Build Your Own House

For some people, renting is the way to go.

It removes the hassles of having to do yard work, deal with snow removal, or fix the things that invariably go wrong with a house.

For some people, ownership is the way to go.

It allows the person (or couple, or family) to feel psychologically, financially and spiritually grounded in a world of impermanence.

The same parallel can be drawn with organizations and their use of marketing tactics through social platforms.

Some organizations would rather pay the rent to get to eyeballs that the landlords of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pintrest, Instagram, and on and on have decided to charge.

Some organizations are choosing to opt-out and go back to doing the work of building their own platform through the use of their website, their blog and their email distribution lists.

Which strategy is better is really a matter of whether an organization is looking to persist and remain relevant in spite of the changing winds of social platforms, or if an organization is just looking to “make some noise.”

However, never forget: The social media landlords of Facebook, Twitter, et.al., already put in the hard work building a really, really, attractive space for all those tenants whose eyeballs you want to show your content to.

So, are you a renter or an owner?

-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/

Conflict Engagement Systems Design: Why Its Past Time

In the 21^st century, the innovative difference between organizations that succeed, and organizations that fail, will be in how they address disputes between their employees.

As an employer, are you agnostic on this? Well, consider the following statistics:

So, here’s the question, if employees are increasingly disengaged and losing productivity, but innovation is expected to increase in 2015, where is the breaking point?

We have blogged before about conflict competence, Conflict Resolution-as-a-Service and even how HR can be used to innovate with people. But this is not enough.

The fact of the matter is, it’s time for all of us to get busy, designing new systems and process that exist, both outside and inside current and future, legal and ethical frameworks, that will protect employee self-determination and employer innovation, in a dispute scenario.

Disputes are the natural outcome of a conflict process. Employer responses to those outcomes have been broken for many years. It’s time to innovate a different way in 2015.

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

The Crack-Up of The New Republic

Watching old industries get disrupted is a painful thing, and nowhere is this more evident than with established media companies.

From the New York Times to the New Criterion, everyone is feeling the pinch from digital disruption and “vertically integrated” media companies, such as Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, who rely on click-bait articles to justify the spending of advertising dollars.

And all of this is happening in a world of declining audience attention spans, increased distractions and with the ever present specter of “content shock” on the horizon.

In case you missed it, The New Republic, recently purchased by Chris Hughes, is cracking up. The media driven articles about the methods and responses to this change, serve as another sign that, what was once thought secure and assured in an open market, is now not so much.

This is what happens, when digital replaces physical, all methods and modes of communication have to change in order to adapt to the new market realities.

In other words: It had to happen.

Content distribution channels remain the ultimate arbiter of content market value. They are—as they always have been—agnostic on the substance of that content: uplifting or entertaining; progressive or conservative; educational or vapid.

Look, digital disruption is taking out everyone, even the old gray lady is offering payouts to journalists who want out because they can’t adapt to the new rules. Say what you may about the direction of The New Republic, and about whether or not it becomes “vertically integrated,” the underlying hand-wringing for “educational long form content” getting out to “the masses” is misplaced.

Content, is content, is content. Long form, investigative, journalism has never been immune to forces of digital market disruptions.

This is a time for excitement, not dread. A time for hope, not fear. A time for response, not blind, reaction.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 1.06.2015

I am wondering about the allure of false peace.

You know the kind of “peace” that comes from accommodation, rather than effective confrontation.
You know the kind of “peace” that comes from quiet acquiescence to the outcomes of the process of conflicts.
You know the kind of “peace” that people seem to favor, when they shrug their shoulders, and seem to passively accept a false outcome, rather than doing the hard work of actively pursuing a different choice.

I wonder if the presence of false peace makes it harder for real innovation and change.

There is a marked difference between real peace and being “just left alone,” or, vainly hoping that the lion of conflict will consume your emotions and spirit last rather than first.

I wonder, do people really want change in their hearts, or do they just say that they do with their mouths?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Changing Our Approach to Facebook

Remember the days when it was still “The” Facebook and all of your friends’ information, pictures and stories scrolled up right away in your newsfeed?

We got involved with Facebook a couple of years after its inception at around 2006. Since then we have had, admittedly, a “love/hate” relationship with the platform on both the personal and the business side.

Since launching the HSCT page in late 2012, we consciously decided to leverage Facebook strategically to gain an audience, and drive traffic to our blog. For the most part, this approach has worked well. About 44% of traffic to the HSCT #Communication Blog comes to us through Facebook. The remainder comes through email connections, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social distribution methods. And that Facebook driven 44% is almost 100% organic traffic.

Even as our dependence on Facebook to drive traffic has increased, we have noticed that conversion among our live audiences (the people who come and see us) has fractured, mainly along age lines. Those between the ages of 35 and 55 are connecting with us through Facebook, but the younger demographic (i.e. 18-35) are connecting with us through Twitter.

So…in 2015, the question becomes: What are we to do about social distribution through Facebook?

