HIT Piece 3.08.2016

The old saw went “If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.”

This old warning is meant to indicate that believing in the efficacy of your own plans—and your human ability to execute them—is a form of hubris and arrogance, doomed to failure from the start.

More appropriate for these days might be, “If you want to hear other people laugh, tell them your plans.”

Other people believe (or disbelieve) in you accomplishing your plans, based on ideas, thoughts, and experiences originating in their lives. Their judgement on the hubris and arrogance of your plans may means more to you than that of a silent (at least to you making the plans) God.

Even more appropriate for our times might be, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him how you’re going to accomplish your plans without Him.”

Hubris and arrogance still run rampant, and many people are hoisted by their own social media feeds. Many others experience a species of schadenfreude when watching other people fail. But very rarely are people ridiculously prepared, ridiculously talented, and ridiculously driven to walking the will of God out in their lives.

-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/

[Advice] Letting Go Of What Got You Here

Engaging with gossip and backbiting got you here.

Telling the wrong story to yourself, to other people, and to the world around you got you here.

Building a myth about what your role was (or wasn’t) and then building an emotional, psychological, and behavioral shrine to that myth got you here.

Being intentional with your own incompetency and fear and choosing the way of escape and comfort, rather than the way of engagement and discomfort got you here.

Choosing a narrow focus and not choosing a wider view got you here.

In the fields of business development, sales, and motivational speaking, the old idea gets bandied about, and the following line gets thrown off with ease quite regularly “what got you to here isn’t going to get you to there.”

Knowing where you want to go in a conflict (beginning engagement—or resolution—with the end in mind) seems obvious. And that’s why the line works. But it’s one that has been repeated so many times, that it has crossed from the obvious into the realm of the cliché.

Taking a hard look at what got you to where you are in your relationships can make “getting there” daunting. It’s easy to say nice, throwaway lines, and they look pithy in Tweets, Facebook posts, and on T-Shirts. But in reality, many of us never look back with a critical perspective. Instead, if we look back at all, it’s with shame, blame, and negativity.

And sometimes, we don’t look back, because we genuinely believe in our minds that we’ve let go of a situation, a person, or a behavior that caused us a difficulty, generated a confrontation, or that lead to a conflict. However, our behavior that got us there, doesn’t change dramatically, we don’t get 1% better every day, and we pass through relationships frustrated, disappointed, and disheartened.

Letting go of what got you here means letting go of your old self. The person you were before you got here. It means letting go of the myths, legends, stories, emotional shrines, connections, and in some cases, relationships, that defined who you used to be. It means having the courage and wisdom of an adult, with the compassion and empathy of a child—and the brilliance to know the difference between the two.

In the long run of your life, it’s better to be surrounded by the courageous, than the cowardly, and the childlike, rather than the childish.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Simple But Not Easy

Conflict represents the apex of our emotional tower as a human species: Conflict, no matter how rationally we attempt to approach it, write about it or think about, is a deeply emotional process.

Too many of us are unwilling to engage in the emotional hard work that we don’t get immediate gratification for, that will lead to ascending higher in the emotional tower, rather than descending lower.

Conflict as a process represents the best hope that humanity has of getting us through the hardest questions that seem to bedevil us constantly. Those questions are made of words; and those words that surround conflict—both stated and unstated–have meaning, and language is triggered by emotions.

But approaching conflict from relationship, rather than from religion, and engaging in emotional labor with a desire to grapple with being consciously uncomfortable, and through having our blind spots examined by others, is the only way to de-escalate the most consistently bedeviling public–and private–questions of our day.

Courage.

Labor.

Engagement.

Relationship.

Conscious discomfort.

Educating, advocating, and encouraging people to ascend the emotional tower of conflict with these rhetorical, and actual, tools is not sexy, not flashy, and not celebrated often enough.

It’s simple. But it’s not easy.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Life Long Learning Myth…Busted

Implementation, coaching, mentoring, and supporting through experiences matters more to adult learning in a corporate setting, than sitting in a room for four hours listening to a facilitator.

