[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode # 2 – Chris Strub

Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode # 2 – Chris Strub, Social Media Maverick, Social Good Trailblazer, Finding the Niches Where Helping Meets Digital

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As an entrepreneur, the one thing that I struggle the most with—along with everything else—is the word “no.” When I say “no,” when I hear a “no,” or when I have to give a “no.”

Recently, I sat in on a ten week leadership class, provided through my local church. Stewardship, discipleship, working with others, and team development and management were all covered in this class.

I asked the instructor one evening, how do you say no?

I am a person who believes in experiences and sees the potential in others. But one thing that I have struggled with for years, is seeing potential in others that they don’t see in themselves. And then, after seeing the potential, I push them inexorably toward the excellence that I think I see in them.

After many years, I discovered why that is a horrible model for leadership.

There are two kinds of leadership, just like there are two kinds of power.

The one kind of leadership is the one that I just described. See the potential in others. Then push the people toward the development of—and realization of—that potential. The other kind of leadership is one that is built around serving your followers and allowing them the space to live out their potential in their own way.

The second model is the one that exemplifies our guest today on the show, Chris Strub. I’ve been a fan of his for years and, full disclosure, we used to work together before he was anybody. But this guy is blowing up now basically everywhere, and you’ll get to hear why in a little bit.

Also, in about a month here on Earbud_U, I’ll have an update about the super secret project that Chris alludes to on this podcast and how that all turned out in the Summer of 2015.

Check out all the ways to connect with Chris Strub below:

Check out his latest trailbalzing adventure, 50 states, 50 youth orgs. in 100 days on the web: http://www.teamstrub.com/

Chris’s Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/chrisstrub

Team Strub on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TeamStrub

Chris on LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisstrub

Check out Chris’s Photos on Instagram: https://instagram.com/chrisstrub/

Live Streaming Daily on Meerkat: http://meerkatapp.co/smallgnumber6/6dd11abf-1bc6-4cab-baa5-ae16d481fd17

Google +: https://plus.google.com/+ChrisStrub/posts

Check out Chris on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ32kX6XL9SAqrnY_FOkBXg

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode # 1 (a) – Neil Denny

Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode #1 (a) – Neil Denny, Mediator, Collaborative Lawyer, Author, Grudge & Forgiveness Expert

Neil Denny’s perspective and approach to peace starts where most people think that the path ends—at forgiveness and reconciliation.

But don’t get us wrong, he’s also a peace building entrepreneur who understands the need that all mediators, negotiators, attorney mediators and others have to do to get other people to walk along the path to peace.

Building a business and keeping your equanimity are not mutually exclusive. When the money doesn’t come in and when the doorbell (or phone) isn’t ringing, what else is the peace builder to do? Well, applying principles of marketing and development can help, along with understanding how partnerships really work between people in business.

Neil is involved in a tom of projects, developing new niches for peace. Feel free to connect with Neil in all the ways that he’s differentiated below:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/neildenny

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/neildenny

Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Neil-Denny/e/B005HSOTNY

Youtube: https://youtu.be/WTmUDGib-VQ

Get Artisan: https://getartisan.wordpress.com/

The Conflict Specialists Show w/Dave Hilton: http://www.conflictengagementspecialists.com/blog/collaborative-law-and-the-get-artisan-movement-with-neil-denny/

By the way, this is our first two-part episode here on Earbud_U. So listen to the first half (released earlier this month) by clicking on the link here!

[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-

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/

[Podcast] Virtual Ghettos – The Earbud_U Minute

Ghettos are popping up all over the virtual place.

In the physical world, the ghetto began as a way to segregate Jewish populations from other populations in Italy and all throughout the rest of Europe. Then, if Wikipedia is to be believed, ghettos came to the US, first as a way to segregate the Irish and Italian immigrants, then as a way to separate African Americans from predominantly White populations.

With that in mind, look down at the screen of your smartphone. How many apps do you have?

How many different neighborhoods, or ghettos, do they represent?

In the virtual space of the Internet, information may want to be free, but people apparently want to be crowded into virtual cities and neighborhoods—with all of the separation, regulation and virtual social norming as informal policy.

As we innovate further—and as digital natives move further and further away from the ghettos that digital immigrants seem comfortable in—the question we must ask ourselves is: Which comes first, the regulation or the innovation?

We have to figure this out as a global culture, because physical ghettos lead not only to segregation, biases and prejudices (which may prove to be minor annoyances in the virtual space) but also to poverty, lack of access to resources and reduced opportunity (which may prove to be even more damaging in the virtual space that in the physical world).

Conflicts between those in the virtual ghettos, those in the virtual suburbs and those on the virtual frontier need to be addressed by people who have experience with emotional intelligence, active listening and strong facilitation ability.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Web 3.0 – The Earbud_U Minute

We need to figure out what kind of Internet we want to have.

The business model currently funding and pushing the growth of the Internet is based upon monetizing a base of users who come to a project and use it for free, or for a nominal price.

