[Opinion] Marketing for the Peace Builder IV

There are three questions that the savvy peace builder should focus on when developing a marketing plan:

Whom do we serve?

This question can be answered with surveys and other formal and informal means. The question is not focused on the peace builder’s skill sets and where they’re comfortable. Instead the question focuses on the target audience for products, services, processes and philosophies. The question seems simple, but when the answer in the peace builder’s mind comes back as “everybody” there needs to be a deeper, more disciplined dive into the question from the target’s perspective.

Why do we serve them?

This question focuses on the four areas that many peace builders (and many entrepreneurs, business owners, and other self-starters) forget, because it is a question that delves into the culture of the marketing, the branding and the project that a peace builder wants to develop. The four areas are mission, vision, and goals. The mission describes what you want the project to accomplish, vision describes where you want the project to wind up, and goals describe the ways you will get there. The last area is the trickiest, because values—if only written down and not lived—can act as a boundary or act as rocket fuel. Either way, if they aren’t articulated, the peace builder may forget them and grab at whatever revenue generating idea comes along, in effect diluting their brand promise, distracting themselves, and ultimately going out of business.

How do we delight them?

This question really is the one that focuses on the savvy peace builder as a person who can delight, rather than as a widget (or a cog) in an industrialized, productized process. This is the question where the peace builder’s strengths, interests and passions can freely reign, to create a product, process, service or philosophy that the target market wants and that they can deliver successfully and generate revenues at the same time. Asking this question (and answering it well) can make all the difference between a peace builder who “burns out” after sustained people work, and the peace builder who stays engaged with learning and developing year-on-year.

Developing a marketing plan can seem like a waste of time, but answering these three questions places the core of the plan under the peace builder’s control and make the development process smoother. In addition, commitment, consistency and persistence become reinforced through an engaging plan for marketing peaceful solutions to conflicts.

-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] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 2

There are three hard parts to launching any peace building project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).

When launching a peace building project, the savvy peace builder often doesn’t think too hard about the first part. In peace building fields from mediation to law, attaining technical knowledge is considered a rite of passage. Which is why peace building is so dominated by the presence of volunteer labor at one end (mediation) and highly paid labor at the other end (litigation) and there is a squeeze in the middle. As a result, many peace building practitioners continue to fund a self-perpetuating economy of training and certifications, rather than doing and experiences. This is a hamster wheel for another reason: The training and certifications are to reinsure that the peace builder continues to remain proficient in old skills they already know and practice (i.e. mediation skills) rather than training and certifying them in new skills that might be uncomfortable fro them to learn and practice (i.e. marketing, sales and business development).

The second hard part is getting the hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly if it is new.

When launching a peace building project, learning new hardware (or software in the case of many entrepreneurial peace builders) is the second hardest part. Admittedly, there are ton of applications and software solutions that can be cobbled together to create the operational infrastructure for a functioning business model. But too often peace builders (as do many other entrepreneurs) become so focused on avoiding learning the new application (or fiddling with it constantly) that they miss completely the third hardest part of developing and launching a peace building project—sales.

The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience to genrate a lead, create a relationship and to close a sale.

When launching a peace building project, content development—books, articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, workshop/seminar content, and on and on—is seen as the most overwhelming aspect of launching. At the core of most content development practices are three objectives for the peace builder to consider:

What do I want my content to do? (i.e. drive brand recognition, drive sales, create actionable leads who will pay, etc., etc.)
Where do I want my content to be distributed? (i.e. from a workshop, from a blog post, from a podcast, etc., etc.)
Who do I want my content to target? (i.e. women with children, business owners with conflicts, men in divorce, judges in arbitration, etc., etc.)

Unfortunately, many peace builders get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively out of fear on “how to make money” rather than focusing on “how to make a difference.” To be successful as an entrepreneurial peace builder, the things is to manage thinking about how hard the three hard parts might be to accomplish collectively, rather than avoiding actually taking the concrete steps to think (and act) differently about at least one of them individually.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Productivity of White Space

The human eye is a powerful bundle of tissues, nerves and liquid.

As the most complicated mechanism (short of the brain) in the human body, the human eye can see, take in information and transmit that information for interpretation in the brain.

One of the first things that a practicing artist must learn while still a student, is the value of white space: Those places in the piece of art where there is “nothing,” instead of “something.” The artist must dismiss her natural tendecy to trust what her eyes—that confuse the crowded appearance of the world, with meaning—see is “there,” and search diligently for what is not.

