Peter’s Face Here

Even in an economic and industrial structure moving rapidly toward the destination where being “good” isn’t nearly good enough, there are still people named Peter in our lives, influencing our decisions.

In conflict, people named Peter rarely engage with difficulty or confrontation, much less conflict. They prefer to avoid the whole thing and stay in the comfortable box of their assumptions and preconceived notions.

In an organization, people named Peter still tend to fail upward in a race to the bottom around mediocrity and incompetence.

In an economic and industrial structure increasingly based around collaboration and openness, people named Peter exhibit an disturbing tendency to remain competitive and closed—and seem to be succeeding tremendously if stock prices are to be believed.

Shocking incompetence, wide ranging mediocrity, selfish competition—these seem to be the catalysts for growth even as competent, skillful, open disruption continues to flood the market with goods, services and ideas.

People named Peter should take note, as should people not named Peter: in the economies of scale of the likely future, the Peter Principle—working toward a personal level of incompetence, and working toward the level of management’s incompetence—will no longer apply.

And then people named Peter—along with other bad and incompetent actors in our midst—will have to either adapt, or perish.

-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/

Residents of (YOUR TOWN NAME HERE) Save $100 A DAY by Doing This One Simple Trick!!!!

Click bait articles and headline jacking efforts are just the latest in a long line of American hucksterism that began with Western, one man traveling wagon shows and continued through to TV infomercials from Billy Mays for OxiClean.

The first inherent problem with of all these forms of advertisement is the combination of shameless flim-flamism, the deceit of the short con, and the promise of a good deal of vaudeville.

The inherent false promise in this tradition plays on the long-standing, human desire for just one easy step that solves a difficult problem, fulfills an unmet need, or at the very minimum, entertains the viewer outrageously.

The reason why concerns about the lack of regulation in election advertising fall on deaf ears every two to four years is that the majority of election advertising is targeted at about the same level of click bait, online advertising and blog posts.

Add to all of it, candidates approving messages that, if your kid, your partner or your friend said them, you’d tell them they were full of it.

And we all know what “it” is.

“It seems so simple. It should be easy.”

This statement came out of a workshop I did recently as well as a podcast interview I gave recently.

Well, if the Truth were simple and easy, hucksters, flim-flam men, election year advertising, and other forms of selling that create artificial conflicts, fake disruptions, and incoherent disconnections, wouldn’t be so popular to use as shortcuts to the capital “T” truth.

And clickbait articles would drive almost no traffic on social media and in new journalism.

Do you feel like you saved $100 yet today?

-Peace Be With You All-

Gimme An “E”

There are two mindsets and one, which was chiefly dominant throughout the 20^th century is in decline, while the other is ascending.

The Entrepreneur mindset is based on taking on risk, pushing the boundaries and restlessly finding new visions and new horizons.

The Employee mindset is based on committing wholeheartedly to a project, getting paid, and then going off to do a hobby, have a family or use the money to leverage another interest.

The Entrepreneur mindset focuses on what could possibly be and the Employee mindset is focused on what is.

The Entrepreneur mindset is best exemplified through the myths of the Old West. The Employee mindset is as well.

Which mindset will “win” the future?

Neither. And that’s a good thing, because both require each other.

The Entrepreneur mindset requires some infrastructure to be built by those with an Employee mindset. The Employee mindset benefits from the “newness” and adventure in which the Entrepreneur mindset bastes.

-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/

Culture of Busyness

The culture of the workplace promotes a culture of appearing to be busy.

In the daily fog of war of conflict, we appear to be busy in the workplace in order to avoid having to confront the hard things:

The workplace project that isn’t working.
The relationship with the partner or co-worker that’s dysfunctional.
The organization that supports and encourages a culture of conflict as if it’s a gift rather than a curse.

The culture of busyness then pervades our family life, our community life, our social life and we wonder why the results of our busyness seem to produce more smoke that fire.

There are a lot of smoke producers in the workplace.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells
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/

Cultural Negotiating

The most important driver for success in the 21st century, as the workplace shifts from being about making things with our hands, to making things with our ideas, is emotional intelligence.

Don’t get us wrong, building physical objects still means something, but the most important building is happening with ideas, a keyboard, and publishing platforms, rather than using hammers, adhering some nails and getting rough hands.

After all, I hear that these days, even a known author can’t get a book deal without an already built-in audience.

With that being noted, cultural competence—alongside emotional intelligence—becomes another tool in the box labeled “FOR IDEA BUILDING.”

Being aware of the personal, political and social cultural backgrounds and ideas of partners on a project (combined with cognitive emotional intelligence) can make navigating differences easier.

In a global world, where the lingua franca is English and everyone can see what you Tweet, post, message or blog, cultural competence (not necessarily sensitivity) becomes even more critical to getting everybody on board.

The hard work now is not only uniting the twelve team members at your table, but also uniting the distributed teams working across the globe–and doing it with a semblance of understanding.

-Peace Be With You All-

Interviewing For Cultural Fit

Culture defines how employees make meaning about the work that they do.