The user takes advantage of the content/service/process for free. And, as a result, the user is so enamored with the content/service/process that they keep coming back over and over again, building a trust based relationship with the creator/creators of the project. Subsequently, in order to fund the project, there are hopefully so many users that an advertiser has no choice but to put advertisements in front of a group of eyeballs with whom the project owner has built a relationship.

This is the model underlying Facebook. The nominal fee model (a subscription-based model) underlies LinkedIn, journalism models, ecommerce platforms and other content/service/process platforms.

Web 2.0 is what everyone is talking about now, but Web 3.0 is really, where the Internet has to move to.

Web 3.0 is beyond just the Internet of Things. Web 3.0 is the Internet as Everything. Web 3.0 is the Internet waging active battle with the last, sticky remnants of the world built through the assumptions of the Industrial Revolution. This is a world created around the rules, laws and policies, created by politicians and people to keep the common democratization of the Internet out of the hands of the common people before the Internet.

Here’s a question: Why is it that there aren’t any internet connected roads?

It has nothing to do with technological innovations such as creating concrete that can communicate with strips on the road. Or with computer chips that can talk to your car. Or signs and traffic signals that talk to the road, the car and each other.

The reason there aren’t roads that are intelligent is not a smart car issues, no matter what Google Cars would have you think.

The issue is really laws and regulations.

Laws are the last bastion of the Industrial revolution world that have yet to fall to the unending sweep of the Internet. We see the beginnings of this with our current thrashing around privacy, data, and “who owns the future” (either you or a corporation) but once we settle all of this we will have new business models that will allows the Internet to be truly “baked in”.

Then, once that happens, the sky truly will be the limit.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] 3 Reasons the Future Won’t Be the Same as Now – The Earbud_U Minute

Nostalgia for the future is a terrible thing. As a matter of fact, we have heard recently that nostalgia for the past might be poison.

Human beings, without much great reluctance, tend to romanticize the past, and believe that the future will be exactly the same. Only slightly cooler.

However, three facts mitigate against this view:

Peace is not the absence of conflict. It’s the management of change.
The “good old days” were just as filled with uncertainty, suspicion, anxiety, awe, nostalgia (both forward and rear facing) as the current time is.
The same conflicts that occurred in the past, will continue to occur both now and in the future, but the impacts of those conflicts will seem faster and more immediate.

Case in point for all of this is the recent 75^th anniversary commentary around the 1964 World’s Fair. None of the changes that we currently take for granted were even thought of then.

Or, to make it even more bald: We are currently living in the future that Blade Runner promised us, just without it raining all the time and us all wearing the same drab outfits.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principle 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/

[Podcast] If We Close Our Eyes… – The Earbud_U Minute

How Americans view the events of September 11th, how a turkey views the events of Thanksgiving Day, and how an HR manager views a workplace harassment claim all have three things in common:

The events themselves are considered unpredictable,

The events themselves are considered out of the “normal” social boundaries,

The events themselves are typically responded to with a mixture of shock, surprise and dismay.

The people (or animals) impacted negatively by each of these events, if given a choice, would rather go back in time and avoid the individual circumstances that lead to the event occurring. Unfortunately, the events appear in hindsight to be both inevitable and linear. Ironically, on the day before the penultimate event occured (in a film, it would be called the climax) the persepctive of the impacted parties was that “everything seemed alright.”

Then, the conflict starts.

The line from difficulty to confrontation to conflict is intersected by an line from fragility to robustness to antifragility. And human beings have arranged systems and set up paradigms that allow us to believe that conflict is an aberration, peace is an inevitability and that nothing really changes at all.

Conflicts within, and shocks to, systems (from family all the way up the scale to nation-states) happen when somebody else has a different idea of how things should work—and acts on it. Keep in mind that for the turkey on Thanksgiving, what happens to it before the moment of the decapitation and defeathering, is just another day in turkey paradise.

Three suggestions for building a system (either at work, in school or in the family) that can withstand the inevitable shocks of predictable people insisting on behaving unpredictably:

Tell yourself a more compelling, less predictable story—Many internal stories that we tell ourselves about the circumstances we are in, tend to focus too much on the benefit to us (“WIIFM” thinking) and focus less on the potential for circumstances to change. But the most compelling stories aren’t about us at all, but about change—and how we might respond to it.
Eliminate hindsight bias in order to engage in more critical analysis of why a system failed—This is a fancy way of admitting that you were wrong and all of the events that led up to an unpredictable, “Black Swan” type event were indeed just that: unpredictable in themselves. Eliminating hindsight bias enables us to forget the past, focus on the future, and guide others towards potential outcomes that they might not like.
Have the courage to acknowledge that the systems we’ve built are not that robust—This last one is the toughest, because it can involve guilt, recrimination and can be a blame focused realization. However, when an unanticipated conflict occurs, the first responses that many human created systems have, is to collapse immediately. However, in nature, building in safeguards and engaging in active, guilt free “what if” adaptations, allows systems to flourish. So, start with the system that matters most (for many people that will be family) and take a hard look at the system and ask the question: “Could our family survive a job loss, a major hospitalization, or another “that only happens to other people and won’t ever happen to us” type event in the future?”

