The Self-Determination of Experts

What is self-determination?

It is an individual and personal equation, involving a combination of autonomy, intrinsic motivation, understanding of cause and effect and the intellect and character to make empathetic choices.

Preserving client self-determination in conflict resolution is the purview of ‘the experts”: People who are more educated than the client in specific areas, whose burden it is to take on the responsibility and ethic of care for the ignorant, inexperienced client.

The unstated message behind the label of “expert” indicates elite-based judgment that creates an atmosphere of superiority, cloistered protection from criticism, a thin skin and an outsized ego.

In an economic world of industrialization, expertise is perceived as the coin of the realm; but, when the world of industrialization fractures (as it is right now) the real power lays not with expertise but with openness.

The field of conflict resolution, based in a foundation of social justice, has developed an affinity for expertise, at the expense of client self-determination.

But, how much information does clients in conflict need before they are informed enough to be “self-determined”?

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

Motivation and the Seven Second Attention Span

The well documented decline in the ability to focus has everybody who can focus for more than 7 seconds talking about it for at least the length of a book manuscript—or the length of a blog post.

But, the real estate worth fighting over, for our money, is not focus, but attention.

Focus happens after attention has been attracted. And, with so many forms of noise distracting the masses from messages that may or may not be beneficial for them, attention is at a premium.

But not focus.

Yes, we realize that the immediacy of social media responses and the immediacy of Internet based information has created concern that the human brain is changing—and it is—but the real battle is still not focus.

The reason we believe that the decline in focus is a symptom of the current Social Age, and not the disease, is because the core of attention, intrinsic motivation, has always been—and will always be—a limited resource.

And while we don’t personally believe that resources are limited, we know that society has been arranged to bring into reality the belief that while attention is limited, internal motivation should be limitless.

And yes, we have seen the neuroscience research around attention and focus, as well as the research around Pavlovian operant conditioning, punishment and reward studies and other behavioral studies since the 1950’s.

But, we still hold that as our technology has increased, from the oral tradition to Twitter, there has always been misplaced concern over focus rather than attention.

We really should have a few more books and blog posts about motivation…

-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/

Honesty in Human Memory

As they fade into the rearview mirror of memory, events of the past tend to be mythologized, canonized or misremembered entirely.

On a global scale, the one class of people who used to rely on this fact of human memory—politicians—are finding it difficult to deal with the current state of constant remembering that’s going on with the Internet and social media.

On an individual scale, we still have the expectation that other people will forgive us our trespasses, even as we can forever hold their trespasses against them, with the help of our new tools.

However, all of this electronic remembering hasn’t led to more honesty. In fact, as the tendency toward tribal social sanctioning has grown exponentially to a global scale, there are more and more media driven conflicts over who owns the narrative, rather than whether or not the narrative was honest and truthful in the first place.

This is part of the core reason why the masses no longer really pay attention when it’s revealed that someone—most importantly politicians—lied about something consequential, because honesty is no longer the coin of the realm.

Instead, who owns the narrative, for the next 24-48 hours, is what’s important. After that, well, the masses can repost in their Facebook feeds all they want, because it won’t matter whether truth (capital “T” or small “t”) was served or not.

At an individual scale, cries of hypocrisy still ring out, but the sound grows hollower with each passing year, as individuals learn from the masses, that ownership of the story is more valuable than the veracity of the content.

-Peace Be With You All-

Trust Me

“Trust me. I got this.”

If there is any other phrase that precedes a sense of oncoming dread and mistrust, it’s this one.

If there is a statement that preceded eventual conflict more than any other, we aren’t aware of it.

Trust, when freely given, often operates as a noun, describing a person, place, thing or an animal. In such a context, trust transforms a relationship from one level and moves it into a far more intimate level.

However, in the above statement, trust transforms from a noun to a verb, requiring the giver to transform into a passive actor in their own drama. In such a context, trust transfers control from an active actor, engaged with their own outcomes, to another active actor whose motives may not be—well—trustworthy.

The sender of the phrase is looking to reassure the receiver and, typically, this sentence means that the reassurance is not working.

The professional peacebuilder should probably avoid the transformation of trust from an active noun to a passive verb, unless the relationship that she is building is long-term enough to warrant such a change.

Otherwise, she’s just asking for trouble.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] 10 Year Overnight Success-Vol. 2

10,000 hours is a long time to persevere and continue without gaining competence, much less mastery.

The human mind seeks shortcuts, quick answers and easy solutions, because it likes the status quo and seeks to maintain equanimity and order in a world of chaos and conflict.

Yet, without those hours, every single one of them, there can be no catharsis. There can be no learning.

When we were still actively engaged in the visual arts, we used to hear, “Every artist has 2,000 bad pieces of art inside of them.” This statement was met with incredulity at the time, but it turned out to be absolutely true.

And here’s the other thing about those 2,000 bad pages, by the time the artist gets to page 1,999, he—or she—doesn’t care about what other people think about all the pages that came before.

10,000 hours does more than pound the path toward competence and mastery. It forges the will of iron to continue in the face of rejection, dismissiveness, ignorance and misunderstanding.

So that, at the end of those 10,000 hours, the human mind has become used to the very things that it feared.

-Peace Be With You All-

This Too Shall Pass

Black Friday is a creation of marketers.

Almost specifically designed to get the average person to buy more stuff, it is a conflict resolution practitioners’ dream fake social “holiday.”

