[Advice] The Life Long Learning Myth…Busted

Implementation, coaching, mentoring, and supporting through experiences matters more to adult learning in a corporate setting, than sitting in a room for four hours listening to a facilitator.

The drop-off in retention after such an experience is 50% after participants leave the room, and without immediate changes, immediate implementation of the learning outcomes, coaching along the path of uncomfortability, and supervisory mentoring through the tough times, the retention drop-off is 75%.

So why do many organizations still offer corporate training opportunities in all kinds of topical areas, within a formalized “sit down, and absorb” learning structure, syllabi, certificates, and experienced trainers and facilitators who drone on and on for—at most—half a day?

There are three reasons:

Most organizations—whether corporations, training organizations, or higher education institutions—are unwilling (and many times unable) to do the hard work of challenging, breaking, and remaking the foundation of learning established through the last 150 years of K-12 schooling. Schooling which was designed in conjunction with corporate leaders and influencers, and codified with the support of intellectuals and educators, to produce compliant workers, who would sit (or stand) all day and do widget based, industrial work, while leaving the thinking and innovating to others up the chain. The kind of work that was hollowed out by those same individuals starting 40 years ago and now no longer matters much in America.

Many supervisors, managers, bosses, CEO’s, COO’s, and others in the hierarchical structure of many organizations, have come from a background of schooling that they either internally rejected because it was too rigid, or found comforting and conformed too. Such engrained mindsets around the value of learning (and education) do not advance and innovate organizations. Instead, they continue to produce leaders who believe that training (and life-long learning) is either a “nice to have” (rejection mindset) or a “necessary evil” (acceptance mindset). Either way, the mentality shaped through that rejection or acceptance, is reflected in buying, internally developing, or advocating for models of learning for employees based in an Industrial Revolution K-12 schooling model.

Trainers, facilitators, consultants, and others in the wide and deep field of corporate training (myself included) aren’t doing enough of the hard work, often enough, of breaking our own mindsets of how information, experiences, and content is delivered to audiences (online, F2F, etc.). We also aren’t engaging with the hard work of breaking institutional, corporate mindsets from the outside by creating offerings and client deliverables that will transcend the dying model of K-12 education. This means having the courage to stick to our principles around peer-to-peer learning, advocating to organizations that we serve for mentoring and coaching for our learners, encouraging accountability, and at the furthest end, treating adult learners like adults in the training room, rather than continuing to train them (i.e. treat them) in the K-12 learning mold they’re familiar with.

The feedback I always get when I write (or talk) in these three areas typically focuses around the inability of organizations to change, the unwillingness of employees to actually be motivated to do the hard work of working on things that are hard (i.e. engaging with emotional labor) and the inability of trainers, consultants, and others to feed their families based on selling what the market is not progressive enough to demand.

These are all legitimate concerns, but the facts of the 21^st century are clear for anyone with two eyes to see:

The workplace, jobs, labor, and other tasks that people need to be organized into groups to accomplish, must still be done, or else there will be chaos in the world. Hard work—manufacturing work, “blue collar” work, etc.—will still be done in the world, but increasingly due to automation and algorithms, that work will be either outsourced or done by machines. And when it’s not, the people who will do it, will charge an even higher premium for it, to support their continued learning to become better artisans.

An acknowledgement that work matters, that tasks should be meaningful, rather than meaningless, and that employees should be treated like adults rather than like children in the workplace, is growing rather than going away. Calls from researchers, thought leaders, influencers, advocates, and others for more pay transparency, flexible family leave policies, and “flat” hierarchical structures, are only the tip of the iceberg.

The rewards to organizations in terms of prestige (Top 10 Best Places to Work), revenues (The World’s First $2 Billion Company), and public goodwill (Anyone See What Apple Made Today) in America, are drivers for success (or determinants of failure in a transparent media market) more now than ever. And these drivers become outsized to organizations that are willing to take risks, to supervisors that are willing to challenge the status quo, and to vendors who are willing to sell with courage.

