-term damage to an organization, because of their corrosive nature on innovation and through creating stubborn resistance to change.

When people become engaged in any of the above communication styles at work, they may interfere (innuendo) or damage (rumor, gossip) relationships, stymie innovation (myths) and creating situations ripe for lawsuits (innuendo) without being aware of it. In essence, when employees, managers, and others are unconsciously, unskilled at communicating effectively, they are displaying competency (at the novice level in most cases) at passive-aggressively creating conflict.

There are a few ways out of this:

The way to get out of this is to role model the behavior that you would like to see in other people at work, particularly if you are a boss, manager, or supervisor.
The other way out of this is to monitor your communication style to determine if you’re engaging in any of the five forms.
The last way out of this is to build a culture on open communication, getting information right the first time, and trusting adults to behave in a mature fashion—and removing those who don’t (or can’t) from positions in the organization quickly.

However, if your organization can’t do the steps above, then the only other solution is to train the people that you already have.

H/T to David Burkus on this one.

-Peace Be With You All-