Grace from Here to the Moon

The steps toward forgiveness and reconciliation include the giving of—and getting of—grace.

We don’t often think about grace (other than maybe as a person’s name, in light of physical attributes, or as a ritual that some families perform before a meal) but the fact is, there used to be public, shared discourse around grace, regardless of politics, emotions, educational attainment, or material situation.

This was grace in the Christian conception of such a term, meaning “God’s unmerited favor.”

Webster’s New World College Dictionary provides this theological definition of grace: “The unmerited love and favor of God toward human beings; divine influence acting in a person to make the person pure, morally strong; the condition of a person brought to God’s favor through this influence; a special virtue, gift, or help given to a person by God.” This definition is based in virtue harkening toward a strong moral core.

Another way of framing grace is that it is getting what we least deserve, when we least expect it, through no effort of our own.

Getting grace implies faith and surrender.

Giving grace implies forgiveness and reconciliation.

Understanding and appreciating the depth of the need for grace and the skillset to give grace is implanted in people through developing a strong moral center.

This is deep and dark waters though, because moral centers (and the ballast that undergirds them) are so very rarely considered by individuals at depth, much less by societies at scale, in countries where the Church is no longer as powerful a moral force as it once was.

We outsource parts of our emotional life to politics that we used to outsource to the Church. The Church used to be a bulwark of morality—even in the face of conflicts so detrimental and consequential that they used to escalate to World Wars.

But the skills that undergird giving grace—such as humility, obedience, and discipline—are harder to acquire now than ever before both individually and corporately. And when the skills that undergird giving grace are lacking, getting grace seems as unattainable as going to the moon on the back of a cardboard rocket.

Grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation; these are what the world—and our civil discourse—need now.

Strategy is a Skill

It is important to note that strategy in managing people in conflicts is still considered by many to be a talent, rather than an attainable skill.

In a conflict, thinking about how to manage it effectively requires exercising all the same planning and engagement that engaging in the conflict in and of itself does.

However, the pushback against this type of thinking most often comes in the form of the complaints that “strategy is too hard” or that “people are unpredictable.”

Individual people may be unpredictable, but general human behavior is predictable, and outcomes from such behavior are even more predictable depending upon which conflict management behavior it is that a party chooses.

Good, effective strategy, that produces satisfactory outcomes requires intentionality.

To plan strategically, understanding three points intuitively begins the process:

  1. Know what you can manage in a conflict around stress, anger, fear, and failure. Without knowing yourself, knowing the other party becomes that harder.
  2. Have the courage to care and be curious. The number one reason negotiations around conflicts fail, is due to genuine lack of curiosity by one party, about the other party’s motives, opinions, and desires for resolution—or management—of a conflict scenario.
  3. Realize that the conflict process is messy and, unlike a chess game, if you plan one step ahead of the other party (rather than two—or seven) your conflict goals toward management and resolution have a greater chance of success.

There is strategy involved in attaining the skills of humility, self-awareness, responsibility, and even empathy.

Almost as much strategy as is involved in letting things “just go,” not paying attention, focusing on issues in the conflict that don’t matter, and not understanding the nature of the conflict (and the other party) that you’re in the arena with.

Strategy to manage and resolve conflicts is a skill that can be learned. Almost in the same way—and at the same level—that extending and not resolving conflict is a skill that is learned.

Raising and Lowering Expectations

There are two actions that you can do with expectations in a conflict situation:

Raise them.

Lower them.

Raising expectations (either through pursuing management, resolution, or reconciliation of a conflict) comes with its own set of problems. When expectations are raised, they wind up being discussed. When they are discussed, they can be agreed upon, or disagreed with, but they cannot be ignored.

Which is what happens when expectations are not raised.

Raising expectations also involves heightening the other party’s desires, needs, and wants—or their expectations—and sometimes this can be damaging if you don’t think that you can fulfill unmet expectations that have already been raised.

Or the unmet ones that haven’t been raised.

Yet.

Lowering expectations (either through downplaying outcomes, ignoring raised expectations, or just not bringing them up in the first place) brings more complications than raising expectations. When expectations are lowered, they wind up being resented as even being in evidence in the first place. When that resentment builds, it can be addressed, ignored, or added to the list of issues to be resolved, reconciled, or managed.