Unrest will continue among employees who believe that they are not getting paid what they are worth, are increasingly mobile, and are calling the bluff of the industrialist mindset that has dominated every sector of life for over a century now. This unrest will grow in continued calls for a basic income, the cries against income inequality, and the accusations of a new “Gilded Age” of wealth and prosperity for some.

Wihout meaningful changes the conflicts that will arise if life-long, continuing, robust education is not increasingly, innovatively, and creatively integrated into the work lives of employees in all organizations in all sectors (from small businesses to the Fortune 1,000 companies), will be massive and unmanageable.

And bosses, managers, supervisors, shareholders, CEO’s, CFO’s, communities, civic leaders, politicians, business owners, corporate training organizations, and others will have to explain in plain terms to their constituencies, employees, followers, and others, the reasons (and their mindsets) for why they rejected or ignored the golden opportunity to implement, coach, mentor, and support in order to transform corporate learning into something meaningful and valuable, in the early 21^st century.

-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] Relational Resonance

Resonance is a term from physics that describes what happens when an object’s natural vibration frequency responds to an external stimulus of the same frequency.

Resonance occurs in nature when an object vibrates without you even touching it. Resonance happens when people fall in love with each other; and, resonance shifts when people fall into conflict with each other.

The reason that litigation is such a poor method for resolving disputes is because most—if not all—disagreements, fights, and “differences of opinion,” are about relationships, built on reciprocation and maintained through common resonance. When the frequency gets disrupted by an external change, the resonance goes away and the struggle to resolution really a hero’s journey back to resonance. Litigation changes the frequency of the relationship between individuals and between individuals and organizations, from one of commonality and vibrating at the same frequency, to one of vibrating at different frequencies.

What does all of this have to do with the conflict resolution professional?

Creating stories that resonate with audiences and clients who are seeking to get back into relationships with resonance, is one of the most important skills that peace builders must grasp in order to design, market, and promote products, services, and processes that will get them revenues.
Creating resonances is about getting to the same frequency—at the same time—that audiences and clients are no matter when and where they are in conflict. Thus, peace builders must consider whether advocating for early-stage interventions (rather that primarily trying to promote late-stage resolution products and services) is a better way to proceed long-term.
Creating the conditions for conflict resolution professionals and audiences to speak the same language—and thus be on the same frequency, will require conflict resolution professionals at all levels to abandon the higher language of “conflict as an opportunity for growth” and move toward the audience language of “conflict as a roadblock to be avoided, accommodated, or attacked.”

The first two are easy. The last is hard.

Peace building is about doing the hard things, doing them well, and doing them consistently—and in a committed way—and building a field and a brand over time that audiences will flock too, that clients will gladly pay money for, and that peace builders can hand down to the next generation of professionals.

Relational resonance must move from the table between clients and the peace builder to the platforms between peace builders and the world.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Bad Ideas

The equation is simple: Talents + Knowledge + Skills + Effort = Strengths

Talents are non-teachable. They are naturally recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that can be productively applied in a person’s life. Effort is also non-teachable. Effort is based on intrinsic motivation, as well as extrinsic influencers.

Knowledge is teachable. In the context of understanding what you’re good at, knowledge is simply “what you are aware of.” Knowledge is a combination of life experiences, plus academic knowledge, plus gut intuition. Skills are teachable. Skills are the capacity (not necessarily competency) to perform the fundamental steps of an activity—whether at work, at school, or at home.

That’s the academic part. Here’s the lived piece.

My strengths are in being contextual and looking backwards to the past in order to look forward to the future, gathering disparate information together from various resources, walking through life deliberately and carefully, analyze and solve problems, and think about how to find the shortest, best route to success for people.

In a list, they look like this

Context
Input
Deliberative
Restorative
Strategic

What this really means in practice is that I have a lot of bad ideas. A lot. With these five strengths, a combination of talents, knowledge, skills, and effort, I have been rewarded (not necessarily financially rewarded) in the space of many places. Without knowing where, and what, your strengths are—what you’re good at—you will have no idea what to do with all of your bad ideas.

