‘All right. All right. All right.’

We laugh at movies featuring the 35 or 40 year old who won’t leave the parents’ house and get a life.

We believe that the current Best Actor recipient once starred in a movie centering around such an animating theme.

But failing to launch (or even failing to recognize the oncoming signs of failing to launch) is not just the provenance of Hollywood scriptwriters and actors, it is a real occurrence in the real world of corporate boardrooms and small business back rooms.

Typically, this failure coalesces around an idea, an innovation or a project that doesn’t get enough organizational political support, organizational money or organizational time. This most obvious failure to launch shows up on the cover of the industry magazine, or as a hit piece on a blog or social media.

But failure to launch also happens quietly, under the radar, lurking like a submarine beneath the conflicts between people in the workplace. And it’s a moment that is so fleeting—so ephemeral—that it’s missed almost all the time.

The failure goes something like this:

Sharon and Bill have a disagreement about a project in which they are both invested. Sharon can’t see Bill’s point of view. Bill thinks Sharon is being obstructionist on purpose. But before Sharon and Bill can really get into it, they both pause—maybe at the water cooler in a conversation with another person, maybe in traffic on the way home—and they have a moment where the thought “Maybe I’m wrong here,” flits across their minds.

Like gossamer.

And just like that, it’s gone. Along with the twinge of regret and disappointment—as well as an oncoming sigh—accompanied by each parties’ resolve, hardening to “Do what is right. For the company.”

The question that makes consultants uncomfortable to ask—and employees and employers uncomfortable to ponder—is the question that on the face seems confrontational and too direct, but underneath is probing. Aiming at the dark heart of what happens in—and out—of the cubicle:

“Have you ever failed personally at resolving a business conflict?”

Or put another way, “When was the last time you failed to launch?”

-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/

Negotiating Innovation

There are all kinds of competencies that a leader has to have in order to be successful in an organization.

Unfortunately, we tend to focus on the flashy ones that look good on the resume, in the job description, or that can show up on the company masthead or in an article in an industry publication.

But the competencies that matter the most are those that don’t show up as prominently.

Conflict engagement and effective conflict management tend to be focused on developing the competencies that will maintain the organizational culture and reinforce the status quo.

Developing these competencies and reinforcing them inside an organizational culture, is the innovator’s dilemma and has been for many years.

Creating a culture focused on developing and nurturing effective, developmental conflict engagement practices—as part of a set of innovative, overarching leadership competencies—can seem like climbing up hill with a spoon.

But is there really any other way?

-Peace Be With You All-

Conflict Engagement Systems Design: Will You Choose?

Organizations, just like individuals, have a particular conflict style and support a particular conflict response culture.

Since culture eats strategy for breakfast (thanks Peter Drucker), conflict is an inherent part of the cultural process of continual misalignment at many organizations.

Don’t believe me? Well, organizational misalignment between cultures and products can cause problems for people in organizations who are trying to innovate. It also causes problems for customers who experience a confusing product and poor customer service.

With all of that, one of the easiest ways to break a culture and let it grow is to reach inside the culture to the people who are part of the culture, to develop something new. But, this approach is fraught with difficulty and mixed motives, which are why most change management—and conflict development processes—tend to fail.

One easy way to overcome resistance to change and organizational misalignment is to develop a visual model, because people in organizations are more attuned with what they can visually interpret.

However, getting a person who can facilitate, storyboard, capture the visuals, and circulate the story among the gatekeepers and decision makers who often aren’t in the room, requires bringing in an outside presence; which, can be fraught with difficulty, because if the person—or organization—that you choose doesn’t work out, well, then all that investment gets no return.

Of course, you can always accept the alternative in your organization, where continual misalignments create disputes and the conflict process never gets straightened out or successfully engaged with.

[Thanks to the folks at HBR.org for moving my thinking on this.]

-Peace Be With You All-

Stop Fooling Around

“Let’s get serious.”

So…what…we’ve just been fooling around the whole time?

Those three words, codified through social niceties and small talk, are often said before official, issue driven, conversations and negotiations begin.

Typically, they are used as a way to separate people from each other and to categorize those who seem issue focused and decision driven—from those who seem distracted and lazy.

But, this is a false equivalency: equating being “serious” with being focused, driven—and by extension—successful in life in all the ways that the folks in the other silo are not.

And all this siloing through language only serves to inflate individual egos, and to deflate the potential for a positive situation to develop between parties who may be viewing the same issues through different frames.

We’ve got a better idea: just get started with the large talking and move right past the short hand, small talk, to the issues that matter.

-Peace Be With You All-

Who Will Take Up The Banner

We seek experts out because, even in a world where there is no more “secret sauce,” the vast majority of us still take the shortest route to the best possible outcome.

Peace building professionals should have gained knowledge of this, either through practical experiences at the peace building table, or just through watching humanity stumble through this thing called life.

Is it any wonder then, that our professions—from the law to engineering—still view credentialing as the “coin of the realm” and seek to convince clients (who don’t know enough to question otherwise) of the veracity of their pedigrees?

This tendency to seek the shortcut, the easy answer, and to give ideas and philosophies which seem complicated the short shrift, has also lead to a loss of practical, moral wisdom. A loss of Phronesis, if you will.

The peace building professional who seeks to ensure that her clients are self-determined and are allowed the space to enact further damage on themselves and each other, is worthy of far more credentialing than the individual who knew all the right answers on the last State Board exams.

