[ICYMI] How to Autopsy a Conflict

How you get started with clients who need a situation resolved?

What are the steps you take to assess the dynamics?

These are great questions that, in order to answer fully, would require several blog posts covering psychology, sociology, theology, legal and other areas. However we are going to forego all of that.

Instead, we are going to focus on the post-mortem analysis of a conflict.

In the medical field, post-mortems occur when a pathologist must determine the cause of death of a human body.

Autopsies are performed either to answer legal or medical questions and tend to be either external, or the more common one that lay people think of, where a body is broken up and sewn back together.When a conflict communication consultant arrives on the scene, it feels like we are performing a post-mortem. And, in essence, we are performing a relational one.

Three steps are required to perform a conflict post-mortem:

Determine the players and their positions,
Answer questions about their motivations and goals,
Propose solutions that will benefit everybody.

Sometimes the solution involves changing an organizational or personal culture and that approach is what we’re all about here at HSCT.Here at HSCT, we deeply believe that changing your personal culture first can lead to changing your organizational culture.

A conflict consultant (or mediator) is called into a situation where the conflict is alive and well.

As a neutral third party, that person (typically us) has no idea what is going on.

Or, they may have only a tangential idea based off of something they were told by either a third party to the conflict, or a person involved in the conflict directly who may be trying to sway the third party participant in their favor.

Messy stuff.

So, us (or an organization like ours) enters the conflict. Our principal conflict consultant talks to all the parties involved and attempts to determine with at least 50% accuracy the answers to three questions. And yes, this is incredibly difficult.

Here are the three questions:

Who’s lying to us about the situation and their role in it?
Who’s telling us the truth about the situation and their role in it?
Who doesn’t care and wants the situation to “go away” so that they “can get back to their real lives!”?

And yes, in case you are wondering, we have actually had clients say that last one to us.

The answer to the first question—who’s lying— helps us determine what direction we go in to propose resolution to the issue at hand. We may propose a mediation, one-on-one coaching with the conflict participants, or outside resources (i.e. therapy) in addition to whatever else the parties may need.

The answer to the second question—who’s telling the truth—helps us determine who needs the most direct intervention first.

In the case of a conflict involving violence against children, elderly or other individuals who are at-risk, the answer to that question is always, the victim is telling the truth. Period. Once the person being victimized is removed then we can successfully manage other areas of the conflict. Or, disengage from it completely.

The answer to the third question—who doesn’t care—helps us determine who to ignore and whom to persuade as a potential ally to advocate for solutions that may benefit everybody in the conflict.

This is a tough position to take, because sometimes conflict participants say that they don’t care, when in reality they do. Or, they may be saying that they don’t care as another way of saying “I’m emotionally exhausted by this issue.” Conflict avoidance is a way to resolve conflicts, just not a preferable way.

Emotional exhaustion, apathy, victimization, disengagement, deceit, power games, these are all the energies that animate a conflict and keep it going and reproducing, like a cancer in the body.

Asking these three questions allows the principal conflict consultant at Human Services Consulting and Training to make a determination regarding the best path to take to resolution.

Originally published on July 3, 2013.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today.

[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/

[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-

[Strategy] The Line From Emotional Awareness

Lines are everywhere.

They denote boundaries and connote separation. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The shortest distance between two points is a man and his money. The lines are on the map.

Redlining was the process by which people were segregated from each other in urban (and rural) areas in order to prevent (or expand) access to resources. Gerrymandering is the process by which boundaries are eliminated (or created) to get political parties in power.

Lines are everywhere.

They are inside of us. They are metaphorical, but when people decide to avoid a conflict, or suppress an emotion, they are either cleaving to lines already created for them, or they are creating their own lines.

Emotional competency begins with the awareness of these lines inside of us. It begins when we look at the lines and actively decide to take our emotional well-being into our own hands. This is tough, and tenuous and it is not guaranteed.