The things is, in developing conflict engagement processes, services, and products, knowing your strengths and where your bad ideas come from, is critical for the market success of the savvy peace builder.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Projects for the Peace Builder I

It’s not easy to do what I do, if you’re a peace builder—a negotiator, a lawyer, a social worker, an educator, or an executive director.

It’s not easy to manage social profiles, blog regularly, connect with clients, fans, audience members, and event participants in ways that can grow your brand.

It’s not easy to keep up with changes in marketing, digital content creation, traditional marketing, and the worlds pf publishing, podcasting, privacy, and security.

It’s really not easy if you’re a peace builder that is struggling between the poles of “I just want my business to work” and “I just need my clients to pay me.”

Well, I’ve got some projects that are upcoming that might be of help for the peace builder:

The book, Marketing For Peace Builders: How to Market Your Value to a World in Conflict is coming out in March. I am taking pre-orders for the book right now and will send people on the list a pre-order copy if you send me your email address at jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com

As a follow-up to the book, I am designing a series of workshops that will cover the material in the book, and provide updates, interactions, and engagement opportunities for peace builders. I have not decided how this series of workshops will be facilitated—in-person, online, etc.—but if there is enough interest, it’ll happen.

As another follow-up to the book, I am redesigning the HSCT website to reflect the importance of the book and it’s materials. I am launching another podcast the Marketing For Peace Builders Show, in late 2016. This will be a podcast featuring interviews from marketers, business development experts, and others who have taken their peace building brands and businesses to the place of connection and engagement.

Finally, I will be launching a LinkedIn Group—Marketing For Peace Builders—that will be a place for peace builders, marketers, and others to connect, engage, ask and answer questions, and to promote services, products, and processes that will plug-in to the peace building community in a positive way.

And that’s just the start.

I don’t believe that peace making and money making should be mutually exclusive.

I don’t believe that academic programs in the fields of dispute and conflict resolution can continue to churn out graduates who can’t pay down their student loan debts.

I don’t believe that the fields of peace building can continue to be a rump, human resource process—considered only after litigation, but almost never before—in organizations and societies in the Western world, even as disputes, disagreements, and fights continue to escalate.

I believe that the fields of building peace are at a zeitgeist moment right now, at the intersection of marketing, content creation, relationship building, and the only way forward to our future as a field is to grab the marketing moment, right now.

Would you like to join me in this moment?

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 2.2.2016

Changes are natural. As an entrepreneur, you have to be able to roll with them and adapt to them without losing your mind, your equanimity, or your focus on the end goal.

That’s hard, because with each change, the end goal shifts from being a long-term goal, to being a short-term need.

With each change, the entrepreneur’s perspective changes and shifts as well, and sometimes, the weight of those changes can force the entrepreneur into a mental, emotional, and even financial, dip.

Powering through the dip—and making it to the other side—without losing your equanimity, your mind, or your focus on the end goal, is the only work of the entrepreneur that matters.

The reason many investors, money men, banks, and governments, tend to ignore or overlook the lifestyle entrepreneurs (such as consultants, trainers, and others) is that yes, they don’t create scalable models, but, those entrepreneurs tend to quit in the middle of dip leaving behind debt.

I’m not quitting. And hopefully, neither are you…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Marketing for the Peace Builder V

Focus group feedback is useful to the peace builder.

Here’s how you run one:

The peace builder, working with another party (typically the focus group moderator), puts together some questions in regards to a future product, a current problem, and the solution to both that is offered by the peace builder.

Then, the peace builder gets a room somewhere and invites some people—maybe five to ten—who are in the demographic that the peace builder wants to offer their services to.

Then, the peace builder orders some pizza, the moderator sits down with the focus group participants and asks them the series of questions that have been cobbled together. In addition, the moderator may coax information from focus group attendees through the use of open-ended questions.