There are a lot articles on the Internet, which fall into the genre of the “new self-help.” These articles focus around “hacking” your life to become more “productive.” Some of them offer valuable information in the form of listicles, without much explanatory content, research based findings, or even a really good argument about how to implement all of the tips at a practical level. This species of article has become so rampant in parts of the Internet, that they are approaching the level of pornography in their ubiquity.

But what do the human eye, seeing, art production, and the “new self-help” all have in common?

The lack of—or the crowding out of—white space in the world.

The human mind has a limited attention span.

And the messages from various signal bearers (i.e. family members, neighbors, co-workers, etc.) tend to “crowd into” the human mind, creating distractions that cause a loss of focus, a loss of clarity, and sometimes, a loss of personal purpose. The solution to this limited attention span problem (or limited bandwidth problem) is not to read another productivity hack article on the Internet and then to vainly attempt to apply its proscriptions.

The solution is to focus ruthlessly on carving out more white space.

More absence of messages that don’t matter, in order to catch the signal of messages that do matter. In principle, this just reads like another “new self-help” proscription with no basis in practical fact, so here are three initial questions to ask yourself before carving out more white space in your personal interactions, your personal productivity, and even in your personal perspective on the world:

Is this action I’m taking right now (or think about taking later) going to give me the highest value beyond just this moment (or the next)?

Am I providing value to someone else by having this interaction with them, or am I not?

Am I playing the long game, the short game, or not playing a “game” at all by having/not having this interaction, taking on this task, or engaging with this person?

Through discipline and with an understanding of the power of absence, your human attention span can focus on the things that matter, and be more productive.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Leadership Through Doing “Things That Don’t Scale”

There are “things that don’t scale” many organizations avoid doing (or abandon outright), when they reach a certain size.

Leaders in those organizations (who may have begun bravely desiring to commit to doing those things) abandon the “things that don’t scale” as other interests begin to attract their attention (see Google’s recent troubles here) and as other constituencies demand attention (see Twitter’s recent issues with investors here). Then there’s the issue of organizational gravity and 747’s.

The human touch is always one-to-one RT @sorrells79: Leadership Through Doing “Things That Don’t Scale” https://t.co/0OehLo17i5

— Liz Kislik (@LizKislik) October 29, 2015

There are three areas organizational leaders begin with enthusiasm and personalization, but then abandon later when the organization scales:

Customer service: Many organizations say that the end user, the customer, the audience member, the fan, the follower, the client, is the one that they serve, and when they are small enough and scrappy enough, they do exactly that. But at scale (and as they transition into being an incumbent in the market), the customer gets lost in the shuffle and it becomes harder and harder for an organizational leader to make the decision about whom they serve, and then to serve them in the same way they used to.

Conflict management: At scale, conflict management becomes a rote, human resource department driven process, separated from the people who are impacted by the conflicts, disputes and disagreements, and the leaders who can successfully resolve them. This is why human resource departments don’t exist in small businesses, start-ups and other organizations smaller than 50 or so individuals. There, the leader does the resolution, as a chieftain of old would, but above that, the effects of Dunbar’s Number kick in and the organizational leader doesn’t have the attention, time or energy (read “bandwidth”) to address or manage all conflict scenarios all the time.

Marketing efforts: At scale, marketing falls into the same trap as conflict management does. More for less becomes the credo, and what used to be innovative, connecting marketing efforts, becomes bogged down in micromanaging, preening and office egos. What used to be sounding boards become echo chambers and marketing efforts are viewed increasingly as a “nice-to-have” rather than as an integral part of the organizational message.

The way to resolve issues in all of these areas is not to ask the question “Well, do we grow or not?” and then try to either stifle growth or to just let growth happen.

The way to resolve issues in these three areas is to have a steady, continuously reinforced sense of organizational culture, organizational focus, and organizational energy.

Then, the leader has only one question to answer in each area every single day, and the question has “yes” or a “no” answer: Does the action I am about to lead on for this organization match up with our culture, focus and energies?

Acting on “things that don’t scale” by answering that question with either a “yes” or a “no”, opens the door to delight organizational customers, end users, clients, advocates, fans, followers and so many others. Make no mistake: it requires leadership courage to stick to performing in the areas that don’t scale, to keep doing them well, and to keep the employees and others performing them, reigned in.

Otherwise, the “things that don’t scale,” but do delight, are the very things that, when abandoned, will surely lead to organizational death.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Leadership Through Apology

Much is made in the Western world of the importance of an apology.

