[Strategy] Here’s What’s Instructive…

There’s no other more instructive event for the modern communications professional than a national election.

There’s white space and absence, in the midst of all the noise and the presence. What people do say is almost as instructive as what people don’t say.

Challenge the premise of the question, create a reductionist argument without objective meaning, play to the crowd as if no one is there to watch.

Be a marketable commodity, while also being a unique niche value, all the while, doing the daily narrative dance with the media.

Here’s what’s instructive about all of this:

Who are you for? If you are for everyone, you aren’t going to attract the attention and awareness of anyone.

Who are you against? If you aren’t against anybody, then you better be inspirational or maybe a little insipid, but never both—and never, even at the same time.

Who’s all in? If you aren’t going for the “gusto” then you aren’t going anywhere. Halfhearted attempts peter out halfheartedly.

Communicate strongly, confidently, and incessantly to cut through the noise, but be prepared to have your bluff called, your desires questioned, and your rigor stressed.

The reason only one person can become the head of a party or a country, is that the outcome—at a communications level—is scarce; and getting there is monumentally hard.

-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 Dark Heart of Man

Let’s talk about the kind of communication we want to have.

In person communications have always been fraught with difficulty, misunderstandings, miscommunications, negative escalations, and conflicts. When people talk with each other face-to-face there is always the opportunity for confusion and conflict, particularly if the conversation in question is questioning deeply held stories around values, worldviews, and frames.

It takes a lot of emotional quickening to escalate from a conversation to a confrontation to a conflict to a fistfight to a war. There are many discrete steps in face-to-face communication that social norming has established, developed, and refined for thousands of years to limit such escalation. But, as is always the case, human beings’ tools for communication get better, friction and misunderstanding increases, even as the speed of communication increases, and conflicts flare up.

From carrier pigeons to riders on horseback to the telephone to mail by airplane to emails and now Twitter, there have always been people who would rather have a fight than share an idea. And as the speed of our tools has increased how fast we get a message and then react to it, (going from days or weeks to micro-seconds) there hasn’t been a commensurate increase in the heart of rational contemplation.

Thus we get to social media communication. Trolls, bad actors, spammers, and others use the immediacy of social communication tools to psychologically manipulate people on the other end of the message into reacting rather than thinking. And there’s really only two reactions such individuals are seeking: fight or flight.

They aren’t looking for a measured argument.

They aren’t looking for reasonable discourse.

They aren’t looking for knowledge or growth.

They are looking for either a respondent’s heels or their fangs.

In the case of the Internet, and the communication tools we have built on top of it, we have exchanged immediacy for escalation, and have confused passion for legitimacy of an assertion. This is particularly problematic for people delivering messages that are outside the “mainstream,” or that rely on dispassionate examination of facts, rather than passionate reaction to opinions.

Ease of access to digital tools also allows communication to be focused on the tawdry and the spectacle—which is short term—instead of the deliberative and the reasonable—which is long-term. The creators of these digital tools—the owners of the platforms—may be publicly or privately traded companies, but make no mistake: the platforms are private property and the Internet, while vast, is not a place where 1.6 billion participants need to (or deserve to) cast a vote on the operations of a series of companies that built the platforms in the first place.

What kind of communication do we want to have?

The answer to that question, at least as is evidenced by the numbers of people using these communications tools, seems to be that we want friction free, painless, non-relational based communication when we want it, how we want it, that allows us to do what we want, when we want, how we want. But this is an inherently selfish and vain position, based in our perception of want, rather than a relational need.

Online communication will always be fraught with difficulty and no amount of changing a name policy, policing speech we don’t like, or building walls and doors into platforms, is going to prevent than difficulty. This is because the tools we use to communicate are the problem because of the assumptions and expectations built into them.

We’ve got to figure this out though, because at a global scale, there won’t be a positive outcome from communications wars between people. We are already seeing the beginnings of skirmishes around the edges of platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. We are also seeing responses to such skirmishes from companies such as SnapChat and WhatsApp, which promise to build platforms with more friendly assumptions around safety, conviviality, and trust built into them, rather than welded on from the outside as an afterthought.

More special interest groups meeting with Facebook isn’t going to solve this communications problem.

More governmental lobbying at scale by Google isn’t going to solve this problem either.

More closing off, disengaging online, or demanding more censorious penalties for people we don’t like, saying things that make us feel threatened, abused, or bullied (the aforementioned trolls, bad actors, and spammers) isn’t going to solve this problem either.

The solution to all of this, as with most things, lies in changing the motivations toward selfishness, vanity, and revenge that lie deep in the heart of man.

