[Strategy] The Cultural Bleed

During our time when technology is flattening the formerly meaningful differences between people and systems, and turning—what once used to be a disk that was thicker at the center than the edges, to one where the edges are getting sharper and sharper—culture still matters.

Competency in how to handle the steep decline from the comfortable center of cultural assumptions to the bleeding edge of cultural competency, should be one of the most sought after skills by employers.

But it’s not.

Mainly because employers are people first and positional titles second, and people tend to lack the courage and self-awareness to break their own frames, in order to attain competency.

Any kind of competency.

The distance between the thick comfortable center and the scary bleeding edge (which is as sharp as it sounds) is not a straight line. It’s curved, with switchbacks, dead ends, false starts and bad beginnings.

But the courage to break our frames and skate toward the bleeding edge of cultural competency, is a core leadership trait that any employer should alwasy be in the process of creatively destroying and rebuilding, before looking to develop it—or hire it—in others.

-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/

[Strategy] Leading Through Obligation

If you are a manager in an organization of any size, with any mission or scope of responsibility, it is your obligation to lead.

Now, obligation is a loaded word, filled with the stresses of accountability, responsibility, and eating last in a world where everyone wants to eat first.

Obligation comes along with the word “honor,” which, as a verb, means to “fulfill (an obligation) or keep (an agreement).

There is a tacit agreement between leaders and followers: Leaders set a tone, provide a secure space for initiatives to be implemented and then codify action through words and deeds. Followers implement the initiatives as they are proposed, rally behind the leader in times of stress or conflict and promote the tone of the actions.

At least, in a perfect world.

Unfortunately, we live in a world of imperfection, mixed motives, lies and deception and selfish pursuits.

In this world, leadership is even more critical and, at the core, requires human leaders to sacrifice resources (material, emotional and even spiritual) in order to accomplish a greater good for their followers—even when they believe that the greater good is wrong.

This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between politicians and statesmen.
This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between role models and celebrities.
This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between leaders and followers.

A leader’s responsibility is not to chart a course for the followers and then blindly lead them there, in spite of everything.

A leader’s responsibility is to chart a course for their followers (after actively listening to their followers) and then convince, persuade, cajole and move the followers toward accomplishing those goals.

This process requires an understanding, and an acceptance of, the definitions of obligation, honor, responsibility, accountability, character and honor.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Who Will Hire the Bigots: Sigma Alpha Epsilon Edition

In a world where proper outward social conformity is often conflated with the presence of internal, moral character, what’s a young man in a fraternity to do?

Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members, who are students at the University of Oklahoma have been either suspended or removed from school, for creating a chant with racist lyrics, and then having it filmed and plopped on the Internet and TV.

These students are about to have their future employment fortunes changed, because, the Internet neither forgets—nor forgives.

Should we be surprised that students in this fraternity seemingly happily chanted along with lyrics that might not have been above board?

No.

Social pressure to conform to group norming is still more powerful at the human, physical, person-to-person, individual level, than Internet shaming ever will be at a larger societal level. And ignorance of history and facts is not merely the provenance of the young and impressionable.

But, here’s the thing: These students have now been impacted far beyond the actual impact of their words and enthusiastic chanting in the video. Yes, it went viral. Yes, many people have played it, talked about it, linked to it, and written about it (heck, even we are). But has anyone asked the larger culture what the societal impact of such an outburst actually was?

No.

No, we haven’t.

Opinion polls are gradually being replaced by instant reactions through immediate outlets (like Twitter, YouTube comments, etc.) to stimulus events. This rarely commented upon cultural shift has created a “firebombing” mentality that has scorched the personal, business, emotional and financial earths of many people, both public personalities and private individuals. All the way from former Mozilla Firefox CEO Brendan Eich and former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, to the two police officers who were shot in response to the death of Eric Gardner and shooting of Michael Brown.

Forgiveness and grace are gifts to be given out of a sense of compassion and empathy (are the fraternity members at OSU not human? Do they not bleed?). But the larger social desire for lockstep conformity prohibits this. And when proper outward social conformity is linked exclusively to the assumption of character, forgiveness and grace are hard to come by.

