[Opinion] On Predicting the Future

You can’t do it.

Neither can we.

Human beings (all of us) spend a lot of time generating a lot of anxiety, about what will happen tomorrow, what will happen next, or when this thing we’re doing now will all be over.

We can’t help it. Our biology has us wired for fear and anticipation of the next thing over the horizon. But, we believe that the work of conflict is for human beings to overcome their biology.

In our modern, conflict ridden culture, we have the tendency to mythologize the past, as if the people who lived then were somehow less intelligent, less forward thinking, less analytical, and less worried about the future. This orthodoxy of nostalgia is a poison, particularly in the context of a conflict. When we mythologize the people and situations of the past, because the future is unknowable—and thus scary—we hand over power to the worst impulses inside of us.

However, there is a way out, but we have to do a very scary thing first: We have to jettison the orthodoxy that mythologizes and infantilizes past decisions, people, and situations and realize that we will, in turn, more likely than not, be mythologized and infantilized by future peoples as well.

Pride and vanity—in our accomplishments, our technology, our knowledge—are pathologies of the current age. In the age of the present, people elevate themselves over the populations of the past, and become anxious and fearful about how they will be judged and categorized by people yet to be born. The humbling thing to realize is that such pathologies are no more pervasive in people now than they were in people of the past.

Pride and vanity—along with a courage deficit and a need for safety—go a long way toward ensuring that conflicts we thought were over—in our families, our organizations, our societies, our cultures— continue on into the future.

Humility in the face of past, faith in the face of the future, and peace in the situations of the present, lead to not worrying about the future, rather than expending mental, emotional and spiritual energy on trying to predict it, control it, or prepare for it.

-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] Managing Reality

Changing expectations of outcomes corresponds to changing our assumptions about other people in conflict–and out.

This is difficult, because assumptions are grounded in pattern seeking behavior that our human minds engage in, to make stories about the behaviors of other people in the world.

When those stories don’t match up to the expected behavior, people often experience disappointment.

Then the stock price goes down.
Then the family erupts into disagreement and conflict.
Then the organization begins the long, slow, traumatic process of firing an employee.

Disappointments are based in having unrealistic expectations about the behaviors of other people; but, since other people also have a skewed view of one another, the disappointments coalesce into conflicts, hurt feelings, and eventually, unrealized expectations.

There is no way out of this cage as long as human beings create narratives about the world, based primarily around the way that their unknowable inner lives either match up (or don’t) with the outer reality.

The thing about reality though, is that it’s relative.

Emotions drive expectations, disappointments and assumptions. They lead us to build and manage narratives about how we’d like the world to be, rather than how the world actually is structured. This structural process leads to far more conflicts than the actual conflict issues at hand.

Leaning in (to borrow the phrase) comes from addressing the hard things repeatedly, rather than just erecting new expectations, based in old assumptions, which lead to seemingly fresh and new disappointments.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Well, That Was Difficult…

“Well, that was easy.”

Actually, no it wasn’t.

And the expectation that it should be, raises more problems than it solves for many organizations, institutions, and even individuals.

If the resolution to the expectation of how the conflict should proceed, results in an outcome that seemed “easy,” that outcome—and the process to get to that outcome—should be reexamined.

Expectations around finishing—or resolving—a conflict, a pain point, or a problem, are often characterized as needing to be “easy” in order to be sold to the skeptical party on the other side of the negotiation table. But the expectation that resolution shouldn’t require anything of one party (and everything of another party) is a childish assumption that many adults act on in very sophisticated ways.

The expectation of an “easy” resolution to conflict leads to poor organizational storytelling around a conflict narrative (particularly in a customer service complaint context) as well as poor organizational dealings with employees who may (or may not) be “pulling their weight.”
The expectation of an “easy” resolution to conflict leads to policies, procedures and laws that lack common sense, hide devilish details in meaningless language and public pronouncements by organizations that should be trustworthy, but ultimately come off as satirical and farcical.
The expectation of an “easy” resolution to conflict leads to disappointments, which deepens dysfunctionality, creates a cycle of more conflict (not less) and allows individuals to hide behind fear, avoidance of accountability and accommodation of unethical behaviors.

The marketing of the “easy” button was genius from a marketing perspective. However, tangled geopolitics, organizational ethics problems and individual ennui are not resolved with a button.

The expectation of difficulty in resolving both simple and complex conflicts—coupled with the courage to do the difficult thing anyway—leads to long-term resolutions, deeper engagement and real, genuine relationships.

“Well, that was difficult. But it was worth it.”