And, to borrow from Einstein when he was talking about the outcomes of the development of nuclear weapons, I’m going to bet that the founders of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and many, many other chatrooms, message boards, and email systems since the web was democratized, secretly wish, deep in their hearts, that they could go back in time, and instead become watchmakers.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Will You Read This?

There are a lot of tips, tricks, “how-to’s” and hack based articles, blog posts, and columns, everywhere. And there always have been.

Partially, this is because the people reading the articles want the easy out. This is evidenced in corporate training where attendees will say “I don’t want the theory, just give me the practical tips.” Or, ask “Is there a silver bullet for this?”

The silver bullet.

The easy answer.

Cheat codes in video games.

Will this be on the test?

What’s the shortcut?

I don’t want to hear your story.

I don’t care about the theory.

I want to work smarter, not harder.

[Advice] 10 Year Overnight Success V

People tell themselves stories about success and failure.

Most of those stories overlap with cultural stories that may, or may not, be factual. Cultural stories overlap with success and failure stories carry an impact. Success stories range from stories about hard work to stories about perseverance, patience, and tenacity.

What often gets missed in these stories is a discussion (or even a curiosity) about the individual and corporate moments that lead to the successes: The moments of gossamer when someone made a decision—or didn’t—and the consequences that resulted from that decision. Very rarely is decision making viewed through this lens as a series of deliberate and coincidental acts, complete with a dizzying array of textures, and moments.

The other thing that is often missed in all of these stories is the acknowledgment of the presence of a moral component in decision making. It is a sign of how far our post-modern world has come, that stories of success are tied more to the presence or absence of psychological traits, than they are tied to the presence or absence of spiritual traits.

The change really shows its colors when we either express guilt at the perceived underserved outcomes of our success—no matter how hard we know we worked for them. And it cuts particularly deep when “so many other people around me didn’t have the same success.” We compound our problem when we lack the commensurate humility in attaining our successes and are arrogant around the impact of our failures, exhibiting both a lack of a higher moral code and even more, a lack of an understanding of the limits of our own individuality and freedom.

There are no overnight successes: Parent work to ensure that their children have advantages that they did not have in their experiences. Adults work, experiment, try and fail, and neither the rewards, nor the failures, are equally meted out. People tell themselves stories about themselves (or repeat the stories they have been told by others since birth) and in repeating the narratives of success, failure, ennui, or moral uprightness, they continue to perpetuate myths that harden into legends, and become lived truths, echoing on down through the generations.

Nothing “bad” and nothing “good” happens overnight. It takes years (some would say at least 10,000 hours) to get to the epicenter of mastery of success and it takes just as long to get to the center of failure.

And the tenacious, and the patient, are rewarded, each to their own ends.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Engagement-As-A-Service

Imagine if engagement with customers, clients, and others could be measured as a trackable KPI of success in your organization?

Imagine if you actually engineered your organization at all levels to compete not in a race to the bottom on price, product, or service, but instead if you engineered (through reward and recognition) for engagement through failure, risk-taking, and decision making?

Imagine if the digital tools you have laying around that you don’t know what to do with, were engaged in actively and intentionally increasing engagement, rather than just selling?

Imagine if engagement were the service your organization offered, and the product (physical, digital, or another form) was actually an afterthought?

Imagine if quality engagement with your employees through open-book management, pay transparency, and treating adults as if they are adults, were the “new normal” rather than a “radical departure.”

We don’t have to imagine. There are organizations at scale that are doing all of these things all around us in all areas of the global economy.

The only question your really have to ask (and answer) in your organization is: Do you have the courage to go past imagining to acting?

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 5.31.2016

Seth Godin made a good point: “In any failing system, the people at the top get hurt last.”

From schools to students, higher education is playing out this maxim before our eyes in the US right now.

The schools at the top in the US—Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and even second-tier, state schools like the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota (where I used to work)—are doing fine in terms of enrollment, prestige, status, and the other markers of being “at the top” in a system of higher education that’s failing.

Students who can attend those schools, and manage the debt that comes from attaining credentials that aren’t any better than the ones obtained at a third tier school with minimal cost, are also doing fine. They, their families, and their personal finances are “at the top” of attending at, participating in, and paying to a system that’s failing.

Certain racial and ethnic groups who have historically been able to attend colleges in large numbers and who have done so at a swift, continuous generational pace, are also doing fine. They and the generational wealth transfer of knowledge, confidence, and self-esteem that comes from knowing that generations before you attended higher education and did well (i.e. it was the path to financial security and relative prosperity) means that if you choose to participate in the higher education system now, then you are already “at the top” in a status driven system that’s failing.

The people at the top get hurt last.

