[Advice] The Antifragile Ethic

The fundamental ethical issue of our time is how to engage with a world where situations and systems, are fundamentally indecent. And sometimes the people inside of these systems and situations choose to behave and respond indecently—and to do it repeatedly.

The issue is not whether or not historical past situations, peoples and systems were better or worse than current ones, that argument only serves as a distraction from addressing our current age of indecency. The real, core issue is how to manage the increasingly interpersonal conflicts that come with dealing with indecent situations and people in the world we have built for ourselves today.

This requires us to do the hard work of actively building new systems, and engage in situations by developing and maintaining an antifragile ethic:

Coming to grips with the idea that there will always be indecency (and this definition of indecency is individual, granular and personal, rather than institutional, democratic and systemic); and, the idea that individuals will have to make an active choice to address this indecency in behavior and choices head-on, rather than making the active choice to avoid, is the first part of the core of developing an antifragile ethic.

The second part of developing antifragile ethic is the idea that individuals must do the hard, emotional labor of engaging with themselves first and then others. The strongest antifragile ethical systems have at their core, a strong understanding and acknowledgement of the foibles and problems of the self first—before getting around to managing other people.

The last part of maintaining the antifragile ethic is to recognize that the choice to lead or follow is a daily, granular, choice-by-choice, day-by-day struggle that will lead to failure, disappointment and wrong decisions. But having that knowledge doesn’t allow us to abdicate the responsibility and accountability for making the hard choices (and accepting the consequences) granularly on a day-to-day basis.

Our need for ease (aided by our rapid technological growth and scientific knowledge) has led us to exchanging the hard work of being decent and building an antifragile ethic, for the faux immediacy of the unsatisfying search for an “easy” button, for addressing the difficult intricacies of interpersonal conflict.

There is no guarantee than this ethical development will work.

To search for such a guarantee is to ensure that the hard work of building an antifragile ethic will never happen. This is a fearful and childish search, doomed to never bear the fruit we so desperately need, to address our current, deepening, interpersonal 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] Expectations

Expectations are the mother’s milk of conflict.

They serve as the fuel that allows a conflict to grow, past the point of employing tactics that would be considered “reasonable” to the point of needing tactics that are unreasonable.

Expectations fuel conflict because they go hand-in-hand, with assumptions. Every party in a conflict knows that assumptions and expectations are deadly, but every party can’t always articulate why.

Here’s the why:

Assumptions exist in the individual minds of the participants in the conflict, their emotions, and their projection onto the other party. Assumptions are dangerous because they bind the other party in a box, not of their own making.

This box doesn’t allow for the creation of creative solutions to the conflict at hand. If anything, the assumption box leads to the same responses and reaction as those that created the conflict in the first place.

Expectations then come from assumptions, because human beings are pattern seeking animals. When looking for the patterns of migrating herds of beasts on the Great Plains or the Serengheti, pattern seeking is critical to eating and overall survival. However, in interpersonal relationships, in the 21^st century, pattern seeking comes from the expectation that what occurred in the past, is still what will occur in the future.

Expectations bind each party to the other in a dance of futility, disappointment and dysfunction. Often—as in families, businesses, and even civic and fraternal organizations—this dance becomes part of “the way we do things here.” Which, when the steps in the dance are questioned by outsiders, defensiveness arises, and calls of “that’s just the culture,” or “You don’t understand. That’s just how we do things here,” begin to be the guiding mantra for avoiding the change that conflicts inherently create.

Managing disappointment with emotional maturity, clarity, thoughtfulness, and with the ability to confront appropriately and effectively, is one of the ways to break the pattern of expectations, derived from assumptions.

-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: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[ICYMI] Unpacking Other People’s Laundry

Unpacking assumptions is the first piece of the engagement process with conflicts in your workplace.

It’s hard enough to be confronted by the results of our faulty assumptions, but it is even more difficult to begin to unpack beliefs, values and perceptions that we have held for years.