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] The Likely and the Comfortable – The Earbud_U Minute

There is a way that work realities are constructed that betrays a lack of understanding and acceptance of an uncomfortable, likely future reality; and betrays a comfort with creating a reality that is comfortable, but unlikely:

The comfortable reality is that employers keep hiring (albeit at a lower/slower rate) and that they keep on the people that they already have.
The comfortable reality is that college age students will continue to pile on massive student loan debt and the skills that they get in exchange for this debt will somehow be rendered relevant in the future economy.
The comfortable reality is that employees will continue to be compensated at current (and ever rising) levels as the technical skills that they exhibit continue to remain more relevant than the people skills that can’t be measured.
The comfortable reality is that all this technological and software advancement will remain nothing more than a meaningless side show with no value to a corporate bottom line, middle line or even top line.

Considering, pontificating and reassuring that “it’s always been this way and will always be this way” in the form of published bromides and policy assurances, calms the employee lizard brain (the cerebellum where fight/flight/freeze responses live) and such statements and actions soothe and serve to maintain the status quo in organizations.

The likely future reality is much, much more complicated. And scary.

The likely future reality is that technological and software changes in the industrial workplace structure and underlying economy will allow more advancement and innovation to be done with fewer employees.
The likely future reality is that employees will be compensated less and less (and at ever decreasing rates) until the gap in compensation between top individual organizational performers and the next employee down the line, will mirror the current growing wage gap between the upper class and the middle class in the overall economy.
The likely future reality is that college students with crushing debt will struggle to learn and integrate emotional and psychological lessons that the academic world did not see fit to teach them at $7.00 per hour jobs. Or that they did not deem important enough to learn in between the socialization and the outrage. All while paying back five and six figure loans.
The likely future reality is that employers will seek to replace people with algorithms, or computer programs, or software solutions and (at the end of the line) robots, who will demand no pay, no benefits and will have such incredibly high productivity that shareholders will be happy to fire humans as a reflex, even as their returns increase.

Writing, teaching, lecturing or even casually mentioning likely future realities activates the employer/employee/politician/administrator lizard brain and makes fear, avoidance and attack responses kick in at all levels of society, from the C-Suite of an organization to the office of the President of the United States.

True management and supervisory leadership requires clear eyed planning for likely future realities, as well as a sophsticated ability to persuade, cajole and even threaten employees, shareholders, and the public to face likely reality head on. Such leadership will create sustainable economic and social systems that will be antifragile, and able to sustain and evolve from unexpected shocks, rather than attempting to build redundant, robust systems, or constructing fragile systems that fall apart in a heartbeat when the next “it could never happen here” event, happens here.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What Will You Do With That Freedom?

The two natural processes of erosion and corrosion are long-term, insidious and the body being affected by them does not observe the effects immediately.

Erosion happens from the outside in: It’s a slow, steady, grinding down of the earth by the massive structural forces of wind, water and ice. It takes hundreds of thousands of years to complete and is never really over.

Corrosion happens from the inside out: It’s also a slow, steady process, where natural—or man-made—materials interact at a chemical level with the oxygen in the air. It takes less time to finish its work and is also never really over.

We underestimate the power of corrosion and erosion as entropy based systems that affect the earth, its properties and the things that humans create. But the circle of life—birth, maturity, death—continues inexorably forward.

On this July 4^th, the day that celebrates the United States of America’s founding with the signing of the most revolutionary document ever written (birth) let us ask two critical questions:

Where is our country, politically, ethically, morally, spiritually, and economically, at in the circle of life?
What social, moral, political and economic processes—either erosion or corrosion—are moving our country inexorably forward along the timeline of entrophy?

Countries, nation states and collections of people (tribes, if you will) also erode, and corrode, in their quest toward entrophy. This holiday weekend, let’s take some time, look around, and consider where we are at.

And what got us here.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Courage

The difference between people who “succeed” and people who “fail” in a conflict scenario is individual levels of courage.

Courage is in short supply and always has been since the days of the playground bully and meeting new people once you got off the bus for the first time in the first grade and Mom and Dad weren’t there to hold your hand anymore.

Courage is not about preparation, learning, discipline or even persistence and grit—although all of those skills and internal factors help.

Courage is about not needing external validation from the world—basically, not needing assurances to do the right thing—and just doing the right thing in the first place.

Which is often the hard thing.

In a conflict scenario, it takes courage to confront in a healthy way, prepare for the feedback you will receive about your role in the problem and then integrating that feedback into your worldview, while also giving feedback to the other person about their role in the scenario.

It takes courage to confront a cheating spouse, explain how what they did impacted you and your family and then to listen to them tell you why they made their choice.

It takes courage to address a difficult employee who has little social skills and appears to have even less desire to develop them, and try to find a middle ground to get tasks done in the workplace.

It takes courage to speak up when you think bad decisions are being made in a fraternal, civic, volunteer, or church organization that you disagree with. And it takes courage to hear and accept why those decisions may not be the best for you, but are the best ones for the organization.

Courage is at the bottom of all resolution. Forgiveness is at the bottom of all reconciliation efforts. Labor is at the bottom of all engagement practices, advice and opinions.