But if you’re a school, a student, or a member of a racial or ethnic group that was either in the middle, or at the bottom, historically, economically, socially, or by any practical measure that matters, then you are being hurt first by the failing of the higher education system as it was previously arranged.

And the worst part is that, you are almost guaranteed to continue to be hurt as the system (which is failing not because of anything anybody did directly, but because of a series of decisions made steadily and non-maliciously over time) continues to spectacularly collapse into something else where the outcomes aren’t guarenteed, and the vision is cloudy.

This is why, when discussions of higher education, debt, and the inability of credentialing to match employer need, come around to minority groups, women, the poor and working classes, immigrants, and others in this country are in relation to the system that created this problem, pache Mike Rowe, but we need more Hispanic physicists than we do Hispanic carpenters. And we need fewer wealthy scions who birth Ivy league lawyers, and more state school, 1st generation, entrepreneurial wealth builders backed by the 1st college degree in their household.

The people at the top get hurt last.

My mother went to college. So did my sisters. I went to college, though my father did not. My grandmother on my mothers’ side of the family went to college. My children are going to college.

Yes, the higher education system is failing.

But I am far from being at the top where I am protected in spite of the system failing.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] What We Subsidize…

What a society taxes it gets less of, and what a society subsidizes it gets more of.

For various social, economic, psychological, emotional, and other reasons, societies around the world, throughout history, have taxed peace, while subsidizing war.

This is not a statement of judgment, just one of objective observation.

We honor dead soldiers, and only occasionally talk about dead peacemakers.

We have thousands of anonymous soldiers who go out and make war, as we have thousands of anonymous peacemakers, who go out and make peace every day. But only one group has a flame burning eternally for them at Arlington Cemetery in the US.

We honor the dead soldier, because we (and by ‘we’ I mean humanity as whole) value valor, honor, respect, dignity, and the ideals of revenge and justice, far more than we revere those same values at the peacemaking table. This dichotomy is the most obvious at scale, where there are holidays honoring the sacrifice of life of the soldier, but no parades in your town for the generations of deceased divorce mediators.

These are not a statements of judgment, just ones of factual observation.

When we do choose to honor the diplomat, or the statesman, who brought us peace, we tend to honor the ones most vociferously who also guided us through war. Churchill is lauded far more than Chamberlain.

Unfortunately, as was pointed out years ago by the band Pink Floyd, the statesmen turned diplomats are the very same ones who sat in the rear of the line (or sat in an office back at home) and commanded “Go forward!” even as the soldiers in front, out on the line, died by the thousands.

Young men have always died valiantly fighting old men’s wars.

The fact is, we will always have more people willing to make war, than we will have people willing to make peace. This is a sad fact of the fallen state of humanity.

This is not a statement of judgment, just one of spiritual observation.

On this Memorial Day, let us take a moment to remember those who made the peace, as well as honor those who fell in the war, because, if humanity is to move forward in any kind of meaningful way, we need to subsidize the peace, and place a higher tax on the war.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Winning at Nuclear Poker

Nuclear weapons are a touchy subject in geopolitical negotiations.

Almost everyone involved in the negotiations around nuclear weapons knows what the outcomes of launching them against another country could be, which is why, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, regionalism in arms races became a geopolitical concern.

But in reality, the issue with nuclear weapons is not really the weapons themselves. In reality, the issues around negotiating with developers of nuclear weapons is the attitudes, motivations, and psychological desires of the people who run the governments that are either developing nuclear weapons (North Korea, Iran, etc.) or who already have them (Russia, the US, China, etc.)

This is similar to negotiations that go on around issues that are less geopolitical and more commonplace. When you are negotiating with your wife about where to go to dinner, her mindset, attitude, body language, motivations, and your previous history with her, matter more to the outcome of that negotiation, than where you eat.

In our individual and corporate lives there are many nuclear weapons that we hide inside of our interactions. Some of them take years to build and only a minute to deploy and to wreck destruction.

We often don’t talk about our tendency to build up resentment, unforgiveness, anger, bitterness, and hatreds, until they are primed and ready to launch. Exploding on another party. Usually, not the party that we want to have them explode upon.

That person (a parent, a child, a former spouse, a family member, a neighbor, a politician) is usually either too far away emotionally, or too distant physically, for us to actually launch our carefully curated and developed personal stockpile of nukes upon them.

Mob behavior, direct democracy, these are both example of personal nuclear behavior writ large, at scale, and just as destructive as at the personal level. Nuclear poker is played at this level as well: by politicians, pundits, professional prognosticators and others. But here’s the thing, from the geopolitical level all the way to your individual level of your individual world:

Nobody knows how anybody else is going to respond to a nuclear strike—either personal or global.
The appearance of being crazy, or dysfunctional, enough to destroy everything can sometimes act as a deterrent to people actually going ahead and pushing the button to destroy everything—either personally or globally.

