This Too Shall Pass

Black Friday is a creation of marketers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

A Fundamental Breakdown

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

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

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

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

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

-Peace Be With You All-

How to Really Break the Internet

The reason why there is so much meaningless content in your Facebook feed is that the platform has developed into an advertising platform, rather than a connection building platform.

If you are building a business as a conflict communication consultant, mediator, arbitrator or another type of practitioner, we can discuss the viability of paying for advertising in your connections’ Facebook feeds.

But this is about the conflict evident in the tension between what Facebook—and other platforms—used to be versus what they are now. The marketer Seth Godin made the point in a recent blog post that when a company goes public, it’s purpose ceases to be about changing the world and begins to be about ticking up the share price point for investors.

That creates tension.

The other factor that creates tension is the difference between what users expect from the platform based on past experiences versus what users are experiencing everyday. This is a tension evident in the fact that the users who engage with the platform the most have the greatest chance of getting their content in your feed.

Which means, Aunt Ida who only uses Facebook once every month won’t know that you aren’t seeing her content as often as you are seeing the content being shared and reposted by good ‘ol Trent who is unemployed and has been on Facebook everyday of the week for the last four months.

That creates tension.

Eventually, when another, viable, connection platform (and no, Ello isn’t it) comes along (as it will) Facebook will go the way of TV and become just another luxury advertising platform that charges more and more to push content to an ever more fractured and shrinking audience base that will be paying less and less attention.

That creates tension.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Interviewing for Your Project

The interview process is rife with problems, and the solopreneur consultant has more problems than most at the beginning.

Think about it: If you’ve solved the problem of scaling up from a freelance, “I hire myself because it’s cheaper,” mindset, and have developed a proprietary process that you can sell to others at a price high enough to justify having an employee, only then can you make a hire.

And many solopreneurs/business owners, approach hiring with a mindset grounded in the back end UX they suffered through when they were looking to work for somebody else.

Typically the process goes as follows: You bring people into a room, after putting several of them through a grueling process of assessment—both psychological and sometimes physical. Then you ask them a series of ridiculous, HR designed, pre-formatted questions.

After this, everybody leaves the room and the consultant/solopreneur/business owner makes a blind decision to hire or not hire the people put through the process. This decision typically follows a series of arbitrary, meaningless, showy conversations with partners and others, that have told nothing about how well the potential employee can perform in the position; and, have everything to do with intangible–and potentially illegal to consider–character traits.

This is the interview process and a lot of times both the interviewer and the newly hired individual is dissatisfied with what happened in the room.

Look, if you’ve successfully leapfrogged to business owner from freelancer, then there are three things that you should be looking for before you even think about going down the hackneyed road of interviewing:

Is the person that I am talking to conscientious?
Is the person that I am talking to accustomed to failure and does this person have the grit to get through it?
Is the person that I’m talking to going to fulfill the material needs of my business at a human level?

That’s it. Those are your interview considerations.

Now, you’re an entrepreneur first and a business owner second. Go blow up the model of the process.

-Peace Be With You All-

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-

8 Things No One Sees

There are a few things no one sees when you’re building a project. We’ve listed the top eight below, though there are at least a hundred more…if not a thousand.

No one sees the endless hours of work a week.
No one sees the intellectual, emotional, psychological and behavioral pushups.
No one sees the grueling sweat of an exhausted mind.
No one sees the research and the dead ends.
No one sees the countless hours logged onto Pandora. Or Spotify.
No one sees the self-motivation.
No one sees the partners’ disappointed eyes.
No one sees the frustration of delayed gratification.

The same way that no one sees the wind and water pound against the rock and watch it get reshaped over the course of several millennia.

But of course, human lives are much shorter. Our conflicts–to push the analogy, our volcanoes–are much more destructive, as are our earthquakes.

The applause and appreciation comes, but not when you’re in the gym, putting in the work.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Working From Home

The old gray mare ain’t what she used to be. Right?

When you’re working from home, there approaches a point of contention, unless you are very clear right away, around what working means and doesn’t mean.

There are children who don’t think that what you’re doing is work.

There is the partner who leaves the house everyday and leaves you with a stack of “Honey-Do’s” that could choke…well…an old gray mare.

There are the general disturbances of the household and addressing household emergencies that crop up during the day, as well as distractions from other forms of entertainment in the home.

The savvy consultant working from home knows that defining lines, particular boundaries and even the well articulated IRS deduction can determine whether success or failure knocks at his door—or at the door of the co-working location two streets over.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA

Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Talking to Your Partner

The professional consultant and coach most often acts as a solopreneur.

She is most often alone in the pursuit of dream.

She is typically overwhelmed by concerns about accounting and how much she must charge to make a profit, how her marketing is working (or not) and multiple other competing priorities.

She is alone in her business and her business practice, but she is not alone in her overall life.

She has a partner and/or friends. No woman is an island. She’s driven, but she has to make two decisions early:

How to pick a partner or friend

How much to tell that person about her solopreneurship.

The best practice is to be as honest as possible with intimate partners (and business partners are about as intimate as possible without taking off your clothes) and tell the other party, just how long it’s going to take to scale.

One less conversation to be had can make her life easier and less complicated.

-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-