Which is what happens when the conflict is seen less as a process to be experienced and more as an arena where one version of reality will win, and another version must inevitably lose.

Both raising and lowering expectations comes with conflict consequences.

It’s probably a good idea to be strategic about which set of consequences you’d rather address as an antecedent to resolution.

Pushing Your Chips Forward

“There’s a real lack of moral fiber,” he said, before launching into a story about local criminality, theft, drug smuggling, and a situation that—while murder may not have happened yet—was certainly in the offering.

“It’s almost like No Country For Old Men,” another party in the conversation quipped. Trying to recall the lines from the film, I misquoted, so I’ll quote accurately here from Ed Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones [emphasis mine]:

“…You can’t help but compare yourself against the old timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would have operated these times.

There was this boy I sent to the ‘lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it.

Told me that he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember.

Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again.

Said he knew he was going to hell. “Be there in about fifteen minutes”.

I don’t know what to make of that. I sure don’t. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, “O.K., I’ll be part of this world.”

A person observes it happening and the temptation is to believe that it has always been this way. The sky has always been falling, and it’s always been the end of the world.

But the reality is, things really have changed and our conflict culture (which used to be focused around, first going along to get along) is now increasingly focused on winning at the expense of everything else.

When the clarity of fiction sheds light on the murkiness of facts, the problem revealed is deep at the core of our culture and society.

The further away culture drifts from a moral core, the harder civility and grace become, both as states to attain and as skills to practice.

We see this fact in our conflict communication, in the tools that ramp up and give power to the tendencies we already had, and in the interactions, we allow to happen to us on a daily basis.

How many of us are willing to push our chips forward and meet something, without moral fiber, that we don’t understand?

H/T to the Anonymous Storyteller who mentioned this to me.

Skills

In every training, workshop, seminar, or presentation, there are participants who don’t want the stories, the philosophies, or the underlying data.

They merely want the skills.

The bullet points that will allow them to plug-in to a situation or conflict, and make it turn out in the most optimum way possible.

For them.

Unfortunately, the skills that they are seeking to learn are not the ones we need to acquire for success in the work world of today—and tomorrow.

How do we determine what skills we do need be learning, though?

A good rule of thumb is to observe carefully the patterns of behavior that you’re engaged in that may not be getting you the outcomes you think that you deserve.

Once that observation is complete, then act to change those patterns of behavior. Get a conflict accountability “buddy.” Gather with others who have overcome the patterns of conflict behavior that you have overcome and share your stories.

And lastly, engage with your new skills by making some tough choices. Some of them will not be easy, particularly if they involve family, friends, or workplaces that are toxic, not supportive of your change process, or that wield power over you in subtle (and not so subtle) ways.

And once you’ve partially gotten through this path to learning skills that are based in what we do need more of (empathy, courage, moral clarity, responsibility, and accountability) then write about what you’ve done and the path that you’ve walked to get to where you are now.

We need more people writing, making videos, and recording podcasts, about how they’ve actually learned the skills that work, rather than more fluff about the spectacles that entertain.

At that point, and only at that point, will the listicle dragon be slain.

Human to Business Sales

Selling to people in businesses is hard for three important reasons:

  1. There are very few (or no) champions of your product or service offering because no one knows how good your product or service offering is inside the organization you’re selling to.
  2. There are no direct ways to influence the people who can make the decision to buy from you—today.
  3. There has been a massive shift in consumer behavior, but not a massive shift how businesses purchase from you based in the reality of shifting consumer behavior.

These are big problems and they’re getting bigger because the practice of creating buyer personas still dominates in a big way in almost every piece of advice available around advising organizations on how to sell to organizations.

While buyer personas are a fine shorthand for figuring out the profile in your head as a seller to businesses, the downfall of them is that they neglect each of the three areas above. In addition, they depersonalize the act of buying (or purchasing or procurement) and attempt to reduce it to a series of formulaic and discreet steps.

Which, of course, makes the three reasons above more problematic, not less.