In a conflict, we fail to unpack three areas:

Our Assumptions: The things that drive us are the things that hold us back. Typically they begin with the words “should” or “ought.” Our assumptions also color how we deal with (or ignore/dismiss) the other two areas.
Their Assumptions: The things that drive the other party are either dismissed, ignored or not fully understood by either party. Those drivers typically are prefaced by “they should” or “they ought.”
The Problem’s Assumptions: “There is only one way to solve an issue and it’s the way that benefits us the most. And, people are most always the problem because they won’t change. Oh, and there’s nothing wrong with me in this situation that solving the problem won’t solve.” These few sentences serve to build a foundation for continued disputes embedded in the conflict process. They assumptions inherent in them act as a concrete base, never allowing the problem to inch toward resolution and shutting down engagement.

With the level of knowledge to which we have access these days, the hard work that matters involves caring enough to seek out resources that can help get past the uncomfortability, fear and cowardice of the results of unpacking before engaging in the process of resolution.

-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: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] Reframing for Dummies

In a world full of noise, one of the most valuable talents, is the ability to actively listen to another person.

We often take listening for granted, confusing it with hearing, responding, ignoring, or “taking care of the problem”—without really stopping to examine what the problem is, or even if there’s a problem in the first place.

We also straight up don’t listen to the other party, or parties, at all. We dismiss their concerns as merely “opinions” and don’t stop to examine the deeper reasons behind what the other party is actually saying. Typically, revealing their deep concerns, closely held values, and sometimes prejudices, that if taken into consideration and addressed, would make for a stronger communication scenario, with less conflict.

We dismiss concerns, ignore reasons, defy truths, because we believe deeply that, once we have stated a position, the other party’s responsibility is to give us the response that we “know” is the right one. This is particularly endemic when the party who is listening is a large organization, or a party with access to the resource of a megaphone. In these cases, we do not seek to respond, we merely look to get our next position across to the other party.

The solution to all of this is three fold, and it lies in the process of reframing.

Reframing is the act of repeating the other party’s words and statements back to them. It seems like an obvious rhetorical tactic, but in many cases, conflicts are rooted in a lack of reframing, and many parties never do it at all, even while claiming understanding and appreciation for a viewpoint that may differ from theirs.

Here are the three steps to reframing:

Actively listen—Not just for the content that you hear on the surface from the other party—the content that generates a reaction from you because you’ve stopped listening and are now forming arguments about how and why they are wrong—but the content that isn’t stated. This, the unstated content, is the content that needs to be addressed.

Avoid reacting—When we hear something we don’t like, we tend to lash out, lambast the other party, strafe the room with the gunfire of our rhetorical position, and then move on, justified in the feeling that we “won” they “lost” and “all is right with the world.” This is the pattern of the mob. Reacting is not the way to reframing, but it is the way to escalating.

Actually think—To reframe successfully, the party who is listening must absorb—and think about—what the other party says, stop (or pause) to absorb the information, and then respond by restating what has already been said in the form of a question. Many people—in the race to the bottom of escalation—miss the pausing before speaking part of reframing.

If reframing were easy, everyone would do it. And the core of the art of reframing is the pause, the dip in the conversation, between the two parties.

Your conversational dip will vary, but without one, you are well on your way to escalation, defensiveness, reaction and conflict.

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-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Getting Resolution to Conflict When the Other Party Would Rather Not

There are always two sides to every conflict.

There is always a third side to every conflict as well.

But each party (or sometimes all parties) have little to no interest in getting to that third side. They like the feelings that being in conflict gives them—righteousness, powerfulness, attention and validation.

The party who moves past these desires and feelings and who longs for resolution may never achieve it with the other party. This can lead to feelings of frustration and sometimes even giving up altogether on the process of resolving the conflict.

There are a few things for the party that’s ready to remember, when addressing a party who’s not ready:

Forcing the conflict towards resolution disempowers the party who’s ready and empowers the party who’s not. It’s the same concept as the one behind forcing a screw into a hole where it doesn’t belong. The screw doesn’t fit, the person who’s forcing it gets more frustrated, the hole gets stripped (or broken) and nothing changes.
Before being at peace with the other party (the one who’s no ready) be at peace with yourself. Self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and spiritual growth are all required for the next step.
Be patient. The most unused resource in our world today is rock-ribbed patience. Ghandi had it, his followers didn’t. Jesus had it, his followers didn’t. Those are just two examples, but the point is, sometimes waiting on the other party to change involves just that—doing what you need to do to attain peace with yourself first and letting the other party do whatever it is that they are going to do.

