[Advice] Caucusing Arete – Part 3

Wisdom and behaving ethically often overlap. But most often not always.

In a mediation, arbitration, facilitation or when having a transformative moment with a transgressing client, ethics can go out the window for the professional peace builder. This is because facilitators, mediators, arbitrators—peace builders all—are human.

There is the idea among some peace building professionals that advocacy, evaluation, design and decision-making are not integral to the role of a peace builder, and thus cannot be transformative acts. This idea underpins the much touted ethics of preserving neutrality and maintaining client self-determination.

Evaluation and transformation can happen together ethically between a client and a peace builder, but then what happens to identity, power and the deeper meaning and significance of the work of the peace building fields?

Bernard Mayer and many others have struggled with these questions in the field of mediation, but the real, scary questions lie far outside the field and relate directly to the underpinnings and assumptions about how to create conditions for peace making, or even peace keeping, and how to plot those points as destinations between two conflicting parties.

Is it more, or less, ethical for the power struggles inherent in conflict engagement and conflict advocacy to occur between two parties, than it is for the immediate conflict to be resolved?
Is it more, or less, ethical for clients to be allowed to engage in their personal struggles in a conflict scenario, while having a third party advocate in the room to represent the voices of those not represented by the dominant power structures at play?
Is it more, or less, ethical to allow clients to manipulate the caucusing process, thereby placing third party neutrals in the unenviable position of being co-conspirators in lying, deceit, or other forms of deception that continue, rather than end, power struggles?

The average client involved in a workplace dispute, a divorce mediation, a church power struggle or another conflict/confrontation/difficulty scenario, may not know what is ethical or unethical based on some ancient Greek philosopher’s definition of how the world works.

They just want their world, in this moment, to work.

-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] Trust + Accountability = Quality

There’s a lot of negative social proofing going on right now.

Some of it is transmitted through social media; some of it comes through more traditional means.

Personal branding as a marketing term has fallen out of popularity, now replaced by the equally amorphous term “thought leader” which will soon be replaced by influencer.

Microcelebrity via YouTube, Vine, Facebook videos, and other forms of entertainment are becoming more and more popular, as the inevitability of tools that enable marketers, brands and individuals to create audiences that show up just for them.

The thing is the courage to create and develop a positive, consistent presence in the face of a lack of positive social proofing has never been in shorter supply than it is right now. At the core of this lack are three crucial areas:

Trust: There is a trust shortage. People, personalities and companies that have shown up, day-in and day-out succeed, but will the current crop of YouTube celebrities make it ten more years? And when there’s no belief that the People Who Matter are even paying attention, then organizations and individuals trust themselves more than the community.
Accountability: When there is little trust—or even belief that anything (or anybody) worth trusting will show up in the first place—then there is little incentive for people and organizations to stand up and say “Yes, I made this decision.” Social shaming, a continuing erosion of public (and private) empathy, and the increasing visibility of public (and private) narcissism, are the ingredients that create a toxic stew where Bystander Behavior (or worse) is supported, condoned and given a pass.
Quality: The quality shortage is most loudly evident in the explosion of voices on social media. But it goes deeper than that. In the pursuit of thinner and thinner profit margins, and with high unemployment and social unrest, the search for quality—of work, of attitude, of standards, of values—becomes a quiet, desperate search, which very few organizational supervisors, human resource hiring managers, recently elected politicians or media talking heads, ever really address.

Trust + Accountability = Quality.

It used to be that circumstances, such as poverty, a lack of articulation, a social power structure, were barriers which could be overcome with a little grit, persistence, faith, trust and accountability.

But the belief that underlies those ideas is eroding because the disconnect between the story behind circumstances, and the reality of erosion in the above three areas, is becoming more and more pronounced.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Collaboration and the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is an environmental science concept that cuts to the core of two areas critical to organizational (and personal) conflict management.

The first idea is that there are so many resources available—time, money, talent, etc.—that there will never be a depletion. Until there is.

This conception of material and personnel resource abundance is the reason that black swan events at a macroscale, such as the 2008 economic crash, or at a microscale, such as a wife finding out that her husband is cheating (or vice-versa) hit impacted parties so hard and take such a financial, emotional, psychological and spiritual toll.

The second idea is that once resources are depleted, there is no compelling reason for any one individual to take the blame (or accept the accountability and responsibility) for replenishing them, because “Everybody was taking from it.” In a divorce proceeding (following infidelity), neither party wants to admit guilt—or their own level of responsibility in creating the situation that fostered the infidelity in the first place. After 2008, how many bankers went to jail, globally, in relation to the level of damage their decisions caused?

In an environmental science context, the solution to tragedy of the commons is to fine and otherwise economically penalize people (resource depleters, polluters, etc.) in the belief that a bigger negative downside will lead to greater self-imposed, self-interested, selflessness.