Here are three ideas that may help when you’re selling (peace, consulting, freelance solutions, or even you’re next “gee-whiz” product to a skeptical procurement buyer):

Champions are easy to get (and even easier to lose), but require engaging with personality, care, and empathy.

Most of the people who are going to become your champions are the ones who have the power to say “no” but no power to say “yes.”

There are still gatekeepers in many organizations, and going where they are (in-person, online, emotionally, rationally, etc.) will go a long way toward engaging with them.

You must determine if buying today is all that matters, or if arbitraging the time to build a relationship today against the dollars that you are going to get tomorrow, matters more in the long run.

The short run will take care of itself.

Does your selling strategy include a 1,000-year long plan?

The reality of consumer behavior means that buyer personas are dead as predictors of selling success in the B2B space.

It also means that running after every social platform for sales is also dead.

This is a good thing.

In principle, this means that consumer behavior in business to business sales is the same behavior in business to consumer sales, but the volume of the connection is lower.

In practice, this means that targeted videos on a YouTube channel, embedded in an email campaign, direct to a buyer, matter more than the number of Facebook likes you happen to be cultivating that aren’t converting to sales.

In practice, this also means that providing value to the small number of businesses you work with as a selling organization, trumps the number of actual businesses that you work with.

Or that you think you should work with.

Champions, behavior, targeted engagement, and long-term strategy matter more for business success than just closing the sale and moving on to the next client.

Loyalty is not a Byproduct of Trust

Loyalty is not a byproduct of trust.

We fundamentally miss this fact in human interactions.

Trust occurs because a relationship builds over time into a state whereby transactional withdrawals can be made from the invisible account of engagement.

Loyalty occurs when people choose to engage with each other out of habit in an unthinking, uncritical way. This fact makes loyalty a particularly pernicious state because when the fundamentals underlying the engagement change—but the thinking about the fundamentals remains habitual and uncritical—the parties are forced into a place where they must shift their focus.

Media interactions, brand interactions, organizational interactions, and even some individual interactions rely on the posture that loyalty = trust or that trust = loyalty, but the fact is, most interactions are based on neither trust, nor loyalty, but instead are based in authority, ambivalence, storytelling, habit, and other factors.

When the bonds of loyalty are broken, without a commensurate rethinking of the bonds in the first place, situations and conflicts arise that lack the drivers of ethical clarity and moral fiber. And then, anarchy reigns, trust erodes, and loyalty becomes a relic of a naïve past.

Work on trust first.

Worry about loyalty not at all.

The Hook Brings You Back

There are plenty of hooks around for you to get caught on.

The boy Peter Pan knew this.

Adulthood, responsibility, accountability, informed courage, these are traits of a mature individual, on the hook and ready to show up and perform.

The modern conception of “adulting” represents the overall continuation of long-term, troubling, cultural abandonments of the hooks that serve to create deeper meaning in life.

But the thing is, the number hooks that require us to show up and perform, day in and day out hasn’t decreased but instead has increased exponentially.

The 90’s pop band Blues Traveler knew this.

Performance is not the thing, though it used to be. Increasingly, the problem is not that people can’t engage or perform once then engage; the problem is now that too many people choose not to show up in the first place.

If you don’t show up, then you’re not on the hook if anything goes wrong.

And if you’re not on the hook when something does go wrong, blame is easy to cast (“Mistakes were made…but not by me…”) and credit is easy to take (“Oh yeah, I was physically here. That’s all that counts. Right?”).

Paying attention, engaging with content and situations that are uncomfortable, responding to ambiguity with heart and courage, dealing with others with empathy, actively listening for a core idea rather than figuring that you know it already.

These are the parts of a performance that matter as much as showing up, and that can put you on the hook when you show up.

Accepting this reality is the difference between an amateur (or a dilettante) and the practicing professional.

The average marketer knows this.

What brings you back, time after time, is the dopamine hit based feeling of success that comes from accomplishing what no one else believed you could.

Many contemporary organizations, distractions, and entertainments, are built around manipulating the feeling of success, without providing the expected (or necessary) commensurate material, psychological, emotional, and spiritual outcomes.

The hook brings you back.

Marketers, fictional characters, popular music bands and even social networks, rely on the biological power of getting you hooked into a habit—without accepting the hard emotional stuff that should go along with it.

