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-

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
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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-

Emotions in the Machine

At a neurobiological level, the facts and triggers for emotions in the human mind are complicated and diaphanous.

If human societies create functioning, artificial intelligence, the chance of human level emotions evolving within those machines, will be slim to none.

Machines, even intelligent machines, can’t rise any higher than their creators.

The emotions that we have as human beings are too complex to be codified into streams of code—with the results streaming out as observable, quantifiable data points.

Data comes about as a result of an action; emotions come about as the evolutionarily developed responses to external stimuli.

One is external (data) the other internal (emotions).

Jealousy, hatred, envy, wrath, lust, love, appreciation, gratitude, respect, duty, honor, sacrifice and on and on, come from the result of constant, human-on-human conflict and rigorous A/B testing, from birth to death.

How, exactly, are we planning on codifying that into mathematically based code, so that adaptive learning, long-term evolution and short-term development can happen?

Powering down an intelligent machine won’t be murder—unless human beings decide that it is.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-

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-

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-

[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.

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-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/