[Contributor] Convenient Culture

Contributor – Alexander Gault
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

Is convenience going to be the downfall of self-sufficiency?

Perhaps this question is getting a little old, but it warrants a great deal of conversation.

The loudest dialogue in pop culture that I clearly remember, that touched on what is most likely to happen, was around the time of the release of the Pixar film, Wall-E. Despite touching on environmental issues and the dangers of unlimited consumerism, Wall-E touched on the topic of technology overtaking humanities ability to do things for itself. Some might say that The Matrix was an earlier example of this in popular film culture, but while in The Matrix, humanity was enslaved against their will, in Wall-E, humanity accepted their condition, and actively entrenched themselves in it.

The future of convenience is starting now, with innovations like the Amazon Prime button and services that will deliver food from non-delivery restaurants for a nominal fee, and those are just what has made it into the market so far. Before 2010, Toyota Motors began developing a “transforming all-electric vehicle”, called the i-Real. The concept was similar to an electric wheelchair, but the device could transform into a high-speed, possibly street-legal vehicle with the press of a button. If that doesn’t remind you of Wall-E then you should probably watch the movie again.

With the possibility of a chair that can go from the grocery store to the living room without you ever getting out of it, the possibilities for human laziness compound astronomically. While it indisputably would be a great boon to those of us who cannot physically walk, that wouldn’t be the only group of consumers.

While its unlikely something like the i-Real will reach shelves or show-rooms in the near-future, there are products that are out there already: The Amazon Prime button, food delivery services for rib-eye steaks, streaming services. All these services and devices, while convenient, have definitely served to make humans lazier. Now, when you run out of dish detergent or toilet paper, you simply press a button, rather than drive to the store. When you want to watch the latest movie, rather than going to the Blockbuster as you would have in the past, you open your laptop, or even more simply, tap a few points on your phone to stream it to your wide-screen television.

Not only is leisure getting lazier, work is to. Most office workers today can work, for at least a portion of their job, from home. And that trend is only going to increase. Wired suggested in 2013 that 43% of the US workforce would be working out of the office by this year. As the Internet simplifies how humans engage, from human interaction to commerce, the overarching result will be that more people will be spending time in their homes, instead of in the public sphere.

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.

[Strategy] How to Be a Role Model

What I see I repeat.

What I repeat I believe.

What I believe I do.

These three statements reveal the power of role modeling. Role modeling begins when leaders think of themselves as role models.

A famous NBA player was exactly correct in the early 1990’s with his brash statement around role modeling versus parenting. But, the shirking of the responsibility and accountability around making a choice to role model in the first place, is an ethical leadership issue. It is not out of the way to point out that the majority of leadership failings in any organization, or with any individual, are moral failings, under-girded by the avoiding, accommodating, or the surrendering of ethical responsibility.

When followers see a leader ethically fail–even in small ways–they repeat that ethical failure unconsciously. When followers repeat those failings over and over again, they begin to believe those failings, which become a lived reality. When followers believe those failings as lived reality, they act out in ways that may seem small at the outset; but, eventually, become as corrosive to an organization and it’s leadership, as the gradual dripping of acid on metal.

Leaders are role models, whether they personally desire to be or not. The courage to build relationships that affect what followers repeat, believe, and do, is the only courage that matters.

-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] The Difference Between Management and Leadership

Managing is a process—similar to conflict—of implementing, developing, and encouraging employees to accomplish predetermined goals. Much of managing in the modern world represents the fully realized theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and his ideas about productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Leadership is a relationship—similar to engagement, resolution, and communication around conflict—between followers in an organization and their leaders. Much of leadership in modern organizations rests on the concepts of authority, transaction, charisma, or some other mystical, in-borne trait. Modern leadership also doesn’t examine the role of followers in an organization.

Management is not leadership. A competent manager knows the strengths and weaknesses of the overall work team and is diligent in learning strategies and techniques to take that team to the next level in production, efficiency, and effectiveness. And if some of the people following can’t get on board, there is always the option to fire people.

Leadership is not management. A competent leader strives to go beyond merely knowing the relative strengths and weaknesses of their overall work team, and instead seeks to discover—and grow—relationships between followers, as well as between the leaders and the followers. Leadership requires doing things that don’t scale (emotional labor), engaging with conflict (leaving a comfort zone), and initiating changes and innovation (not being afraid of failure).

Leadership requires grit and grows resiliency. It also demands that the person doing the leading avoid seeking assurance and reassurance from followers; but, instead that they be guided by their own internal principles and be able to articulate those to followers. Managing requires keen observation, willingness to follow direction, and the ability to articulate those observations and directions up and down a hierarchical chain.

Too often, too many organizations seek to impose leadership on people who should be managers. Employees look for leadership from people who have attained status, but not skills. And supervisors, and managers, become frustrated, overwhelmed, disheartened, and burnt-out, because they are asked that their reach exceed their grasp, without being asked if there capable of reaching that far anyway.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 2.2.2016

Changes are natural. As an entrepreneur, you have to be able to roll with them and adapt to them without losing your mind, your equanimity, or your focus on the end goal.

That’s hard, because with each change, the end goal shifts from being a long-term goal, to being a short-term need.

With each change, the entrepreneur’s perspective changes and shifts as well, and sometimes, the weight of those changes can force the entrepreneur into a mental, emotional, and even financial, dip.

Powering through the dip—and making it to the other side—without losing your equanimity, your mind, or your focus on the end goal, is the only work of the entrepreneur that matters.

The reason many investors, money men, banks, and governments, tend to ignore or overlook the lifestyle entrepreneurs (such as consultants, trainers, and others) is that yes, they don’t create scalable models, but, those entrepreneurs tend to quit in the middle of dip leaving behind debt.

I’m not quitting. And hopefully, neither are you…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Work You’re Doing

In the workplace, affective (heart-based) work generates less quantifiable outcomes than cognitive (head-based) work.

Affective work is about emotional labor and connecting with people through the long-game of relationship building.

Cognitive work is about intellectual labor and creating and maintaining the planned obsolescence of connections as commodities to be used and then discarded.

One kind of work leads to conflicts, dead-ends, starting over, and working through difficulty. One kind of work leads to outcomes that can be replicated all the way to the point at which they can’t be replicated—by a human being—and then the human being who’s doing them gets laid off.

One is about the future and one is about the past.

Which outcomes are you trying to generate?

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-

[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/