When we start out as children—and our world is starkly black and white—apology comes, not from inside of us, but from outside of us. It is a statement we are compelled to say to others when we hurt them, under threat of punishment from someone in a position of power, i.e. a parent, a guardian or an older sibling.

These apologies are rarely meant, rarely come from a place of empathy about the situation or the other person harmed, and rarely lead to long-term resolution of conflicts, hurts, or injuries.

As we grow older, however, we become used to doing everything that we can to respond to conflicts through attack, avoidance, and/or accommodation. Interestingly enough, adults use all three of these methods to get around, get past and smooth over the need to either give an apology or receive one.

Then, this tendency scales to the workplace; a hard charging environment concerned only with the acquisition of revenue, the holding of power, the maintenance of position and continual growth. And when there’s a mistake made, a wrong committed, or an injury to a customer, a client or a partner, apology becomes a place for liability to lurk in the shadows.

There’s no room for apologies in this environment when people are hurt through conflicts there.

Just get over it, and move on.

But, what if the courage to apologize, much like the courage to take a risk and resolve a conflict in a different way, were a leadership competency, rather than a trapdoor for an executive leader to lose their position?

What if we thought about the process of risk, forgiveness, failure reconciliation, and apology differently?

As was pointed out last week, people get into disputes with other people, but because organizations and workplaces operate at scale, there is little room for the individual to get resolution—or apology—at scale. The only solution is to change the way we operate in organizations at scale, and to shift the conversation around conflict, disagreement, and even injury away from litigation and toward resolution.

The only people who can do that are the people at the top of the hierarchical pyramid. The ones that set the culture of (to paraphrase from John Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) “No apologies. It makes us look weak.” The ones that promote, and expand, the image (the myth, if you will) of the hard charging executive.

We see this beginning to happen with Zappos, and the growing interest in implementing a holocracy system in organizations. A system where there is flattened hierarchy. This is the beginning of rethinking how we redesign organizational myth and culture, but for apologies to be effective, and for the act of apologizing to be an effective leadership competency, there must be three things evident before a mouth opens to give a statement:

Sincerity—because the distance between the person affected by a conflict (whether external stakeholder or internal stakeholder) and the person who can give the organizational apology is long, the issue of sincerity in an apology becomes paramount. The only way to close this distance for the leader is for them to actually do some emotional labor and engage with humility.
Humility—because of the nature of organizational cultures (governments, businesses, etc.) arrogance is “baked in” to the structure of the organization, its culture and its ways. This is something that the person giving the apology has to break, but this also has to be reinforced by all of the people down from her in the organizational chain. When the leader is humble enough to apologize, but the mid-level manager is not, the chain of apology is broken.
Acceptance—because of the nature of power in organizations (power over, not power with) and because of how leaders perceive the products of power (i.e. money, time, etc.) there is little ability to accept the idea that an apology when given might not be accepted by the other party. This puts the organization (a group of the many) at the disposal of the injured party (a group of the one). This lack of ability to accept an unpredictable outcome (and not having built an antifragile organization in the first place) creates the environment where the default thought is “We’ll just go to litigation.” Which is the ultimate power play.

For organizations to continue to develop, scale and grow successfully in the 21^st century, leadership training, competencies and even research has to shift in favor of increasing leaders’ development in the three above areas, before an apology-based culture is even considered.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The 4 Areas of Organizational Conflict

In many organizations, the anticipated fear of doing something that might not work when resolving a conflict outweighs the anticipated benefits of taking a risk and resolving a conflict in a new way.

This anticipated fear shows up in four areas.

Customer service interactions—these are the ones that involve poor or miscommunication, bad service, a dissatisfied customer, or even a service that doesn’t do what the end-user (i.e. the customer) thought that it would. Conflicts in these areas tend to be the ones who’s outcomes are used to define the organization by its external supporters and detractors. They are usually resolved through speed and immediacy flooding the point of contention, followed by organizational silence.
Product recall incidents—these are incidents where a product is created, developed, produced, distributed and marketed in “good faith” but then proves to be defective in some way. Conflicts in these areas tend to focus around a material loss of some kind and are rarely resolved with an apology. They are resolved through litigation, regulation and in some cases, destruction of the organization.
Process innovation failures—this is when a product or service changes in some way and the changes are dissatisfying to the end user, the seller of the product or service, or the creator of the original product or service. Conflicts in these areas tend to take a long time to manifest and usually begin in the customer service area. They are usually resolved through changing cultures at two steps below the surface level (i.e. firing and hiring) but are rarely resolved thoroughly.
Employee disputes and conflicts—these are the most common internal conflicts and occur when visions, values and goals rubu up against each other. They are usually responded to internally through either avoidance, accommodation or attacking and are rarely resolved thoroughly until employees “move on.”