The peace builder sits in the room, saying nothing, but taking notes and watching the attendees’ non-verbal reactions, listening to the moderator, and recording responses to the questions.

At the end of an hour, the attendees are thanked for their time, offered the opportunity to take advantage of the product, service, or process that they have been questioned about, and are sent home.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The purpose of a focus group is three-fold:

To determine the reactions and responses of members of your target audience in a low-risk environment where they are rewarded for their participation.
To get feedback about the product, service, or process that the peace builder is developing through a process similar to an interview.
To collect the opinions from the focus group about the motivations of people who might actually use the peace builder’s product and to better understand how they perceive the utility of the product offering.

The savvy peace builder should be using focus groups before they launch workshops, seminars, training opportunities, books, curriculum, or any other product or process designed to appeal to a niche group of people. The savvy peace builder should avoid focus groups entirely when they are developing workshops, seminars, training opportunities, books, curriculum, or any other products or processes that have never been developed before, or which have been developed so long ago, that they have been forgotten almost entirely.

A warning though: Sometimes attendees fall into groupthink, peace builders and moderators, may fall prey to experimenter bias, issues of confidentiality around sensitive information in a group setting, and the fact that peace builders may cherry pick feedback to support a foregone conclusion.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Three, Episode #1- Travis Maus & Ryan Berkeley

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Three, Episode #1 – Travis Maus and Ryan Berkeley, Entrepreneurs, Cutting Edge Financial Planners, Trailblazers for Your Money

[powerpress]

People often remark that money makes people act funny. And not in the “haha,” Heath Ledger Joker way either. We talked about charging people for art last season in our ninth episode conversation with Nicholas Jackson, and we talked about charging people because art is valuable.

But what about managing money?

Nobody gets excited when you are talking about managing money.

As a matter of fact, eyes roll into the back of heads and people gradually slump down in chairs until their heads are the merest slivers above a table.

Then there’s the common situation where two adults hang out at the kitchen table talking about family budgeting every month…or they don’t

And then there’s the fact that there isn’t much education in school around the topic of money, money management of financial matters. And no, studying macroeconomics doesn’t count…

Case in point: My son was asking me about credit card use during the summer. He was on the cusp of turning 18 and wanted to know about credit scores, building a financial background and what the penalties and pitfalls would be with taking on more than he could handle.

After a 30-minute period where I laid out everything that I know about the wide world of credit creation, money management and fiscal sanity, he flopped onto the ottoman, held the cat in his hands, and asked:

Why don’t they teach us this stuff in school?

Why indeed…

In the kick-off to our third season of The Earbud_U Podcast, we talked with Ryan Berkeley and Travis Maus, partners and co-founders of SEED Planning Group, based in Binghamton, NY.

They are no-nonsense when it comes to managing your money, but they were plenty animated when it came to discussing why you should seed your financial strategies and goals with them, for both the long-term viability of your financial health, and for the long-term viability of the financial services industry.

So take a listen to Travis and Ryan, and take a little knowledge from our talk.

Check out all the ways below that you can connect with Travis and Ryan and S.E.E.D!

S.E.E.D Planning Group website: http://www.seedpg.com/

S.E.E.D Planning Group on Twitter: https://twitter.com/seedgroup

S.E.E.D Planning Group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SEED-Financial-Strategies-288049794685377/

S.E.E.D Planning Group on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seed-planning-group-62410167

Travis Maus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-maus-15aa2429

Ryan Berkeley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanberkeley

HIT Piece 12.22.2015

My wife will tell you that I never take “time off.”

She’ll say there’s no “break from this project” and she’ll tell you that many of my interactions with other people only demarcate interruptions between email, social platform updates, blog posts, product development ideas, and new business operations ideas. Some that might pan out—many that might not.

My in-laws will tell you I’m obsessive about work. And so will my children. That I never “unplug” or I am “always on the computer.” My immediate family will say that I seem distracted and antsy when I’m not working on cracking some project.

They’re not wrong.