In conflict engagement and conflict management, sometimes it’s best to abandon the commons (the shared relationship, the collaborative enterprise, the cooperative partnership) rather than take on the emotional, psychological and spiritual effort to save the commons.

True emotional labor, however, requires quieting the lizard brain, accepting responsibility for the tragedy (even if there’s no commensurate feeling of a need for the taking of responsibility) and moving forward collaboratively and selflessly with people and organizations that we would really rather not.

Otherwise, who will be left in the emotional commons but the spoilers, the discontented and the selfish?

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HIT Piece 4.28.2015

I’ve been thinking about the depth of change, the nature of adoption and what it takes to move the meter.

As I have moved from mediations (trying to show parties how they can repair a boat with holes in it that may or may not have already hit the iceberg) to corporate training (trying to show parties how to build a better boat in the first place), I have noticed myself becoming more illusioned.

This is the opposite of what I’ve been told should be happening (or what some of my posts from last week seem to reflect here and here) but, instead of becoming disillusioned, I am actually becoming more hopeful.

A participant at a training last week gave me some great feedback. He said, “Never before have I been in a training that was focused on being holistic. In work, out of work, all this stuff that you’ve been talking about can be applied everywhere, to your whole life.”

Yes.

The idea of late adoption versus early adoption in product and service development is based in the power of stories. One group of people tells themselves one set of stories about a product, a service or an idea. Another group of people tells themselves another group of stories about the same things. But, eventually, a culture (or individuals) change, because of the overwhelming weight of one story over another.

Conflicts, confrontations and difficulties are the same way. We built our lives by telling ourselves stories. It’s refreshing in our daily lives (in the middle of the story, starring us) to run across someone who tells you to have the courage to unmake the story (or untell it, if you will) that has ruled your life for many years.

Yeah, I’m becoming illusioned….

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Sorting Emotional Intelligence

In a physical emergency, triage is the best way to address issues.

Originating during the Napoleonic Wars, triage divides wounded people into three categories:

Those who are likely to live, regardless of what care they receive;
Those who are likely to die, regardless of what care they receive;
Those for whom immediate care might make a positive difference in outcome.

In a conflict, confrontation or difficulty, people often have no trouble dividing their approaches to relationships in the exact same manner:

Those situations that are not likely to become conflicts, no matter what I do;
Those situations that are likely to become conflicts, no matter what I do;
Those situations that are likely to have a positive outcome if I address them as best I can right now.

Many people in their individual lives triage situations, relationships and other people, and mistakenly believe that they are acting with the best interests of other people in mind, and that they are acting within the bounds of emotional intelligence.

When asked, they will swear up and down that they are good at reading other people and examining what conflicts to engage in, what conflicts to avoid, and what conflicts to be neutral about.

Unfortunately, true emotional intelligence takes years of self-examination to master. Somewhere around 10,000 hours. The true test of developing emotional intelligence is moving the inner space from concerns about self (“I triage this situation with these people really well!”) to concerns about self and the other person (“How are we going to triage this situation together?”).

Some people like conflict, confrontation and the feeling of powerfulness that such ability to trigger a conflict or confrontation in others’ produces.

Some people don’t like conflict and will run away at the first hint of even a little difficulty.

Some people are neutral on all of this and genuinely have the ability to triage effectively.

However, in the complex business and social worlds that we inhabit (with complexity increasing rather than decreasing every day); people can rarely afford to avoid, attack or remain neutral when the opportunity for greater, deeper and more meaningful engagement presents itself.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] The Decay of Power

We are reading The End of Power by Moises Naim and it puts forth a powerful historically broad thesis.

Moises asserts that power, and the wielding of that power, isn’t what it used to be. That everywhere, from governments to corporations, power is diffusing and becomes diaphanous, even as the results of a lack of concentrated power become more and more disastrous.

His work is a counterpoint to Steven Pinker’s most recent thesis about violence and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s endless dour prognostications about the future and how unknowable it all is.

We haven’t finished the book—yet—but it consistently puts us in the mind of the HBO show, Game of Thrones, when one character says to another “In the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” And then, without putting too much of a spoiler out there, he dies.

Power is fascinating to us as conflict engagement professionals and consultants, because many, many people associate the trappings of power, the results of power either wielded or not, and the lack of power, with the actual fact of power itself.

At the micro-level, where families, communities, neighborhoods and social norming still hold sway, and privilege (racial, class, wealth and otherwise still mean something), power still is concentrated and wielded with terrible ruthlessness. At one end of the spectrum, we have thinkers like Naim, Pinker, and others who assert that the world is changing, and it is.

But too many of us are trapped in our own Game of Thrones. And we still seek out risk-averse, conflict free lives, endlessly chasing peace and tranquility that will calm and quiet our nervous lizard brains at the other end of the spectrum.