So then the question becomes: How much do you really want to grow as a person before you leave this life?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Steps to Eliminating Hurry

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry in your life.

Many time management seminars and productivity hacks, mobile applications, in-person trainings and coaching sessions, skirt around the core problem at the heart of modernity: There are only 24 hours in the day.

The problem is not that people have too many tasks in their adult lives (we do); the problem is not that people are constantly busy with priorities that don’t really matter to them (we are); the problem is not that people are stressed out, frazzled, feeling like they are browsing through life, and deeply emotionally and spiritually unhealthy (we are).

The problem is that most of what we read, absorb and try to put into practice focuses around moving around the priorities we don’t like, and trying to squeeze one more ounce out of the 24 hours we do have—so that we can do more things we don’t like.

All while telling ourselves the story (in this case, the lie) that “Well, if I just do THIS thing, I’ll have more time to do what I want to do.”

Really, the issue comes down to patience. In our American culture (and if you’re reading this another country, or from another cultural background, this statement may or may not apply to your experience) we value impatience, hurry, and idolize the cult of busyness, over many other areas.

We resent people who appear to have more time than they know what to do with. And we envy in our hearts people with wealth, who at least outwardly, appear to have no worries about time at all, and appear to have boundless energy.

Then, we read the articles on productivity, time management, wealth creation, the “1%” and on doing more with less, searching for assurances that we are right and “they” who appear to have more than us, are wrong.

But, what if we tried three other things rather than just moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic one more time?

Say “no” more…and mean it—“no” to promotions that we don’t really need and that take more time from priorities we said were “non-negotiable,” “no” to obligations that come packaged as opportunities and “no” to productivity and time management “hacks” that don’t get at the core of what we really need. Which is the courage to say “no” in the first place.
Eliminate hurry—don’t hurry. That’s it. Just slow down to a crawl. Take time to talk to people in front of us, rather than the people on Twitter (we are deeply guilty of this one, so we are are talking to ourselves here as well). Take time to drive in the slow lane for a month at the posted speed limit. Do the old things (like writing and reading) that require us to put aside the things that don’t matter (like work) and put in front of us the things that do matter (like self-improvement).
Get active—55% of mobile phone users go online through their phones. Most of this is browsing, shopping and in general, watching what other people are doing. Television used to be the driver for passivity, but we now have a TV/computer/radio in our pocket all the time. But getting active in our own lives requires us to stop watching the escapades of people who are already active in their lives.

Difficulty in balancing seemingly competing demands is the first stop on the road to conflict. For many people, difficulties begin with the management of their perception of hurry, patience, stress, and other people. When we have the courage to ruthlessly eliminate hurry, stress is reduced and difficulties become manageable, rather than events that can derail an entire day with anger, stress, and impatience.

-Peace Be With You All-

[ICYMI] Moving Around Deck Chairs on the Titanic

The corollary question to, “Does any of this stuff really work?” is “Does anybody really change?”

The writer and marketer Seth Godin, in his most recent audio production, Leap First, talked about how people often need to hear assurances. Assurances that everything is going to be alright in spite of organizational layoffs or familial changes, or assurances that the future (of work, life, the economy, etc.) is going to be just the same as the past, but slightly better.

He stated that the reason people need to hear assurances is that the human lizard brain turns on a jabbering, sabotaging, klaxon of alarm bells when assurances are not wrapped around threatening information. This is a defense mechanism, long developed and honed to a point that sabotages needed changes in organizations.

In relation to conflict, we see evidence of such a need in the training and teaching that we do. In the mediations that we no longer do, we used to see that clients needed assurances that there would be safety, autonomy and self-determination at the mediation table; before they even sat down to do the scary work of confronting their former partners, husbands or wives.

In the effort to educate people in how to approach conflicts, difficulties and even confrontation in better ways in their organizations, we have struggled with the practical fact of having to provides assurances to “grease the runway”—while also having to provide challenging information that will encourage audience members and clients to stretch past their comfort zones.

Comfort zones are the geographic location where the “expert” lives (whether in a person’s head or a person’s organization). The “expert” employs the whispers of the lizard brain, assuring us, even as we are stretched by new knowledge that “only minor changes need to be made,” or “that’ll never happen here, the organization is too big,” or “we’ve always done it one way. Don’t worry. That guy will be gone tomorrow and you can get back to doing what you were doing the way that you were doing it.”

The phrase “moving around deck chairs on the Titanic” indicates a person (or organization) choosing to act in a futile manner to solve a minor problem (the arrangement of the deck chairs) while a major problem (the looming iceberg) goes unaddressed.

Does anybody really change? We don’t know.

We hope (and yes, we know that “hope” is not a scalable strategy–we measure and assess outcomes as well) that every person who attends a workshop, a seminar, a corporate training, or a keynote chooses to exit their comfort zones in some small way to do the work that matters around conflict, confrontation and difficulty in their organizations.

