Negotiating With Outrageous Confidence: The Diplomacy Issue

Recently, we keynoted the Ithaca College 2014 BOLD Conference.

We had a great time talking with the student attendees at the conference about negotiation and performing that act of active asking, well and with confidence.

And not just confidence, but outrageous confidence.

We have found in our entrepreneurial journey, that too many people—the majority of whom are women and/or members of minority groups—don’t ask for what they want even meekly, much less outrageously.

But, after the keynote, a point was raised to us, around the issue of using the tactics of outrageousness to boost one’s self-confidence, in order to gain only win-win outcomes.

The person wanted to know about how to maintain diplomacy when going into a negotiation while also maintaining equanimity with self—and others—while also maintaining self-assurance.

This is a great question and, in the context of the wider world, the answer is that, the spate of recent college graduates “asking for too much” or “being unwilling to work hard for advancement” does not spring from a great well of self-assurance.

Instead, both of these meta-employment-phenomena are occurring in response to the messages that older, job holding generations, have provided an entire current generation. These messages have been absorbed and we are beginning to see the results of that absorption.

In the context of the smaller world of the keynote, however, we would respond by noting that, of course there are times in a negotiation, any negotiation, that the cost of disrupting a potential future relationship, must be weighed against the benefit of moving toward a win-lose outcome.

But, until many more people (including women and minorities) begin acting with a little more self-confidence, self-awareness and even outrageousness, we believe that encouraging others to ask period, rather than to not ask for too much too soon, is the better route.

-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-

Big Conflicts, Big Data, Big #IoT

As part of the continuing, half a century long hangover that economies, industries, governments and individuals are experiencing as a result of the collapse of the Industrial Revolution and the ushering in of the Idea Age, humanity still longs for “bigness.”

Big profits.
Big mergers and acquisitions.
Big Data.

The current collective panting that everyone from Wall Street wizards to social scientists are doing about Big Data—and the collection of every bit of information that platforms can get about customer and client preferences—reveals two disturbing, collective beliefs that will have wide ranging implications if not checked:

The first implication is that of our collective belief that bigger is somehow better, more secure and safer. With the number of incumbent bad actors (i.e. hackers, criminals, black hat actors, etc) looking to take advantage of the inherent security flaws in the collection of Big Data—not to mention the flaws inherent in size itself—this idea should die a quick death.
The second implication is less talked about but is just as important: What happens when everything gets bigger but the human heart shrinks? The collecting of every possible piece of data on people’s actions, choices and preferences and the storage and manipulation of that data, can only inevitable lead to more conflict, not less.

The coming era of connected physical items to a virtual world, provides us another opportunity to address these implications and answer these questions. In the Industrial era that we are rapidly leaving behind, “bigness” was the way that things got done in the most effective way possible.

But now, in an era of decentralization and disruption, the human heart—and it’s size—must be considered more carefully.

-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-

On Our Former Greatness

From Detroit, Michigan to Gary, Indiana, urban decay is a fact as cities evolve from the physical industrial totems to 20^th century progress into the semi-transparent, high technology incubators of the virtual 21^st century.

And, with 70% of the human population living in cities by 2050, the crimes, poverty, squatting and homelessness that occur in the midst of inevitable urban decay, will make the distinction between the virtual and the physical more and more stark.

The often highlighted conflicts between residents in the cities and those in rural areas will become more acute as well, but they will not be the most serious.

With all of the in-migration occurring, urban decay becomes a consequence of conflict between a vision of the past and the possibility of the future.

Environmental degradation, fossil fuel use, convenience to services, access to information and job security will all become the battlegrounds in the war between the physical and the virtual.

And when more and more people need fewer and fewer physical places to produce the same amount of goods and services that they did 70 years ago, what will become of the totems to humanity’s former industrial greatness.

Oh, by the way, since the poor—those in spirit, those in material wealth and those in talent—will be with us always, the discarded remnants of the current and future world’s former glory—physical and digital—will also increasingly become places to carve out their own form of prosperity, security and culture.

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

The Shifting Social Contract

Privacy, the law and the social contract is breaking down.

People want to access the internet and be social privately, secretly and anonymously, but the NSA reads our emails and may soon have access to the data that all the devices in our home will be sharing with each other.

The Lockian social contract is breaking down with technology that Locke could never have anticipated, in an effort to create a Rousseauian-libertine future with no responsibility for what we say and do.

And that’s at a macro level.

Then there is bullying and social break down in social media. Children push each other to suicide. People are redefining the workplace and griping about it on social media. People are making individual economic choices at a rational (and emotional) level to pick streaming over subscription packages.

And that’s at the micro level

So…what does all of this have to do with mediators and conflict?

At the intersection of macro and micro concerns regarding privacy, trust, secrecy, confidentiality and the breakdown of the general social contract, lies a place for peacemakers with skills and talents to train, advise, coach and mentor those for whom active listening, empathy and civil liberties seem to be quaint holdovers from an era of powdered wigs and wine snobs.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Presenting to the People Who Matter

There are people who matter and people who don’t.

The tough thing is telling the difference between the two.

The line between the successful consultant or coach and the “also ran” is the one who strikes a balance between knowing who are the smartest people in the room…and who are just hanging out waiting to applaud.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells
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/

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-

[Advice] 3 Stages to Launch – Part 1

There are three hard parts to launching any project:

The first hard part is attaining technical knowledge (i.e. getting a degree, getting experience, phoning a friend, etc.).
The second hard part is getting the necessary hardware together and attaining a certain level of comfort with it, particularly when the learning curve is steep.
The third hard part is developing content—and allying with partners in that development—and getting that content distributed to the right audience.

Unfortunately, many people get caught in a spiral of focusing obsessively about how hard the three hard parts might be, rather than actually taking concrete steps to complete at least one of them.

-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/