Well, this is a larger puzzle that many brands are working out in 2015, but for our money, the best approach is to change our thinking taking the following two points into consideration:

Facebook is now a billboard service on the digital highway. And, just like billboards on the physical highway, certain people see the billboards if they drive on that highway and certain people don’t. Physical billboard space has become pricey in the “real” world. In the digital realm, Facebook Ad spend, and Boost Post spending in an era of zero organic growth has also become pricey for a small, one-person shop.
The gamification of the SEO process on Facebook continues to yield dividends. We have to tag our friends on our personal page, whenever we post a blog article, in order to bump up our numbers of content views. This is unsustainable, to say the least, because the cost-per-click of ad spend on Facebook is only going to increase, even as the dubious benefits of gamification become less viable.

So, what to do?

Beginning this week, and for the remainder of 2015, we here at HSCT are going to pay for fewer posts, less often. The posts will be mostly image based and will always link back to blog based content.

The other thing that we will be doing is posting fewer links back to our original, blog based content. Instead, we are moving in the direction of creating newsletters and beefing up our distribution model directly to—and through—our website.

So, for those of you who have liked and consumed our content via Facebook, we’ll still be there, just less often.

To join our email list, please, head on over to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/hsct-offers page and sign up today. After you do that, download our two FREE offers, our [download id=”2414″] and our [download id=”2390″].

And have a great 2015!

-Peace Be With You All-

There is A New Year: 365 More Chances to Do It Right

We have a few people that we have worked with this year, here at Human Services Consulting and Training that we would like to thank this year:

To all of those who have worked with HSCT this year, thank you for your time, your efforts and your trust in our collaborative efforts to move toward education and understanding.

To all of those who we will continue to work with in 2015, just remember, January 1, 2015 represents the beginning of 364 continuous days to get it right, in peace, grace and love.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Eating Ramen to Pay the Light Bill

Generating enough revenue to pay the bills is the ultimate goal of making peace as a conflict consultant.

Without revenues, there is no business and without business, there is no opportunity to engage in the hard work of making a dent in the universe and making peace in someone’s life.

So, if the savvy conflict consultant has to eat ramen noodles to sufficiently build up enough revenues to build the business, then she should eat the noodles.

-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/

Systems of the 21st Century

For many organizations, the 21^st century has proven to be pretty much the same as the 20^th century.

People still get hired and fired in much the same ways that they did 20 years ago.

Organizations and businesses still do the core processes of their businesses—sales, finance, marketing, accounting—in the same way that they did—with some minor cosmetic changes—30 years ago.

And, unfortunately, organizations and businesses still handle conflict in the same way that they did 30 years ago. They still view conflict as a process rather than as a product.

They still view the resolution of conflicts—however they are resolved—as “the way we do things around here.” This is reflected in either the avoidance of the process, the accommodation of the tradition of the process, or the attacking of outside interveners with new ideas as “not understanding how we do things here.”

Many organizations still pay outside consultants or have internal offices and departments, designed to “handle” conflicts in the ways that the organization sees as comfortable and preserving the status quo.

In order to do the brave work of the 21^st century, peacemakers must become more and more involved in developing bleeding edge systems for organizations, because the changes to systems that on the surface appear cosmetic, will have deep ramifications for the future.

-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 Center is Holding

The signs of the post-American (some would say post-empire American) world, are all around us, from Trayvon Martin to the latest corporate hacking issues at Sony.

The center is holding culturally and economically, in “flyover country,” where—outside of a very few areas in the economy—failure is still not tolerated, taking risk is still frowned upon, and steady, 40 hour a week values, are still being inculcated into the young.

At the edges though, things are fraying and the Sony hack is the latest example of the fraying edges. Data illegally obtained and then released to the tabloid journalistic community.

And Sony isn’t the only one. JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, Kmart, and now Staples have all experienced this phenomenon.

For the people at the cultural, political and even economic center, this represents a watershed shift from the America that they knew—and that they still want to believe in—to an America that they do not understand.

We have said before that the large looming 21st century conflicts will be between those who have access to technology and software and those who do not, or even between those people who seek to define the future through search (Google) instead of connection (Facebook).

At a global level this will be true, but in the US, the battles coming are between those who believe and seek to shape the culture in post-empire ways, and those out in “flyover country” who are still raising children and inculcating them to believe in the values of empire based thinking: God, family, country.

The role of the peacemaker at the policy table, the entertainment industry, and even in the digital space, is now more important than ever.

-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/

[Opinion] Politik With The Addition of Other Means

The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz noted, about 230 years or so ago, that “War is the continuation of Politik with the addition of other means.”

In a digitally connected world, hacking, data thefts, downloading intellectual property without previous permission, plagiarism without appropriate attribution, are all “added on means.”

Depending upon your frame of reference— of the person or organization being victimized, or of the person or organization doing the victimization—these acts can also be framed as war.

Students of peace in the digitally connected world should become students of the new boundaries of warfare in the 21^st century, in order to educate the masses on the nature, depth and breadth of future conflict.

Because someone is going to have to stop the black hat actors, before they become black hat actors in the first place.

To join our email list, please, head on over to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/hsct-offers page and sign up today. After you do that, download our two FREE offers: [download id=”2414″] and [download id=”2390″].

-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/