The drop-off in retention after such an experience is 50% after participants leave the room, and without immediate changes, immediate implementation of the learning outcomes, coaching along the path of uncomfortability, and supervisory mentoring through the tough times, the retention drop-off is 75%.

So why do many organizations still offer corporate training opportunities in all kinds of topical areas, within a formalized “sit down, and absorb” learning structure, syllabi, certificates, and experienced trainers and facilitators who drone on and on for—at most—half a day?

There are three reasons:

Most organizations—whether corporations, training organizations, or higher education institutions—are unwilling (and many times unable) to do the hard work of challenging, breaking, and remaking the foundation of learning established through the last 150 years of K-12 schooling. Schooling which was designed in conjunction with corporate leaders and influencers, and codified with the support of intellectuals and educators, to produce compliant workers, who would sit (or stand) all day and do widget based, industrial work, while leaving the thinking and innovating to others up the chain. The kind of work that was hollowed out by those same individuals starting 40 years ago and now no longer matters much in America.

Many supervisors, managers, bosses, CEO’s, COO’s, and others in the hierarchical structure of many organizations, have come from a background of schooling that they either internally rejected because it was too rigid, or found comforting and conformed too. Such engrained mindsets around the value of learning (and education) do not advance and innovate organizations. Instead, they continue to produce leaders who believe that training (and life-long learning) is either a “nice to have” (rejection mindset) or a “necessary evil” (acceptance mindset). Either way, the mentality shaped through that rejection or acceptance, is reflected in buying, internally developing, or advocating for models of learning for employees based in an Industrial Revolution K-12 schooling model.

Trainers, facilitators, consultants, and others in the wide and deep field of corporate training (myself included) aren’t doing enough of the hard work, often enough, of breaking our own mindsets of how information, experiences, and content is delivered to audiences (online, F2F, etc.). We also aren’t engaging with the hard work of breaking institutional, corporate mindsets from the outside by creating offerings and client deliverables that will transcend the dying model of K-12 education. This means having the courage to stick to our principles around peer-to-peer learning, advocating to organizations that we serve for mentoring and coaching for our learners, encouraging accountability, and at the furthest end, treating adult learners like adults in the training room, rather than continuing to train them (i.e. treat them) in the K-12 learning mold they’re familiar with.

The feedback I always get when I write (or talk) in these three areas typically focuses around the inability of organizations to change, the unwillingness of employees to actually be motivated to do the hard work of working on things that are hard (i.e. engaging with emotional labor) and the inability of trainers, consultants, and others to feed their families based on selling what the market is not progressive enough to demand.

These are all legitimate concerns, but the facts of the 21^st century are clear for anyone with two eyes to see:

The workplace, jobs, labor, and other tasks that people need to be organized into groups to accomplish, must still be done, or else there will be chaos in the world. Hard work—manufacturing work, “blue collar” work, etc.—will still be done in the world, but increasingly due to automation and algorithms, that work will be either outsourced or done by machines. And when it’s not, the people who will do it, will charge an even higher premium for it, to support their continued learning to become better artisans.

An acknowledgement that work matters, that tasks should be meaningful, rather than meaningless, and that employees should be treated like adults rather than like children in the workplace, is growing rather than going away. Calls from researchers, thought leaders, influencers, advocates, and others for more pay transparency, flexible family leave policies, and “flat” hierarchical structures, are only the tip of the iceberg.

The rewards to organizations in terms of prestige (Top 10 Best Places to Work), revenues (The World’s First $2 Billion Company), and public goodwill (Anyone See What Apple Made Today) in America, are drivers for success (or determinants of failure in a transparent media market) more now than ever. And these drivers become outsized to organizations that are willing to take risks, to supervisors that are willing to challenge the status quo, and to vendors who are willing to sell with courage.

