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-

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/

Residents of (YOUR TOWN NAME HERE) Save $100 A DAY by Doing This One Simple Trick!!!!

Click bait articles and headline jacking efforts are just the latest in a long line of American hucksterism that began with Western, one man traveling wagon shows and continued through to TV infomercials from Billy Mays for OxiClean.

The first inherent problem with of all these forms of advertisement is the combination of shameless flim-flamism, the deceit of the short con, and the promise of a good deal of vaudeville.

The inherent false promise in this tradition plays on the long-standing, human desire for just one easy step that solves a difficult problem, fulfills an unmet need, or at the very minimum, entertains the viewer outrageously.

The reason why concerns about the lack of regulation in election advertising fall on deaf ears every two to four years is that the majority of election advertising is targeted at about the same level of click bait, online advertising and blog posts.

Add to all of it, candidates approving messages that, if your kid, your partner or your friend said them, you’d tell them they were full of it.

And we all know what “it” is.

“It seems so simple. It should be easy.”

This statement came out of a workshop I did recently as well as a podcast interview I gave recently.

Well, if the Truth were simple and easy, hucksters, flim-flam men, election year advertising, and other forms of selling that create artificial conflicts, fake disruptions, and incoherent disconnections, wouldn’t be so popular to use as shortcuts to the capital “T” truth.

And clickbait articles would drive almost no traffic on social media and in new journalism.

Do you feel like you saved $100 yet today?

-Peace Be With You All-

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] 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/

The Political Body

The monumental conflicts of the 21st century will revolve around who owns your privacy.

Think about it: When you engage in social sharing–and, increasingly all of the Web works because you decide to share pieces of yourself with others–you tacitly provide approval and permission to your personal life.

Carol Hanisch had it right, but not the way that she thought. The body even is going to be turned to the benefit of the social Web, collected data, and politicized privacy.

But the core question remains: Who owns you, your data and even your body? Women have a right to choose, but does everybody have a right to privacy in spite of wanting access to the social web, wearable and even methods of payment, that collects their data?

Intriguing questions, and ones that are already being asked, but not answered, by ethicists, moralists, lawyers, philosophers and others. We know this: where there are no easy answers, black and white seem to be the only ways forward.

Which leads inevitably to more–not fewer–shades of gray.

-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/

[Opinion] The 10 Year Overnight Success

The road to any kind of success in any field or endeavor is scary, narrow and full of switchbacks, failures and dashed dreams.

Having the courage to pull the trigger in the face of uncertainty, disruption and defeat is the primary driver of all successes.

Living the courage in our heads to do the things that success requires is not the position of strength.

The position of strength is the courage to perform the acts in the human heart that might lead to uncertain outcomes.

The solution to the disconnect between attaining success versus the courage to do the hard things with integrity, lies deep in the human heart.

Oh…if we had known this, we might have seriously considered taking ten years to become a watchmaker.

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-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/

[Opinion] We Would Prefer Not To

In light of the current interest around Big Data and the privacy issues made relevant through Wikileaks, Edward Snowden revelations and Google’s recent EU “slap-down,” we wonder how the people who choose not to be enfranchised will be cajoled (or forced) into the developing systems of the future.

Typically, late adopters hang out at the end of the bell curve, waiting around for the latest I-phone iteration to arrive on the discount aisle at Wal-mart, but even these days, the distances between the areas on the bell curve is becoming more and more compacted.

The conflict then arises between those who are the early adopters (the “cool” people”) and those who, for whatever personal, psychological, or emotional reasons, would prefer to still run down that awesome eight track recording of Supertramp.

Most marketing thinkers and wizards of smart continually claim that, eventually there will be enough niches for the people who would rather not participate in the future to still hang out and take advantage of the fringe benefits of the future, without having to actually become an early to mid-adopter of the future.

Problem solved.

Right?

But, what if the real conflict comes from the powers that be in government, corporations and other large organizations, who would prefer to have the convenience of having everybody (even the fringe folks) participating in the “whiz-bang” future, in spite of their objections?

It turns out, that Bartleby (and his late adopter followers) wins in the end, but with the cruelest dénouement possible.

And then the question becomes, what’s the early adopters’s Alamo?

-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/

Christian Peacemaking in a Fallen World – Bully Edition

Bullies are everywhere it seems.

They are at school. They are at work.

Have they always been around or are we only now becoming sensitive to their presence and their impact?

From Donald Sterling to the workplace bully to the disaffected school shooter, modern Western culture seems to be turning up more and more of the disaffected and the dysfunctional.

Eventually, the societal call will come to violate the inviolable in order to ferret out and better address the impacts of bully pathology.

The conflation between the everyday bully and the societal scourge will become easier and easier as time progresses and peace will become harder and harder to attain.

There will be less understanding, less forgiveness and the road to reconciliation will be even tougher.

The hard work of #BuildingForTheFuture is just beginning…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Queen of the YouTube Selfie

Narcissism is the great modern diagnoses.

From philosophers to social scientists to political theorists, the erudite thought leaders have spilled rivers of ink (or created tons of bytes) by critiquing the rise of everything from social media to the “selfie” and positing that such developments spell the end of Western civilization.

For our money, the end of Western civilization may come about, but not because a few million people posted images of themselves on social media sites.

And here’s a prediction for the intelligentsia: If the candidates for President in 2065 don’t have at least a Youtube channel, we here at HSCT will be genuinely surprised.

After all, we hear that you can’t even get a book deal these days without having a platform and an audience first.

-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/

HIT Piece 08.05.2014

I always tell the Steve Martin, San Francisco coffee house story before I begin speaking in front of groups of ten or less.

At some point in my career, I will be speaking before an empty room.

What matters is not the empty room, but how I handle what happens afterward.

-Peace Be With You All-