Here are three things to consider on your way to emotional competency:

Gain emotional awareness—many people in organizations are aware that they have emotions; they are people after all. However, they sometimes lack the courage to assess their own internal lives. People in organizations where we have done corporate training have often approached us afterwards and said “I knew I should have done (X) differently, but I had no idea what was going on with me.”
Develop emotional intelligence—many people underestimate the importance of stories that they tell themselves, the role of fear of failure and the importance of framing and emotions. Without understanding these areas (and taking the time to engage with them) gaining emotional intelligence can seem like a lifetime long, twilight struggle.
Attain emotional competency—many people confuse competency with intelligence or awareness. Many people in organizations (some in the C-Suite) would rather pay for intelligence and awareness, rather than competency. But emotional competency matters more than even talent or skill. In an organization, the people who advance the furthest are those who are the most emotionally competent in the end.

Lines are everywhere.

But they don’t have to be in you, your organization or even your life.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What Cultural Competency Looks Like…

So, if culture matters, and the people in your organization drive your culture forward, what does competency look like?

Cultural competency looks like the founder/CEO knowing what the organization is going to look like. And then sticking to that vision.
Cultural competency looks like the team being composed of people who buy into the vision and will push it forward relentlessly. But, the team is not a collection of mere “yes” men…or “yes” women…
Cultural competency looks like hiring people based on your internal gut reactions—backed up by trustworthy people—rather than merely relying on cultural inertia to move an organization forward.

Culture eats strategy gets repeated over and over, and then a group, a speaker, or a room, laughs and moves forward with their own preconceived notions of strategically implementing whatever organizational changes are deemed necessary.

And, in the process, losing the very culture they were trying so hard to preserve through strategic means.

Deep competency looks like strategy servicing culture in order to move and organization forward, without worrying about change or innovation.

-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/

[Advice] 4 Locus of Control Questions

Confirmation bias occurs when a person believes that the situations and experiences they continually run into, reaffirm their persepctive on their place in the world, and their preconceived beliefs or practices.

Case in point: When a person looks at the amount in their paycheck every week and mutters “ Well, I guess we’ll always be middle class.”

Or, when a person tells another before a difficult decision, or contlict, “Well, you had to know that Bob was going to react that way.”

Confirmation bias occurs because we want reassurance that the stories we tell ourselves are the only way reality could possibly be organized. This is why we emotionally, psychologically and somtimes even physically, resist when we are confronted by a different outcome someone else has experienced in the same situation. The fact of the matter is, we are in charge of our own stories—and the stories that we tell ourselves—but we often don’t believe it.

This dovetails with locus of control.

Based in studies and research from the 1950’s, locus of control says that some people believe they are in control of their lives, and other people believe outside forces determine the direction of their lives and their decision making processes.

People with a high internal locus of control believe the world is something they control.

People with a high external locus of control, believes the world controls them.

Confirmation bias reinforces the stories of both personality types: If I believe that I’m in charge of my destiny, then I will continually tell myself the ” I’m In Charge Story.” But if I believe that destiny is in charge of me, then I will continually tell myself the “I’m Not In Charge Story.”

Most often, when things are going well, confirmation bias and locus of control concerns become secondary to a good time. But in a difficulty, confrontation or a conflict around things that matter, confirmation bias and locus of control (both internal and external) can serve as drivers that both intitiate and continue the conflict spiral.

Perceptions, stories and triggers are the fuel in the car of conflict situations, and the only person who can alter the fuel successfully is you. Here are four challenge questions for determining your conflict story:

What did I learn about difficulty, confrontation, control and conflict from my family?

Family is the world’s first organizational structure. And many of us learned the wrong lessons from those in charge. But the real issue is that we keep confirming the same lessons repeatedly with others.

What did I learn about control over my environment when I left the home?

Formal schooling in (at least in the United States) begins at around 4 or 5. This is when true confusion sets in, and when uncomfortable questions get asked about “reality”—and sometimes hushed up.

What messages have I had reinforced through my friends, associates and even the media I chose to consume?

There is a reason that many individuals with high internal locuses of control, refuse to watch the news, choose their friends carefully and are elitist about companies to whom they decide to give their money, time and talent.