Unrest will continue among employees who believe that they are not getting paid what they are worth, are increasingly mobile, and are calling the bluff of the industrialist mindset that has dominated every sector of life for over a century now. This unrest will grow in continued calls for a basic income, the cries against income inequality, and the accusations of a new “Gilded Age” of wealth and prosperity for some.

Wihout meaningful changes the conflicts that will arise if life-long, continuing, robust education is not increasingly, innovatively, and creatively integrated into the work lives of employees in all organizations in all sectors (from small businesses to the Fortune 1,000 companies), will be massive and unmanageable.

And bosses, managers, supervisors, shareholders, CEO’s, CFO’s, communities, civic leaders, politicians, business owners, corporate training organizations, and others will have to explain in plain terms to their constituencies, employees, followers, and others, the reasons (and their mindsets) for why they rejected or ignored the golden opportunity to implement, coach, mentor, and support in order to transform corporate learning into something meaningful and valuable, in the early 21^st century.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Confusion of Trust

People sometimes say (or think) in an interaction “I don’t trust you.”

And then they go and order a book, a magazine, a car, or even a living space (hotel room) online without much of a thought about who is on the other end of the transaction.

Transactional trust is at the core of most messaging and is the vehicle for the virus of conflicts when the transaction is proven to be not worthwhile, too expensive, or requiring too much emotional involvement.

Transactional trust is what organizational leaders use to ensure that their expectations (and sometimes ours) get met, and the organization moves forward a smoothly as possible. When the trust breaks down however, their expectations (and ours) around sacrifice, loyalty, and expectation shift. And it’s usually a long way back to the original formulation once it’s gone.

In most conflicts, there is a loss of transactional trust, and the message that conflict participants want to send to each other is drowned out by their internal voices, clanging along, declaring quite loudly “I don’t trust you.”

And if the most important thing is sending a message, what do you do when no one is using the same medium that you are, in order to hear the message, you want to send in the first place?

This is the trouble that leads to polarization in modern communications, as well as increases in conflict. It’s not about everybody speaking the same language, it’s about everybody communicating using different mediums.

And when my medium of choice for delivering (or receiving) a message of choice, is not your medium of choice for receiving (or delivering) a message you think that I need to hear, then conflicts, confusion, and escalation are bound to increase, not decrease.

This real confusion around medium, message, and transactional trust has three potential outcomes:

The person sending the message and the person receiving it on the other end now have the option to turn off the other person completely and will exercise the option when the interaction becomes uncomfortable or too demanding, because the bar of trust is way higher and the social penalty for not trusting is way lower.
Both people in the conflict are now comfortable in turning each other off, and are increasingly ensconced inside medium based echo chambers where the same message reverberates from the “tribe” that already supported their initial decision to disengage.
Immoral, unethical, and incompetent “bad” actors now don’t have to encourage followers to seek resolution, collaboration, or even speak a common language. Instead, all they have to do is the easy work of reaffirming fear based transactions that grow trust between them and their “tribe,” trapped in echo chambers of their own making.

The irrationality of our decision-making process served us well in smaller communities, but as interactions that have meaning and mattering begin to scale to global levels, the frictions between our innate irrationality and our need for the security of transactional trust, will only increase.

H/T Seth Godin.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 3.1.2016

The value of strategy and tactics—and knowing the difference is two-fold:

You have to know what the map looks like in order to figure out how to get where you’re going.

You have to know what your strengths are in order to accomplish what you want to do.

Strategy (the map) and how to navigate the map (tactics) are not the territory. The territory is the field, the platform, the audience, the market, the brand, and at the furthest end, the horizon and the dent in the universe that you want to make with your life.

Internal conflicts come about because people often confuse the map with the territory. Or they, on purpose, use the language of principles to describe positions that are negotiable. Very few people speak and live in spaces and markets where they mean what they say, and they say what they mean.

When you’re launching a project, knowing the difference between strategy (the map), tactics (how to navigate the map), and the territory (where in reality you want to end up) can make all the difference between walking with authority and wandering with confusion.

-Peace Be With You All-