Many organizations assume that immediacy of response in all four of these “dispute” areas equals resolution. The problem “goes away” and then there is silence—from the press, from the customer, from the stakeholders, and from the employees.

This assumption exists because organizations operate at scale. Scale creates degrees of separation between the person impacted by the outcome of the interaction, the incident, the innovation or the conflict, and the person who is “at the top” of the hierarchy in the organization.

As human beings, from the age of tribes to the age of multinational organizations, we have outsourced the resolution of conflicts to third parties—chiefs, in essence—with the expectation that with distance comes freedom from emotional entanglement and rationality in decision making.

When the chief knew everyone in the tribe, this might have been—and may continue to be—true. But when Dunbar’s Number kicks in at scale, and organizations begin to grow, more and more resolution is outsourced to fewer and fewer people who are called to sit in judgment, render a verdict and not consider the consequences.

The unspooling of the Industrial Revolution and its outcomes and consequences, at scale, has put to lie, the myth promulgated throughout mass media, mass advertising, mass unionization, and even mass government for the majority of the last century: The individual, whether employee, customer, neighbor or advocate, can get resolution to conflict, disagreement, or disappointment at scale from an organization.

All conflicts, interactions, incidents, disturbances, and any other synonyms humans use to describe conflicts and disputes are always interpersonal, and thus can only be resolved at the interpersonal level. But many organizations—schools, nonprofits, businesses, corporations—only function well and “change the world” at scale, rather than in interacting with one person, employee, customer, neighbor or advocate, at a time.

The solution for this is not to prevent organizations from scaling. This is as impossible as canceling biological maturation or natural growth. The deep solution is for the chief to purposefully change attitudes and minds at the individual level through coaching, training, and leading, and then leaving a culture in an organization behind that repeats the vision, mission, values and goals that they want to see.

This is the real innovation that requires courage at the beginning, the middle and the end to execute. But many organizations would rather put out burning fires than build a better house in the first place.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Ability to Remember

The ability to remember makes it hard for us to be reconciled with those who have harmed us.

This remembering lies at the core of our unwillingness to extend a hand of forgiveness toward those who have wronged us, whether it be in the business world, the academic world or even our families. This remembering lies at the core of our willingness to engage in vengeance, to couch and justify judgments and to close ourselves off from the other party in a conflict, under the guise of “self-protection.”

Many people hide behind their memories of “who did what when to who” in a conflict, in order to avoid letting go of the emotional pain associated with impact of the conflict; but, many more people would rather be reconciled to those who have wronged them in the past and continue in relationship.

Human beings are built for relationship, not ritualized conflict. And in non-Western cultures, where communitarianism is valued over individualism and conflicts are seen as tearing at the root fabric of relationship, the ritualized process of reconciliation is framed in the language of restoration.

In the West, though, outside of family and school we focus too much about the surface of relationships. Exploring this pathology is another blog post for another, day. The point is, we must figure out three things when we feel like we are ready to be reconciled with the one who has hurt us:

We are beginning a new relationship with an old person, and what happened in a past conflict no longer determines the current parameters of the new relationship. This is the hardest part of reconciliation, because we often want to hold the other party continually accountable for what we think is their part of the conflict, regardless of whether or not the situation has changed.

We are surrendering our “right” to revenge, continued blame, and “dredging up the past.” This is the second hardest part of reconciliation, because we project our view of the conflict onto the other party, and subscribe to them motives that we have secretly inside ourselves. Where there is fierce conflict, there needs to be equally fierce reconciliation.

We are reconciled to people, not to brands, organizations, governments, corporations or even neighborhoods or families. This is the third hardest part, which paradoxically, makes it the easiest to nod our heads and accept when we hear it (or read it). However, really consider it: When people litigate, they are looking for an apology (more on this phenomenon later) from a human being. Too many of us hide away from relationships that make us uncomfortable, or that expose our vulnerabilities in ways that make us seem weak. Reconciliation only occurs when people are exposed to other people and experience their desire for a renewed relationship. Systems and structure cannot engage in reconciliation (or even apology) in any kind of meaningful way.

The ability to remember is a choice. Just as the ability to reconcile is. Both require active participation on the part of one (or both) parties to a conflict. They also require repeated refreshing at the well of relationship.

Click on the link here and download the FREE HSCT White Paper on FORGIVENESS AND RECONCILIATION TODAY!