The field of peace building is at a crossroads—and has been for about the last ten years.

The practitioners, credentialers, academics, and others who hold the reigns of power, have to decide if Phronesis is more important than field level shorthand, and whether or not honoring the former rather than the latter, will lead to a stronger field or a weaker one.

Clients and the market can’t direct the field around this, they can’t point the way.

Data and technology will not save us either. Artificial intelligence is just that, artificial, and lacking in profound moral and ethical wisdom. And big data is only information without interpretation and action.

Phronesis is what needs to be acknowledged so that clients’ best interests are protected.

But who will take up the banner?

-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/

[Advice] Caucusing Arete – Part Two

ADR professionals are asked to where many hats, and are often called to wear them all with excellence.

There is much debate over whether it’s good enough to be good enough anymore, or if we all have to be excellence, but in the space of ADR, arête is important.

Arête is the Greek word for the idea of living up to your potential with excellence.

Now, we’ve talked about this before, but the issue becomes more important when we talk about client autonomy and a preservation of client self-determination.

Wearing that hat—for both clients in a dispute mediation scenario—is kind of like holding two thoughts in your head (and in your heart) at the same time.

For the ADR professional, becoming comfortable with pursuing this form of excellence is a strong part of the hard work of building something that matters.

-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/

We’re Going To Win

Nonviolent resistance is fetishized through cultural memory as being easy, but it’s really not.

There’s a story in Malcolm Galdwell’s book David and Goliath that he takes from Diane McWhorter’s book Carry Me Home, where a man is giving a speech and he is attacked. The crowd at the speech at first believes that the attack is part of the speech, but quickly realizes that it is not.

The man giving the speech, instead of responding with violence toward his attacker as a form of defense, became his assailant’s protector, singing him songs and wrapping him in an embrace. Eventually, the attacker is introduced to the crowd as a guest.

The man whispers to his attacker before introducing him to the crowd “We’re going to win.”

How many times in our lives do we respond to an attack with aggression, passive resistance, apathy or even outright violence?

Responding to an attack with nonviolence—and following that response all the way to its logical conclusion, which may involve the potential for death—is the single most courageous act David can perform against Goliath.

“We are going to win.” But, Martin Luther King knew that nonviolence unto death was the only courageous way to accomplish that win.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Courage to Bleed

It’s thicker at the center of a disk.

It’s thinner towards the edges.

That thin edge is called the “bleeding edge.”

The bleeding edge is the place where lack of common consensus, low chance of adoption and a high level of risk, meet to ensure there will be a conflict between the thick, comfortable middle and the thin, dangerous edge.

However, if you turn the disk on its side and look at the down slope, from the height of the thick center to the valley of the thin edge, it appears to be a gentle decline.

But it’s really not.

It’s more like a steep slope where speed increases the closer you get to the edge and the further you get away from the center.

The distance between the thick center—where every organization wants to be—and the thin edge—where every organization starts—can only be negotiated one customer, one conflict, at a time.

Galaxies are shaped like this. So are societies. So are communities, organizations, and families.

Get to the bleeding edge.

-Peace Be With You All-

Conflict Engagement Systems Design: Real Innovation for Your Organization

Innovation is the “hot” word among all the business thought leaders as we kick off 2015…

There’s “dark-side” innovation, “game changing” innovation and even “shark jumping” innovation, as a recent search of LinkedIn thought influencer posts recently revealed.

But there’s very little talk about organizational innovation focused on the greatest—and most taken for granted resource—that and organization has: its people.

Now, as companies are emerging from the trance of Frederick Wilson Taylor, they are still continuing to treat employees and others as disposable widgets. The current pressure on Marissa Mayer and Yahoo is just a recent high profile example of this.

But, organizations are more than short term ROI and their daily stock ticker price.

Something has to give, if innovation is the key to moving forward in a business environment that is increasingly unstable and unpredictable.

It’s time to hack at the organizational culture that underlies preconceived notions of productivity, innovation and even people.

Conflicts are part of the innovation process and disputes are the result of that process.

Conflict also brings change and can serve as a driver for innovation in even the most entrenched organizational culture.

It’s time to hack a new system. It’s time for conflict engagement systems design for the 21^st century.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Who Will Hire The Bigots

In a world where talent and ability matter more than character and virtue, what is an old racist to do?

Donald Sterling, former owner of the LA Clippers behaved abhorrently in many ways over the years, which was well documented everywhere:

in court documents,
among close friends and business associates,
even by a fractured, distracted, ADD-ridden, news media.

But until his comments were recorded surreptitiously and then played back, not one iota of an issue was raised.

He was even given an award by the NAACP.

But now that the dust has settled on that unrepentant old racist, what are we to think of his sudden change in fortune?

In this current incarnation of American culture, talent and ability trump character.

And character and virtue seem to only matter as they publicly buttress innate talent and ability.

See Tiger Woods’ fall from grace as an example of this.

When culture giveth position, power, accolades and applause, culture can also taketh away.

Forgiveness and grace are gifts to be given out of a sense of compassion and empathy (are Sterling, Woods, former Mozilla Firefox CEO Brendan Eich not human? Do they not bleed?) But a desire for lockstep conformity prohibits this. And when character is linked exclusively to talent and ability forgiveness and grace are hard to come by.

Because everybody fails.

Particularly the envious.

-Peace Be With You All-