The personal (and global) question in any negotiation where the threat of nuclear destruction is on the table, is: How crazy do you want to be to ‘win’ at nuclear poker?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Chessboxing Motivation and Morale

Motivation is about individual effort and achievement.

It’s about having internal drive that gets you personally engaged with something (a situation, a person, an interest, or an idea) that animates you. Motivation can be driven from a place of positivity, or it can be driven from a place of negativity, but either way, it’s from inside of you.

Motivation to act can be sparked by other people, but much of the time, motivation has to be driven by what people think about themselves and their place in the world. A lot this is driven by where individuals believe that their control comes from. Some people believe that other people and situations control them. Some people believe that they make their own decisions and that other people and situations have little to no impact on them.

Morale is about team efforts and team achievement.

It’s about having multiple motivations working together and “clicking” with each other. Teams go through cycles of forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Morale is about how all their motivations work together. This is where conflicts arise. This is where friction happens when one person’s locus of control (and personal focus) doesn’t match another person’s locus of control (and their personal focus) on the team.

Morale is something that exists—or it doesn’t. We use terms such as “cultural fit” or “alignment” to describe the pursuit of morale. We often focus so much on the tactics and hacks to shortcut the only true way to build morale: Building relationships.

But building relationships is not sexy. It’s not tactical, or strategic. Building relationships is about focusing on one-person at a time, discovering their deep motivations, and leveraging those motivations for the good of overall team morale. Building relationships is about knowing when to increase tension, when to put in some slack, and when to let go.

If you are looking for the next big idea to build morale on your team, or in your organization, start with asking three questions:

What do we do here? Not what do we produce here, or what do think we do here, or what does the market say that we do here. But what is it that we actually do here? This core question will take you months to get the answer to.
Why should what we do here be important to anybody else, other than us? This question is not answered by the typical bromides of “we are for everyone.” No organization, no product, no personality, no philosophy, no idea, no service is for “everyone.” If you can answer this question honestly then you can go about the painful—but revelatory—process of architecting who’s on your team—and who isn’t.
Who do we want on our team? Too many organizations (from start-ups to established Fortune 1,000 Companies) begin with this question, get stuck on the second one, and never ask the first. Trying to architect backward from this question to build a team is like trying to unbirth a baby. It doesn’t work. This is the least interesting and relevant question, because if you answer the first two honestly, then this last one becomes almost an afterthought.

Conflicts, disagreements, and “differences of opinion” will happen between passionate people. However, there is no reason to consider those realities in the box of “poor” or “low” morale. The morale comes after the motivation, which comes after the architecting.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Building an Arbitrage Machine for Entrepreneurship

In financial markets, in gambling, and even in entrepreneurship, there are two skills that are critical for success: making small bets consistently through developing a model (buying) and breaking an old model (selling), and building an anti-fragile machine that can withstand the shock of either of those small bets failing.

Arbitrage is the process of hedging bets (through the purchase and the sale of an asset) so that, no matter how much is spent, the buyer/seller can always either come out ahead, slightly behind (not enough to be far back, but enough to catch up), or slightly ahead (building a continuous lead). Hedge fund managers and stock traders with fancy algorithms understand arbitrage. So do insurance agents, financial advisors, professional gamblers, and even entrepreneurs.

Many people though, make bad large bets (thus financial collapses and the development of ‘flash’ trading via fancy computer programs) and take massive losses with little to no gains. This is due primarily to ego driven betting that has nothing to do with market conditions, and everything to do with personal psychological and emotional tics. The most successful people bet small, bet consistently—or they don’t bet at all.

Day by day, step by step, entrepreneurs should be building a machine in their unique niche that will arbitrage against their unique market. One that will allow them to see opportunities, take advantage of them, and not lose their livelihoods, their families, or their peace of mind. This does not have to be a stressful process, but it does have to be done.

When the entrepreneur makes those small bets they don’t become business people (business is about maintaining a consistent place in one spot with gradual upticks in growth, rather than about advancing a model) instead, they become evangelists for a new way of doing things. In whatever field they’re in, they begin to make bets that will fundamentally breakdown the model they saw as problematic (which lead them to entrepreneurship in the first place) and will replace it with a new model.

Customers, clients, and others don’t have to know what model the entrepreneur is building. As a matter of fact, they don’t really care. But the entrepreneur should care. Otherwise, freelance work is always an option.

-Peace Be With You All-