Empowerment through patience, wisdom and personal diligence does not come overnight, nor is it a “get resolution quick” scheme. But it’s rewarding and life affirming, whether or not the resolution that comes about is the one that either party expected.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] We Built This City

There are systems in place inside of corporations, nonprofits and even families to manage everything, from the finances to the logistics of getting groceries.

Human beings create systems, in response to growing external complexity, which creates conflicts, friction and disputes. Think of Dunbar’s number, or the number of people you actually interact with on Facebook.

As the Internet has exploded all around us, the demand for a digital solution to almost every problem has increased, accompanied by the promise of decreased complexity, chaos, friction and disputes.

But this promise is a misnomer at best and a lie at worst, because the solutions to most conflicts lies in gaining greater awareness of self, moving past the need to rely on a system to solve complexity, and moving toward doing the hard work of discovering something about other people inside of ourselves.

There’s no digital solution for human problems, and with complexity of systems increasing, and with human beings outsourcing more and more of that complexity to algorithms in exchange for the ease of leisure, we have no choice but to start down the road of learning about ourselves.

Or else, the interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts between and within people will only grow more pronounced as man’s search for meaning and mattering becomes more and more acute, inside of the systems we’ve built.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] An Antifragile Future

The future conflicts we can’t predict, the ones that come out of the sky and surprises us, are the easiest to prepare for. But we have to work at it.

Interpersonal conflicts come from both places: the places we can predict (that family member who’s “always been a problem,” or that co-worker who “just doesn’t get it…and never has”) and the places we can’t predict (“he was so normal,” or “she never said anything about it before”).

We don’t prepare for the unpredictable for two, major reasons:

It will never happen to me: Actually in the realm of all mathematical, probabilistic calculations, the likelihood that someone getting into a conflict with you whom you did not expect to is pretty high.

I’m already prepared in case it happens: Well, think about the last unpredictable event (for you) that happened? How did you respond to a flat tire in the middle of road? A screaming adult? A disappointed boss or co-worker who had never said anything previously?

We respond with the patterns comfortable to us, to conflicts and stimulus that are unpredictable, because we don’t think about, plan for, or even consider the fact that the unpredictable might actually happen.

This is why we’re always surprised by future outcomes, conflicts and situations, even as we look for patterns in the past, and assign blame or credit, in order to make order, out of the chaos that unpredictability represents.

There are a few ways out of this, none of them comfortable:

Think about future conflicts “tabula rasa”: Begin by thinking about conflicts that could arise with a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Think of the future—and conflicts that could arise in it—as unexplored territory.
Do not look to the past for solutions: The past is exactly that, the past. And it’s not a good predictor of future behavior, actions or choices. The past is merely history. Or, perhaps nostalgia. And sometimes nostalgia can be poison.
Be open to possibility: This one is really hard if people are not comfortable with change and require stability and predictability—or at least the story of stability and predictability—in order to go about their day. Being open to the possibility for conflict opens the doors to being creative in your reactions, and responses to it.
Creativity is the key: Many people struggle with creative ways to explore, challenge and respond to conflict prone situations. This is why the standard responses to receiving a divorce decree is to just accept it and get a lawyer. However, many conflict scenarios—both interpersonal and intrapersonal—can be resolved, accommodated, or even avoided, in a myriad of creative ways. And, depending upon the type of response you’d like to encourage in the other party, responding creatively is better than using past patterns of behavioral responses—and expecting a different result.

Employing some, or all, of these strategies leads to creating systems in families, churches and civic organizations that can be antifragile, rather than collapsing due to fragility, or overcompensating due to a robustness of robustness.

-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/

[Strategy] Don’t Wallow in the Gap

Our heads are the most dangerous place to be in conflict.

We tell ourselves a story about the nature of the conflict, who’s at fault (and who isn’t) and what the solution should be (preferably one that benefits us and makes the other person the enemy).

We then plunge forward, tackling the conflict with the tools that got us into the conflict in the first place: we don’t actively listen, we don’t engage emotionally with the other person’s content around and within the conflict, and we engage (happily or miserably) in the gamification of the conflict process.