People engage in shopping rituals, while also engaging in conflict with each other, over the acquiring of stuff.

People fall for the commercialism (advertisements) that subtly intimate that choosing not to make purchases, or too engage in the ritual, that somehow a person is a Scrooge.

People report an uptick in feelings of depression, dissatisfaction and other mental health issues.

This comes about due to a falsely generated feeling of collective belonging around this season, tipped off by the false shopping ritual of Black Friday.

During this day, the words attributed to either an Eastern monarch, or King Solomon, should ring in our ears, both as a blessing and as a curse.

Because, the sun is going to rise tomorrow and the rituals of one, man created day, have little to do with the vicissitudes of the future, or even the inevitability of conflict.

-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/

A Fundamental Breakdown

Depending upon who you talk to, the social contract is either breaking down, or being renegotiated, with terms that favor the disaffected, the previously ignored and perennially held back.

Fundamental Attribution Error, correspondence bias and the attribution affect—all cornerstones of modern social psychology—describe the contemporary social contract in two basic ways:

External: If something goes wrong, other people are to blame and should have controlled their situations better.
Internal: If something goes wrong, I am not to blame because situations happen that are beyond my control all the time.

When we seek to blame others—or blame circumstances—for our misfortunes, disputes and conflicts, we shift the social contract in subtle and profound ways.And, depending upon whom you talk to, personal responsibility, or powerful institutionalized forces, are to blame.

But, when there’s no one to attribute cause and error to, and when there’s no set of circumstances that can be forgiven, how is conflict to be resolved?

-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/

We Built This

There’s been a trend that has advanced as our electronic tools have outstripped our good sense, our common decency and our impulse control.

The trend can be heard in phrases such as “my Twitter feed blew up” or “Facebook melted down.”

When the popular media narrative drives emotional responses to hot button issues, surrounding topics such justice, identity, legal decisions or social depredations to push up ratings and gather attention, the population in the United States now has the tools and know how, to take to Twitter and Facebook and express displeasure, disgust or even to “poke the bear.”

The social contract is breaking down, not because people have the tools to express opinions from the peanut gallery, but because every peanut in the gallery has access to the tools in the first place.

But, we in the field of ADR shouldn’t get mad at the Internet or social media. After all, we either actively or passively, participated in building the media that we have right now.

We shouldn’t throw up our hands in disgust and walk away, tune out, turn off and drop off the “map.” We also probably shouldn’t engage, foment and otherwise stir the pot more, with anything but affirmations of peace and solutions to complicated issues.

We have taken the words of the Declaration of Independence, and the admonitions and arguments of dead 18th, 19th and 20th century white male philosophers to heart, but unfortunately, we have taken them to heart—and to task—using tools and social spaces that weren’t really designed for nuanced observation, conversation and peacebuilding.

The popular narrative is exactly that—a story—and we as individuals are under no obligation to spread the story, comment on the story, or even to believe the story.

We are under obligation, as peacemakers, to point out alternatives to the dominate narrative, no matter from whom—the majority or the minority—it may spring, and offer a path toward the Truth.

-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] Firing Your BFF

If you hire your friends because you don’t know who else to hire, and they’re the only ones in your circle that you trust, then you are well on your way to actually having to fire one of them someday.

And, before the successful consultant scales up to employing the person that they used to share ice cream cones with on the playground at age six, there are about three things to consider:

Does the friend that you’re going to hire have the expertise needed to serve your company well, or are they just a warm body filling a space in your organization?
Does the friend want a position because they can actually add value, or are they just there to ride your coattails?
Does the friend have friends that are going to be a headache, or an asset, to your organization if it comes down to having to hire more people?

After the successful, scaled up consultant takes these three things into consideration, no amount of connections, collaboration or previous commitments should encourage a “friendly” hire.

As Michael Corleone once infamously said “Friends and money – oil and water.”

Think about hiring someone other than your BFF, so that you don’t have to hack that relationship to make it work again.

-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/

Big Conflicts, Big Data, Big #IoT

As part of the continuing, half a century long hangover that economies, industries, governments and individuals are experiencing as a result of the collapse of the Industrial Revolution and the ushering in of the Idea Age, humanity still longs for “bigness.”

Big profits.
Big mergers and acquisitions.
Big Data.

The current collective panting that everyone from Wall Street wizards to social scientists are doing about Big Data—and the collection of every bit of information that platforms can get about customer and client preferences—reveals two disturbing, collective beliefs that will have wide ranging implications if not checked:

The first implication is that of our collective belief that bigger is somehow better, more secure and safer. With the number of incumbent bad actors (i.e. hackers, criminals, black hat actors, etc) looking to take advantage of the inherent security flaws in the collection of Big Data—not to mention the flaws inherent in size itself—this idea should die a quick death.
The second implication is less talked about but is just as important: What happens when everything gets bigger but the human heart shrinks? The collecting of every possible piece of data on people’s actions, choices and preferences and the storage and manipulation of that data, can only inevitable lead to more conflict, not less.

The coming era of connected physical items to a virtual world, provides us another opportunity to address these implications and answer these questions. In the Industrial era that we are rapidly leaving behind, “bigness” was the way that things got done in the most effective way possible.

But now, in an era of decentralization and disruption, the human heart—and it’s size—must be considered more carefully.

-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/