Meanwhile, the wheel of power goes around and around and around…

-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: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Who’s Afraid of Reaching?

The same people and organizations that are afraid of starting to blog—for whatever cultural organizational reasons—are starting to become perplexed as to why their reach to fans and audience is plummeting on social media.

Our advice is the same as before, but there is another piece to this equation as well:

When distribution platforms change the ways in which they let an organization talk to fans, followers and audience members,

And

When “people might read long form content even though it’s statistically shown to not be read by anybody much anymore,”

And

When the hard, scary part of starting an organizational blog seems to be around the voice, tone and message conforming and being exactly the same, no matter who writes,

THEN

The real issue is not “who’s afraid of blogging,” the real issue is “who’s afraid of doing the hard work of stretching and reaching.”

Many organizations (no matter what sector of the economy they are in—nonprofit, higher education, corporate, public service) have a fear of being perceived as being vulnerable. This is where the rubber meets the road:

Reaching is the process by which the organization says “to hell with it” and reaches for that vulnerability anyway and starts engaging with fans and audience members and trying to build their own house, rather than safely squatting in a house already built for them, and grumbling every time the rules change.
Reaching is a sign of an organization taking stock of long term people goals (and taking those goals seriously) rather than giving lip service to them, or only focusing on the short term financial goals.
Reaching is the first (and simplest) step towards empowering people in any organization.
Reaching, just like training in conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, and so on and so on, is easy to begin, but hard to follow through on.

Many, many organizations in many sectors of the economy have figured out the equation.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HIT Piece 4.21.2015

I am not a fan of meaningless meetings.

Part of the reason that I started this gig was to go to fewer meetings, not more.

Part of the reason that meetings are so prevalent is that human beings are social animals, and even in the workplace, being social takes a priority, sometimes over the task at hand.

Social capital is exchanged in meetings through preening, posturing, political jockeying and other means.

There are more immediate and meaningful ways to do this, but meetings are the one way that everyone has agreed upon to take care of this innate social need.

So maybe, I should say, I am not a fan of meetings that are meaningless for me.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Managing Muscular Development

Here’s a simple calculation:

Managing yourself + managing other people = a full time job.

Don’t let people fool you. There’s plenty of full-time work out there. But there’s no pay. And the cost for failing at it is high.

We underestimate the power of disputes (as a part of the conflict process) to go viral, through the stories that we tell other people about the conflicts we are embroiled in.

Conflict engagement requires that we understand our own inner lives, and move from being selfish (inwardly focused) to being self-aware (knowing what’s going on with us internally, without becoming overwhelmed and focused on it). This is the core of the first part of the equation.

Conflict management requires that we understand (or at least acknowledge) the presence of emotions and the depth of their impact, on other people in with whom we are in dispute. This is the core of the second part of the equation.

Conflict as a full time job is requires us to recognize that conflict sometimes serves the other person and their motives, sometimes it serves us and our motives, and sometimes it serves nobody at all. Conflict will never go away, and sometimes the management of the process requires us to be tuned in (almost to have a sixth sense) about how power, story and emotions wind around issues of advocacy, policy and process.

There’s plenty of full time work out here. But too many people would rather defer the hard work of figuring out the parts of the above equation today, in the hope that tomorrow will just be a slightly better version of the past they just left.

This is neither engagement, nor management. It is mere avoidance.

And mere avoidance atrophies our emotional muscles as surely as a lack of exercise atrophies the physical muscles.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtrainining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[E-Book] The Savvy Peace Builder

There are savvy peace builders all over the place.

Unfortunately, sometimes it is difficult to talk with people who understand what is going on, with you, your business, or even your approach to peace.

There are attorneys who mediate and volunteers who have dreams. There are professionals in the social work space who want to make a difference, but don’t always know how. And there are nonprofit community mediation executive directors who constantly feel overwhelmed and underfunded.

But, how is this any different than usual?

Well, the tool to create a new and different world surround us every day. There are savvy people and organizations building projects in all manner of areas and they are using mobile phones, laptops and social media platforms. They are creating applications and computer programs.

But, at the end of the day, when the rubber meets the road, sometimes talking to another person is what the savvy peace builder needs.

The Savvy Peace Builder E-Book is a collection of 32 posts, over 40+ pages, written over the last year, chronicling the best advice that I have actually lived, and expereinced, day-to-day, in and out, while building every aspect of my project, Human Services Consulting and Training.

After downloading this e-book, you will:

Find out what to do when it all doesn’t work…
How to talk to people who don’t matter, and how to talk to the people who do matter…
How to balance your work and life…

And much, much more!

I hope that you take the time to download the book.
I hope that you take the time to read the book.

But even more, I hope that you take the time to apply, and act on, the lived lessons listed and written about, and apply them to building your next peace building project.

Because I believe in you and I know you can do it.

[download id=”3014″]

-Peace Be With You All-