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] A Modern History For Labor Day II

There’s a lot of political commentary floating around about the perils of income inequality.

This issue—which can lead to conflicts—is mask for a much larger, more pervasive, and more pernicious kind of inequality though. And this conversation masks discussing the core question, buried deep inside the second type of inequality.

Here’s the question that a conversation around income inequality can‘t touch: Why do some people become “successful” (whatever that means) and other people don’t (whatever that means)?

Labor Day is a day to focus around outcomes and inputs:

Labor is an input. Work is an outcome.
Effort is an input. “Success” is an outcome.
Childhood is an input. Adulthood is an outcome.
Actions are inputs. Consequences are outcomes.

Conflicts come about when there is an avoidance, an accommodation or an attack as an outcome related directly to deeply held perceptions about the nature, range and efficacy of a particular consequence, for a particular action.

Different people respond in a random variety of ways to inputs and outcomes, consequences and conflicts.

Trying to focus on equalizing responses—and thus removing the risk of conflicts related to differing outcomes—is an exercise best left to academics, politicians and political commentators on the news.

The celebration on this day should be about how successful and persuasive efforts have been (inputs) to create different, and materially better, outcomes, rather than continuing to circle the room, searching in vain for better outcomes.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Marketing for the Peace Builder III

There are three ways to connect with clients, customers, fans and audiences.

And in the world of digital communication, there is one basic principle that underlies all of these connections that the peacebuilder must keep in mind.

Original content creation starts with the blogging, but then moves to image creation (uploads to Slideshare), video (both live streaming and staged), audio (podcasts), webinars and more. Original content creation requires consistency, sweat equity and massive amounts of focus to get right.

Content curation starts with looking at what the Web already has as content out there, being produced by others, and then distributing that content to others in your network. Content curation requires and understanding of deep linking, mobile phone use, SEO rankings, keywords (yes, they still matter) and SEM (that’s Search Engine Management). Content curation requires an intuitive and analytic driven understanding of which platforms are just bullhorns, and which ones are targets for getting your audience’s attention, trust, and giving them value.

Content distribution starts at the intersection of content curation and content creation and requires understanding how those two intersect—and how they bisect. The fact of the matter is that many content creators are really good at distribution vial one platform (email, social, TV, direct mail, etc.) and really mediocre at many others. This is due to the fact that each distribution channel has its own rules, quirks and dramas that affect how an audience gets engaged and why, how long that audience stays engaged, and why that audience leaves.

The one basic principle the peacebuilder must keep in mind, is that creation, curation and distribution are the only ways that scale occurs in the digital realm. And when the persistent thought in a peacebuilder’s mind is “Is this doing any good?” the persistent answer, after developing in all three areas with strengths in creation, is…

“Yes.”

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Another “Uber of ‘X'” is not the Solution to Our Problems

“Uber of X” is not the solution to many of our problems with spreading, monetizing and deeeping the significance and reach of the Web.

One of the areas that demonstrates the lack of human imagination in developing the Internet for the service of people rather than in the service of commerce, is the human desire for the tool of the Web to work in service of leisure, consumption, marketing, entertainment and distraction. This desire, evidenced through the apps, tools and services we have designed and laid on top of it, caters to our base human desire for ease of solution, without being bothered by the intricacies and complexities of the chaos and complication, network growth brings.

Our tools–particularly our communication tools–should stand as objects that raise us up out of the muck of our inter/intrapersonal conflict biology and serve a Higher Purpose and our higher selves.

Another social media network isn’t going to do that.

Another selling, promotion or entertainment platform isn’t going to do it.

Any application, change or build atop the Web we have now, pitched and described to potential investors as “The “Uber of ‘X’” isn’t going to do that either.

But, maybe the Web in its voracious expansion out of the corral of the digital/virtual world and into the desert of the lived real, will never become the edifying, higher purpose technology we all thought it would be in the 90’s—maybe it’ll never be more than a glorified telephone/television system.

In the sci-fi dystopian novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, the citizens of a reality, not far removed from our current one, have limited choices outside of consuming, learning, and entertaining themselves in an elaborately constructed virtual world. Meanwhile, in the real world, people line up to enter the virtual world in a zombie like, Walking Dead, fashion, as the means of commerce and creation have abandoned the old, real world leaving it to rot and die on the vine.

We are at the beginning stages of this transformation of our world.

But only if we don’t try to challenge the inherent assumptions, expectations and disappointments around the architecture of what we have built atop the Web we have now. These challenges must push us beyond socializing and commerce and move humanity toward transformation and edification.

-Peace Be With You All-