We are sure that the OSU students who have been suspended (or removed from school) as a result of this incident, will attain employment in the future and will move on to living as full lives as they possibly can, but what deeper lessons have they learned from this incident, from culture, society and from institutions of higher learning, about race, character, conscience and forgiveness?

-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/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

[Advice] The Project Work Trap

The savvy peace building consultant looks at project work as another version of the golden handcuffs scenario, they started their project to avoid in the first place.

Work for time is the consultant’s version of not scaling. And, in order to effectively scale such transitive and necessary products as peace, honesty, good faith and courage, project work has to be the minimally viable product.

Developing books, developing processes, developing software applications, developing “train the trainer” processes and more are ways around, through and over the project work trap.

And the savvy peace builder knows this…

-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/

HIT Piece 03.10.2015

The world is full of three things: problems, ideas and people.

The world is not full of three things: value, implementation and character.

One thing I have been struggling with lately is that I see abundance everywhere online. There is so much virtual space on the Internet that it’s almost overwhelming.

But how many people are choosing to build their own platforms in this virtual abundance, versus those people who are hanging out in neighborhoods already designed and built by someone else?

This is not only a social media application question (although the cloistering is most notable there) but also it is a general philosophical question for anyone who’s developing anything on the web.

As I have been thinking more and more about what this project for peace will look like five to ten years out, I have been more and more considering the efficacy of designing on open source platforms, marketing through freemium or low cost channels, the power and exclusivity of paywalls, and how to develop, grow and scale this project without encouraging cloistering, prejudice or assisting, either tacitly or openly, the development of scalable ghettos.

Heavy considerations all.

-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/

[Opinion] A Utopian Singularity

The release of nuclear power was greeted with a mixture of awe and triumph.

Splitting the atom was—at one time—the most difficult task that humanity had set itself upon completing.

Once the atom was split, however, and the power released from that act was applied to the making of war and the destruction of human lives, in order to—ostensibly—prevent the loss of other human lives, humanity recoiled in horror at that which we had accomplished.

Robert Oppenheimer’s words at the Trinity test ring down through to our time: “ Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

And now, we have arrived at yet another linchpin moment in human history. Just as the act of splitting the atom and releasing it’s energy was supposed to bring humanity closer to a utopian peace, we are now at a moment where very smart people are promising us that we are ready to release the potential of AI and many other technologies.

They promise us a jobless future of endless prosperity, with at least our basic needs completely fulfilled.

They promise us a future of 3D printed food, self-driving cars, predictive machines that will learn what we need and provide it to us without question.

They promise us a future where there will be haves and have-nots, but that they line between the elite and the commoners will be the same as those who can defeat—or prolong—their own deaths through genetic manipulation, and those who know that the technology is out there to do this, and cannot get it.

But, in the midst of all of these promises—remarkably similar to the many promises made to humanity by well meaning smart people (like Robert Oppenheimer) before we released atomic power—they do not ask the truly existential questions the release of such technologies creates:

Will a jobless future have space for fulfilling work to be accomplished by people who want to do it?
Will 3D printed food provide for all of humanity’s basic dietary needs without damaging the environment, or the people who consume it?
Is overcoming death really the highest possible calling for an individual human being?
Can a man made machine ever experience emotions, question its own limitations or explore the possibility of a soul?
Will machine learning bring utopian peace, or is the brute nature of the human animal more likely to emerge once the singularity arrives?

What’s most disturbing to us is that none of the really smart people in genetics, neurobiology, data analytics, computer and software technology or any of these other fields, seem to be interested in sitting down with a few philosophers, religious practitioners and policy makers to even discuss the questions in the first place.

To quote another famous man: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Humanity’s progress is too important to be left alone in the hands of the very smart people.

-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/

[Strategy] 20-80-100

80% of the conflicts in your organization will be solved by 20% of the people in your organization.

And, not all of those people will have positional titles, effective job descriptions, or even work in “traditional” departments that “are supposed to” address conflicts.

Pushing the frontier of who gets what, so that the majority gets more value out of the conflict resolution process, should be the goal of all organizations.