We temporarily pause the conflict (sometimes for hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades) and call that pause resolution—when in reality that pause represents a “lull” in the conflict conversation, where more content floods the gap.

And after all of those steps, we look around an wonder why our workplaces, our families, our schools and our churches are not “doing what they should be doing.”

This is not a condemnation, or castigation. We have engaged in all of these steps as well, with conflicts between us and other people in our own life. We engage in some of these ways even still.

But there is a way out of the narrative trap:

Break the language: Language = Thought and thought = language. Take a pause and review the words that you use to talk about yourself, about the other party in conflict and about the content of the conflict scenario. Words give meaning and set up paradigms for future behavior and decisions.
Break the trap of decisions: What got you here to conflict isn’t going to get you there to resolution. The decisions, patterns, and behaviors that got you into the conflict you’re in today (and the ones you’ll be in tomorrow) have to be broken through self-examination.
Break the gap: Being intentional about the outcomes you want to achieve through avoidance, accommodation, assertive confrontation, or any of the other choices for responses that you have in a conflict, is critical to avoiding the gap. That temporary pause, or “lull” in the conflict flow.

These tips seem obvious and easy, but if they were, we would be collectively performing them all the time, rather than stumbling through the narratives we’ve built. Ultimately, the way out of the narrative trap of conflict, takes having courage to take the steps in the first place.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Epidemiology of Resolution

Resolution is not the cure for the disease of conflict. Neither is forgiveness or reconciliation.

Resolution, forgiveness and reconciliation merely name the types of processes that have to occur in the hearts of people in conflict during the final stages of the conflict process.

But do not be deceived: the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked:

Who can know it?

We addressed aspects of the science of epidemiology before, and where that science dovetails with the process of the resolution, forgiveness and reconciliation, is three fold:

Epidemiology involves examining the symptoms of presenting issues and how they relate to the overall disease map, or journey—the process of resolution has presenting issues, and the main one is the presence of a softened heart.

Epidemiology involves examining the roots of diseases to determine why they arose in the first place—the process of forgiveness, true forgiveness, involves looking at the roots of a relationship where conflict arose in the past, present and may arise in the future, and then determining what the roots of those conflicts are.

Epidemiology involves examining how a virus, or disease spreads among an at-risk (or not yet at risk) population—true reconciliation between damaged parties in conflicts happens very rarely, but when it does, the psychological and emotional benefits of moving forward from where the conflict ended, spread rapidly.

In the radio show of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Lamont Cranston was the vigilante known as The Shadow. In later years, Alec Baldwin portrayed the character in a big budget movie. At the core of The Shadow’s war on crime, was the idea expressed in the opening lines of the radio show, later abandoned in the 1994 film altogether:

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The cure for conflicts through the processes of resolution, foregiveness and reconciliation is multifaceted, multi-angled and requires performing hard, emotional labor, that many of us would rather not perform.

But when everything else hasn’t worked, hard work is sometimes all the work that’s left.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] You Can’t Get There From Here

Parties in conflict often ask the questions Alice did when she arrived in Wonderland.

The Cheshire Cat, that fictional animal who disappears, leaving behind only a grin was right, if a party in a conflict doesn’t know where they are going, then it doesn’t matter which way they go.

However, many parties in conflict are savvy enough to know (whether they are conscious of it or not ) that what got them into conflict isn’t going to get them out.

The problem is, many parties have a preference for when they would like the conflict to end (at a place of compromise, accommodation or winning) but they have no idea what the process to attain that outcome looks like.

Too many parties are also like Alice, in that they harbor suspicions of various peace building processes— negotiation, mediation, training, coaching, or litigation—not because they don’t understand the processes, but because they don’t understand themselves.

The prickly questions of:

How did we get here?
Was I in the wrong and not the other party?
Do I have a responsibility to make it better?
What if it gets worse?

And on and on, doggedly insist upon themselves in party’s whisper spaces, before a decision, during the process of getting to resolution (or not) and after the decision is made. On the other side of the whisper space and resolution is the tug at our heart strings of the regret that we cannot go back to the ways things were before.

Or party’s try to go back and only reignite the old conflict.

What got you here (to conflict) won’t get you there (to resolution) especially if each party has no idea what “there” should look like when they arrive.

-Peace Be With You All-