What messages am I sending out to the world that are reinforcing difficulty, confrontation, control and conflict stories that are no longer relevant to my experience?

If you have succeeded in overcoming a poor story, or have moved the needle on your locus of control, revisiting old stories that are no longer relevant is the surest way to experience the same things over again.

-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] Building Better Work Relationships

Relationships at work are third level relationships.

First level relationships are familial ones, all the way from the family in your house that you grew up with to your cousin Wanda in Oklahoma. Second level relationships are close friends and associates, schoolmates, neighbors, etc.

But the people that we work with are not ones that we would have chosen. Even in an era of choosing yourself, or four-hour work weeks, the vast majority of us still work under conditions that resemble the ones that our grandparents worked under, albeit with less pollution and physical effort.

And, for the foreseeable future, since human beings are going to continue to build organizations, establish and maintain hierarchies, and engage with mechanisms of active and passive social control, there will always be workplaces.

Always.

With that being said, the question becomes, how does a person build better work relationships? With everything that we now know about neuroscience, psychology, the genetic code and even the world of software and computers, developing the resources to build better workplaces should be easy. But it’s not. And what’s even more distressing is that the most common solution proposed, with access to all that knowledge and data, is to replace humans with software programs and/or mechanical objects.

Robots are fun and AI is coming, but we are a long, long way from building something—well—more human than human. So, here are the top five ways to build better relationships, one human to another:

Empathy is huge—and we don’t mean in the “touchy feely” way that empathy is often thought of. In a workplace culture, empathy begins with Wheaton’s Law and ends at actively listening to someone else. Even if you disagree with them.
Do emotional labor—we wrote about this last week, but it bears repeating: in the economy that we all work in—no matter if we are co-working with others or on a distributed team—doing the hard work of caring, listening and acting out of self-interested selflessness is the only way forward.
Remove the fear—acting out of fear: of getting fired, of irritating a boss, or of confronting a co-worker, has to be jettisoned. Fear is a common reaction when things that matter to us (i.e. our values, our needs our emotions, etc.) are threatened. But, the brain only knows what we tell it. So tell it good, factual self-talk, rather than allowing biases and false ideas to fill the brain space.
Lead on doing the hard things—this is the 2nd hardest thing to do in building better work relationships, because there are so many things that we would rather avoid. But doing the hard things that are also the right things, is the only way that an organization can survive. Which leads into the last thing…
Leave if it doesn’t fit—most of the pushback that we get around the five things comes down to this statement “If I do all of these things that you suggest and nothing changes, not even the place I work, then what do I do?” This statement reveals a common workplace false parallel: A person’s value is not determined by their work. There are other positions, cultures and value systems represented in other workplaces out there. And if you’ve already done the hard work of building better work relationships, do you think that this work will make you less employable in the future, or more employable in 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/

[Strategy] Trust is not Scalable

Conflict resolution is not scalable, because trust is not scalable.

Make no mistake though, the products of trust are scalable. And the results of trusting an organization, a brand or even another person are scalable.

But trust is not scalable.

And the reason that it’s not is nuerologically and psychologically complicated, but basically, trust wanes the further removed my relationship is from another person. Not a brand, and organization or a system, but a person.

Conflict resolution in organizations, thus becomes unscalable, because the trust at the core of resolving conflicts doesn’t exist in the first place, because the parties involved are far too separated by the barriers of organization, values, culture, mindsets, behaviors, beliefs, etc.

This is the reason mediation works so well for neighborhood disputes, but not so well for sexual harassment lawsuits. When conflict resolution processes become a strategy, rather than part of an overall organizational culture, they fail miserably. Mediation, conflict resolution and other forms of ADR, should be at the core of a culture’s development as an organization grows, so that the products of trust—increased revenue and productivity to mention just a couple—become expected.

And so that, when disputes arise—and they will—the trust is already there and litigation (and even more untrustworthy, unscalable process) becomes unthinkable.

-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/