It’s hard to be in this project alone, because, even though many people think that it looks romantic from the outside, to truly become even a moderately large sized force in the arena of conflict engagement and corporate training, the person in the arena has to be dedicated 24/7.

Now, to answer the objections, yes, I understand that material success is nothing without relationships that matter to share it with. And I am doing a better job than I was last year at actually trying to “dial in” to family moments, breaks and respites.

But I’m doing what I love, and I don’t know any other way to get to those outsized rewards in the minimal time that I have left on this planet, than to pursue the results of that love really, really hard for just a little while.

And I do take “time off.” Today is my annual retreat day, where I go to the mattresses (as Clemenza pointed out to Michael in The Godfather) and take some time away from the grind of the day-to-day and reflect on what I’ve done well, what I’ve done mediocrely, and what I haven’t done at all…

Now, I’m headed to Barnes and Noble. It’s the place to unwind, at least while they’re still around.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Gap Between Here and There

The decision is the thing.

It looks romantic from the outside, I’ll be honest. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, but you can’t take the first step without the decision to make the first step in the first place.

The gap between being there and getting here and the gap between being here and getting there are only covered by two actions:

Making a decision without much reassurance from others…

And

Doing the work without much appreciation from others about how difficult it is.

What covers the first gap (the one between being there and getting here) is making a decision. Making a decision to take action is scary and uncertain; and there’s usually very little reassurance from others. It typically begins when you are motivated enough to actually make the decision in the first place, and you’ll either be motivated by internal factors or external circumstances. And only one of these do you have control over.

What covers the second gap (the one between being here and getting there) is doing “the work.” Many people believe that “the work” or work ethic, is fading in American life. I prefer to believe that as the nature of “the work” shifts (from blue collar to white collar to “no” collar) the nature of the work ethic changes as well. Have I put in less “work” when I type up a 500-word blog post than a person has, who codes an algorithm all day in a language that looks like Mandarin to me?

It looks romantic from the outside, I’ll be honest. But on the inside, I can tell you, the work is what people observing you building your business, your project, your idea, or your processes from the outside aren’t going to see. And by “the work,” what these outside observers are really looking for are the tangible results of your efforts, your arguments, your research and your time.

Because, for better or worse, American culture is still built on getting results, rather than the nature and efficacy of developing, managing and experiencing, the process. For the peace builder, thinking about how to start building their project right now, I encourage you to cover the gap, first by making a decision, and then by doing the work.

For the peace builder (or anyone else who ever built anything) the decision is “the work.”

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Data Driven Conflict Engagement Product

When people are searching for ways to resolve the conflicts in their lives, their workplaces, and even in their neighborhoods, they’re using Google to do it.

They’re reading blog content from the Huffington Post, watching videos on YouTube and talking to their friends and neighbors about the conflict, how to resolve it, or just venting about it.

But they aren’t searching for a mediator, a lawyer or even a conflict coach. They aren’t asking their friends for a referral, nor are they attending workshops and trainings to get resolution.

And, as frustrating as it may be for the accomplished peace builder, many people who could have used the services of a trained peace builder, come to them as a last resort, rather than as a “top of the mind” choice.

The solution to this is not to crank out more conflict coaches, conflict academics, conflict mediators lawyers, arbitrators and other professionals. The solution to this is not to develop another mandated, 40 hour certification process for training mediators, who will become volunteers, to address the needs of community mediation centers.

The solution to this is to build new, data driven products, that meet the consumers of conflict (who are searching, tweeting, reading, and examining at places other than where all the peace builders typically hang out online) where they are, rather than where the profession would like to them to be.

The data driven conflict engagement product, marketed to the right audience, based on their preferences and their searches, with data gathered from their requests, concerns, questions and issues, supported by content that informs, entertains and advocates for their concerns, could be the greatest product the field of peace building ever creates.

There are a few people working on this right now at Stanford, in Washington, DC, in Arizona and in Silicon Valley—but not nearly enough to meet the needs of people in conflict.

-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/