In environments and situations such as these, avoiding conflict as a baseline becomes the hook that is the easiest to get you to come back repeatedly.

But the thing is, conflict is the only hook worth getting caught on, to attain deeper success, lasting outcomes, and faithful engagement.

Can We Have Civility

Can we have civility when we don’t agree on what’s true and what’s not?

When we hold on to our worldviews, and when they become more than merely window dressing, and they become integrated into our overall identities, we can find it incredibly difficult to engage with others civilly.

So, we resort to not talking, talking about mere banalities, or talking about distractions that mean nothing at all.

When we are unwilling to hear different perspectives on the facts that we hold dear, we lose the ability to be flexible when the fundamentals that underlie those facts change.

As fundamentals always do.

When we are unwilling to acknowledge that there might be different outcomes to difficulties, conflicts, and competitions that might just be as good for just as many people as the outcomes that we favor, then we become concretely encased in the pursuit of outcomes.

And everything else be damned.

Can we have civility if we are unable, unwilling, and incapable, of going outside of our worldviews, perspectives, and preferred outcomes toward what another person may value?

When we are wedded tighter to the secure arrogance that theater, spectacle, and display inevitably provide, rather than being wedded inexorably to humility, grace, and forgiveness, we will be constantly surprised by what outcome “wins” and what outcome “loses.”

And we will allow our capacity to engage in civility to erode.

When we are more concerned with the freedom to be expressive, rather than the responsibility of soberly and judiciously informing another party of the truth, then we will allow ourselves to fall into incivility.

And our communication culture will erode into communication anarchy.

Can we have civility in the process of moving toward communication anarchy?

Conflicts—based in values, identities, worldviews, and emotions—are sure to become more damaging and deleterious when we cannot separate far enough from people whose values, identities, worldviews, and emotions, (and maybe even existence) we find to be odious above all else.

Network Leap 3

Most people don’t see it.

Confusing the primacy of what we can see, touch, taste, and feel, closes our human perceptions to the potential financial and monetary value of what we cannot measure and codify with our five senses.

This is evident in the primacy of the use of relationship networks in every aspect of our lives.

We cannot touch connection, though we can experience a story with other people.

We cannot see engagement, though we can engage in active listening and experience the positive effects of someone listening to us intently, and the negative effects of someone ignoring us.

We cannot see the value in a relationship, but we can feel with our hands and our emotions the ways in which people grow in relationship transactionally with us.

We cannot see the cruft, bad feelings, negative emotions, and life experiences where the relationship didn’t “work out” as transactionally as we would like, which often creates in us a sense of caution at getting back into relationships and connections.

We have all observed the causal outcomes of the impact of things we can’t see (relationships) and have experienced the power in maintaining and growing connections (networks) to people who may—or may not—be able to “help” us advance in the world.

We all know someone who has gotten a cake job, attained a plum position, or moved up the ladder of an organization, not through technical skills, but through the value of human connection.

Most people don’t see it.

We cannot directly observe the functions of the Internet.

We cannot directly observe how information spreads through bits and bytes and is translated into images, text, and videos.

We cannot directly observe how those videos, texts, and images impact the mind and change the perceptions of the receiver of those messages, but we all accept the reality of these changes happening.

We cannot see how searching for information on the Internet, using a tool such as Google, unites us as disparate people in a communal desire to connect, engage, and to grow our interests, our curiosities, our agreements, and our arguments.

Most people don’t see it.

But Google does.

Think about it: Google as a search engine tool proves—in a form monetized at enormous scale—that the networks of connections matter more for making money, making more connections, making products, making ideas, and making services than anything else tried in human history up to this point.

But there’s an upper limit to that knowledge.

Trapped by the confines of the box in your pocket (i.e. your mobile phone) or the box in your house (i.e. your TV or desktop computer) or the box in your briefcase (i.e. your tablet), there’s a hardware limit to a software solution.

There might not be a software solution to the problems that people have, but in the 21st century, Google (now Alphabet) is going to do its level best to break out of the boxes it is currently trapped in, and prove that networks between people in the physical world, can be scaled and monetized just as easily as they were through a search function.

Google sees it.

Do you?