Workplace culture is defined as ways of thinking, behaving and working in an organization that provides boundaries for where employees can and cannot place value.

The issue comes when the personal culture that an employee comes from doesn’t match the culture of the organization that they are joining.

In other contexts, this disruption is noted as lack of product market fit, and typically, in the open market, when an organization makes something that no one wants to buy, they go out of business.

When we think of hiring, the interview process is used as a way to avoid—or minimize—the detrimental results of a lack of product (people) market (job) fit.

However, these days the interview process is so artificial and so unable to determine if a person can actually do the job for which they have been hired, it is a wonder we haven’t done away with it.

Conflicts in the workplace arise from the get-go, because the initial person/organization fit is poor, and then they escalate when two people, tasked to work together to accomplish a company goal, can’t get along with each other and disagree about where they fit in the organization.

Cultural interpersonal conflicts at work are corrosive, damaging and dangerous and could probably be avoided if–instead of asking a series of artificial questions, or filing out meaningless, psychological assessments—the hiring organization could discover each individuals’ story about why they want to work for an organization in a particular position.

Would this be harder, more time consuming and require a deeper level of emotional intelligence on the part of the hiring committee? Sure. But firing and rehiring are just as time consuming and harder still.

-Peace Be With You All-

Getting Out of Our Own Way

Getting out of our own way—and leaving other people well enough alone—used to be easy, right?

In the past, if we wanted to resolve conflicts, the world was much simpler.

Before the prevalence of psychology, biology, pharmacology, therapy, counseling, and the “-isms” of feminism, masculinism, cultural relativism and social justice.

The world was much simpler in the golden age of whatever time before the time we are talking about now.

Right?

Except…except…

The world of the past was actually just as complicated as the world of the present. Particularly to the people living in that world at that time.

Here’s the truth: It’s not the whiz bang technology that makes life seem fast and complicated. It’s not even the toes that we have to now tip-toe around, that it seems our grandfathers and grandmothers didn’t have to step around, that makes everything so “complicated.” In reality, life was always this complicated, but people tend to mistakenly believe that history began the moment that they were born—and that everything will end the moment that they do.

No. It has always been this complicated to get along with other people in the world.

The only difference is that we have so many more outlets to voyeuristically view the difficulty, the dysfunction and the spectacle of people who persist in getting in their own way.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Truth in All of Us

Honesty is such an ugly word, everyone is so untrue.

Except that while people may be untrue, they are often also unreliable, full of mixed motives and notoriously prone to following their own emotions and senses, rather than inclined provide the truth.

How do we provide the truth to others in love?

Well, there’s no easy way to tell the truth in love.

Major philosophies, major religious figures and even major political and social leaders have gone to their deaths either from telling the hard truth in love, or from not telling the truth at all.

Maybe the real key is to focus less on our struggles against what we think resides in other people’s heads and hearts, and to instead begin focusing on our own internal struggles with our own stuff.

And, the truth, once crushed to earth, will rise again.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Truths of Innovation for Human Failures

Working in the space of forgiveness and reconciliation has exposed us to some unusual truths, that people and organizations experiencing conflict situations in the more “concrete” segments of our world–such as the workplace, or the school–would rather ignore.

The first truth is that people in conflict are truly people and bring all the dimensions of people, including spiritual ones, to bear in a conflict, no matter the location of that conflict situation.
The second truth is that many segments, organizations, and profit-centers in our Western culture would prefer to ignore those spiritual dimensions and how they play into conflicts spirals.

This is based upon the mistaken belief that spirituality only occurs between 9am and noon on Sunday mornings.

Or not at all.

Ever.

The third truth is that high conflict people have a spiritual dimension that rules their behavior, based in deep seated beliefs, past experiences, and deep seated traumas and that no one engagement–or workshop attendance–and learning of new skills will “fix.”

Our “move fast and break things” approach to innovation and disruption is fine in the world of physical objects such as technology, but falls miserably short when addressing the issues that real people bring to the table when they are organized into groups of larger than three to accomplish a task.

There’s no app, or cybernetic/Internet of things, revolution that’s going to address these three truths.

The only way to get there is to delve deeply, truthfully and uncompromisingly, into the human heart.

Download the new FREE eBook courtesy of Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT), on Forgiveness and Reconciliation by clicking the link here.

-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/

The Other 95%

Nonverbal cueing involves 95% of human communication efforts.

Professional speakers and presenters realize, at a professional level, what many people know at an amateur level:

What you say with your face and body matters more than what you say with your mouth.

In a dispute resolution process, nonverbal cueing is far more important to coming to resolution that anything that either party may say.

Mediators’ nonverbal cueing can protect the agreement process, or reveal doubt about either the participants or the resolution itself.

Eye contact, micro-expressions and body language are the grout in between the tiles of conflict resolution processes that can either ensure that an agreement remains adhered to by either party—or can ensure that no matter how many “yeah, yeahs” are given, the agreement will fall apart.

-Peace Be With You All-