Antifragility is the end goal in all of our systems, from corporations to families. Preparing to survive conflicts and shocks to the system is the only way forward to adapt to inevitabilities we cannot predict. It’s certainly a better option than closing our eyes and pretending that nothing can change at all.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Whisper Space – The Earbud_U Minute

We give language to our thoughts.

We speak into existence what we believe and—being narrative animals—we weave stories together and create myths for ourselves based on the conscious language of our thoughts.

We look for assurances that our stories are the “right” ones because, to hear something different—or to experience something different—causes a continuum of reactions inside of us, from mild cognitive dissonance to jarring trauma.

Our lizard brains seek comfort, reassurance, quiet and the reserve of the appearance of “normalcy.” Anything that might cause the lizard brain to reject its own, natural story and to create a new one is automatically rejected and dismissed.

Then, when our stories and other peoples’ stories rub up against each other in intimate locations—such as work, school or even church—we have difficulties, confrontations and conflicts.

In the whisper space between confrontation and conflict—a space which can also be referred to as “the dip”—we take a pause before either avoiding a new story, denying a new story, or incorporating a new story into our familiar one, and we hear the tiny voice, urging us to do the right thing.

However, in the impatience to rush to judgement, and give language to our raging emotions, we move past the whisper space—and ignore the choices that we are provided in that space.

And then we blame others, blame circumstances and—ultimately—blame the narrative that caused us to contemplate all of these changes in the first place.

Thus, we give language to our new thoughts—and the added elements to our old, comfortable narratives.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Print the Conflict Legend – The Earbud_U Minute

Who here remembers The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence?

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Nobody?

Ok.

The story goes that Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) a man of law and order, goes out west and has a few run-in’s with the local bad man, Liberty Valence (Lee Marvin). Eventually, things get to be so bad in the tiny town of Shinbone that Ransom finally realizes that law and order cannot stand in the face of evil, and that some things can’t be solved with a law book and “fancy words.” So, he gets a gun and, on the advice of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), he decides to prepare for the ultimate showdown against Liberty.

Except, Ransom can’t hit the broad side of a barn with a bullet, and he doesn’t take out Liberty.

And at the climactic moment of truth, Tom Doniphon, shoots Liberty from the shadows, thus ending his reign of terror over the town and ensuring the rise of civilization and law and order.

It’s a great film (Woody Allen called it one of the best films in American cinematic history) but what’s the point of bringing it up?

Well, the titular line at the end—from the mouth of a newspaper editor—has come down in American cultural history: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

How many legends of conflicts that have occurred in your organization—be it a church, a workplace, a nonprofit, a school—have become truth, long after the facts of the conflict have been misremembered.

What shifts a conflict story down the line to conflict legend all the way to conflict myth, is the old schoolyard game, Whisper Down the Lane.

When the story of conflict, which is personal and meaningful, becomes calcified into legend, which is impersonal and dogmatic, no amount of conflict resolution or training is going to change the conflict culture.

And then the legend gets printed, over and over again, gradually becoming operating myth, which becomes codified in the worst phrase possible in an organization…

“Well, we’ve always done it this way.”

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] The Epidemiology of Conflict – The Earbud_U Minute

Conflicts, disputes and other disagreements are not the disease. They are symptoms of the disease.

When we think about how a virus spreads, doctors, researchers, data gatherers and others look at the patterns, causes and effects of health and disease conditions in a particular population.

Epidemiology is a very specific interdisciplinary science, but when we talk about the presenting issues that lead to conflict, even in our post-therapeutic age, we are still hesitant to become armchair analysts.

Or, we analyze and get it wrong.

The beginning of understanding the how and why the symptoms of conflict are confused with the nature of a conflict itself, begins with taking apart the behavioral and personality choices that individuals make—and that particular populations, in particular environments, support.

Think about it: In the workplace, there still remains the illusion that resources are limited, thus competition is reinforced.

Thus, individuals who would rather be collaborative are now in conflict with the underpinnings of the environment where they spend 40 to 60 hours per week.

Think about it: In the church—or any other religious organization—the illusion remains that faith and belief will remove the stain of previous wrongs and mistakes without active engagement on the part of the individual.

Thus, individuals who are looking for active engagement wind up within groups that would rather remain collectively passive in the face of all manner of wrongdoing.

Think about it: In the school, bullying behavior manifests, but politicians, teachers, policy makers and others would rather support a broken system that encourages collective, Industrial system based responses.

Thus, micro-schooling with smaller groups (or homeschooling) is pooh-poohed and parents (who vote) raise children who are overly aggressive due to familial environments, and are never directly confronted about the results of their uninformed parenting styles by the “system.”

Root causes—and getting back to them—is often the first thing that is dismissed by critics of therapy, counseling, and even mediation.

But without exploring and getting to the root of root causes, the solutions to the corrosive nature of conflict will never be fully teased apart.

And we will continue to be collectively surprised by apathy and inaction, bullying, poor communication, and ineffective organizational responses, even as we build more tools that separate us further.

-Peace Be With You All-