But, there’s a ceiling on that value, generated by competing goals and desires, differing value placed on outcomes and the lack of ability for some in an organization to accept the efficacy of pursuing more than one outcome.

As long as 20% of the people in organization are overcoming 80% of the ceilings in 100% of organizations, the ceiling on claiming value will not move effectively.

-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/

[Strategy] Integrative Change

The systems undergirding our lives, our families, our communities and our organizations, governments and businesses are based on distributive mindsets, philosophies, behaviors and approaches to conflict.

Distribution grows from the foundation of perceived scarcity of resources, competition, a “winner-take-all” mentality, and limited outcomes around things that matter.

But sometimes, even inside of these systems, and working inside distributive rules, individuals attempt to remake the world to reflect a different reality and to attain different outcomes.

Individuals attempt to be collaborative and build relationships based on integrative bargaining strategies, collaborative teambuilding and a philosophy that the ends and the means must match.

On rare occasions, individuals scale up those relationships into organizations. Then, the distributive systems embedded in economics, social policy and the law, co-opt their best practices, their language and their approach to develop a “brand image” while losing and abrogating the heart of those individual interactions.

The push and pull that underlies the growth of the Internet—and its future spread to other areas—is that between a distributive world view and economic system, now being forced to operate within a highly integrative system that wasn’t really built for them.

The great benefit of integrative negotiation tactics and strategies is that they serve to build the foundation to be distributive in the future, rather than having to consider proving the benefits of distributive negotiation tactics and strategies by the next quarterly stock report.

Organizations built on an integrative framework inherently will have no trouble operating distributively when its time. And they will reap the benefits long-term for a long time. We’re looking at you, Facebook.

Organizations built on distributive frameworks will perish, or have immense trouble determining when best to operate integratively when it’s most appropriate. We’re looking at you, IBM.

Individuals, however, will continue to interact both distributively and integratively no matter what the system tells them.

-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/

[Strategy] CRaaS for Employees

Online based processes to resolve human disputes have had a long and harried journey.

In some ways, this is because technology and innovation has not caught up to the conceptual framework of the people who envisioned its wide use.

In other ways, the integration of human beings—with the emotional stimulus that human beings bring to conflicts—has proven to be beyond the capacity of such online systems to handle.

In orer to overcome both of these drawbacks, clumsy integration of human beings into the process of online dispute resolution at the beginning point, the midpoint and even the endpoint of systems has become enshrined in ODR procedures and practices.

However, organization of all sizes, can create their own conflict resolution as a service platform, for the benefit of employees, with the help of web based applications, cloud based storage capacity and encrypted and secured servers.

As technology further advances, predictive (rather than reactive) systems based in artificial intilleigence, data storage practices and analytical tracking, could provide the next pieces in the process to integrate humans in a conflict resolution system that serves the needs of both human resources and the employees in conflict.

-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/

[Opinion] The Voice

Before there was ever the written word, there was the voice that was heard.

The oral tradition of storytelling has along and ancient pedigree, dating back to the dawn of humanity and continuing on through this day.

We have invented tools to record or musings, our hopes, our dreams, our poetry, our songs, our defiance and our place.

The human voice carries meaning with which the written word can never fully compete.

And in the new world of podcasting, the technology for recording the spoken word and transmitting it to hundreds and thousands of people has never been less expensive.

We are living through a Renaissance of podcasting as the field expands (11 million podcasts at last count) and as the field does so, more and more people looking to find an audience, gather a tribe, and make some noise, are going to get on the bandwagon.

We’ve been diligently working on Season Two of Earbud_U, the conflict engagement podcast, bringing together interviews with people from various backgrounds and with various experiences, and asking them the ultimate questions, ultimately.

But, Season One is about halfway through and your can hear all of the episodes, featuring all of our guests, by clicking on the links below:

Earbud_U, Episode #1 – Darren MacDonald

Earbud_U, Episode #2 – Jared Campbell

Earbud_U, Episode #3 – Brad Heckman

Earbud_U, Episode #4 – Elin Barton

Earbud_U, Episode #5 – Diane Lange

Earbud_U, Episode #6 – London Ladd

And…

-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/