But moving deck chairs around is the mental, emotional and spiritual activity of an organization deep in their comfort zone, being soothed with assurances, which lap upon the sides of the organizational body, even as changes loom in the distance.

Originally published on April 24, 2015.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!

[ICYMI] No Parking Here

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind. Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?” – Five Man Electrical Band (1971)

In this week’s post “How to Autopsy a Conflict,” we here at Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT) addressed some of the methods which our conflict consultant (and many other mediators and peace practitioners in the field) use to examine conflicts almost after the fact.

There are many ways of communicating in the world today and a conflict communication situation came to us recently and we’d like to address it here, for the benefit of our readers.

In any conflict, both parties have three options in how they can choose to communicate:

They can be nonassertive “What good would it do to speak up?” Or, “Whatever you decide is fine with me.”
They can be passive aggressive: “I’m going to spy on you and then tell on you later to a person or entity up the ladder.”
They can be aggressive: “I am the boss. What I say goes.”

There is an apartment complex in Binghamton, NY, somewhere around the NYSEG stadium where the Binghamton Mets play. This apartment complex has on the street parking.

Typically, a friend of ours (for the purposes of this blog post, we’ll refer to him as C.) parks all the way up to the sign that reads this:

In essence, his selfish act of kindness, provides somewhere near an extra half to full space requirement for the vehicle behind his to park on what is a crowded, on-street parking, apartment living situation.

Now, one would expect such largesse to eventually be rewarded and acknowledged. And it is:

The person who wrote this…well…let’s get a direct quote from C. about this:

“This person clearly has a f—king problem.” (We had to edit that, we’ve got kids reading over our shoulders as we write this.)

Profanity aside, the head consultant here at HSCT agrees. As a matter of fact, we would call this type of communication passive aggressive at best.

Since we are about solutions to this, we have about three for you, our dear reader, our friend C., and the note leaver, that may help alleviate issues like this in the future:

In a previous post, (click here) we addressed getting to know your neighbor.

This would be our recommended course of action in this situation. You may key a stranger’s car, but not a friend’s.

Assertive, not aggressive, communication is the key. A note, left under a windshield with a message on it, provides the first, subtle message that escalation is not only OK, but preferable and acceptable.

Intimidation, fear, closed-off-ness, and anxiety are all present in this note and lay deep in the subtext of C’s feelings as well as his verbalized response.

The antidotes for all of those are collaboration through mutual understanding, clarification of perspectives and by having a rigid goal, but being flexible in the means to get there.

Finally, if you just can’t correct the parking situation on your own, call in a third party: A good friend, the police or the conflict communication and resolution professionals at HSCT.

We’ll take care of it all, from notes to nuts.

Originally published on July 10, 2013.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!

[Opinion] Trust + Accountability = Quality

There’s a lot of negative social proofing going on right now.

Some of it is transmitted through social media; some of it comes through more traditional means.

Personal branding as a marketing term has fallen out of popularity, now replaced by the equally amorphous term “thought leader” which will soon be replaced by influencer.

Microcelebrity via YouTube, Vine, Facebook videos, and other forms of entertainment are becoming more and more popular, as the inevitability of tools that enable marketers, brands and individuals to create audiences that show up just for them.

The thing is the courage to create and develop a positive, consistent presence in the face of a lack of positive social proofing has never been in shorter supply than it is right now. At the core of this lack are three crucial areas:

Trust: There is a trust shortage. People, personalities and companies that have shown up, day-in and day-out succeed, but will the current crop of YouTube celebrities make it ten more years? And when there’s no belief that the People Who Matter are even paying attention, then organizations and individuals trust themselves more than the community.
Accountability: When there is little trust—or even belief that anything (or anybody) worth trusting will show up in the first place—then there is little incentive for people and organizations to stand up and say “Yes, I made this decision.” Social shaming, a continuing erosion of public (and private) empathy, and the increasing visibility of public (and private) narcissism, are the ingredients that create a toxic stew where Bystander Behavior (or worse) is supported, condoned and given a pass.
Quality: The quality shortage is most loudly evident in the explosion of voices on social media. But it goes deeper than that. In the pursuit of thinner and thinner profit margins, and with high unemployment and social unrest, the search for quality—of work, of attitude, of standards, of values—becomes a quiet, desperate search, which very few organizational supervisors, human resource hiring managers, recently elected politicians or media talking heads, ever really address.

Trust + Accountability = Quality.

It used to be that circumstances, such as poverty, a lack of articulation, a social power structure, were barriers which could be overcome with a little grit, persistence, faith, trust and accountability.

But the belief that underlies those ideas is eroding because the disconnect between the story behind circumstances, and the reality of erosion in the above three areas, is becoming more and more pronounced.

-Peace Be With You All-