[Strategy] “Why” is the New Black

“Why” is the new black.

I keep saying this, in trainings mostly, and what it means is that–what lies at the core of most problems, disputes, disagreements, frustrations, and “differences of opinion” in the workplace—is the inability of adults to ask other adults the question “Why?”

The reasons for not engaging in this way are numerous, but the largest on is that supervisors, managers, and even fellow employees, have been trained subtly through the power of social proofing and liking—along with groupthink— to believe that asking “why” as a way to explore motivations (either intrinsic or extrinsic) is the province better-trained, more highly compensated “others” higher up the hierarchical ladder.

Supervisors, managers, and employees also want the reassurance that if they ask exploratory questions in a Socratic manner, that such questioning will lead to resolution in their favor and against the other party. This is, of course, an unknowable outcome, and so it’s just easier to avoid the whole thing and adopt a “Do as I say because I told you to” position. One that leans on authority and extrinsic motivators.

Unfortunately, (or if you are a person of courage, fortunately) the Industrial Revolution is over. The era of supervisors, managers, and leaders merely leaning on authority to get widgets made faster and cheaper has passed as well. And the era of calling everyone’s bluff is now upon us.

Increasingly, people are returning to the idea (that was rampant in the world before the Industrial Revolution brought prosperity to the masses) that labor has to matter. Jobs, work, and labor are all discretely different and we have spent 150 years muddling the boundaries. But, in a 21^st century where more and more people who would have been tagged as merely “employees” are asking “Why?” to get to the meaning and mattering behind widget based tasks, the boundaries are only going to become sharper.

For supervisors, managers, and employees struggling within the transition from the brave, old, familiar world to the brave, new, unfamiliar world, getting rid of the desire for reassurance, developing patience, and exploring motivation Socratically by asking “Why?” is the only way forward.

Otherwise, a lot of middle management in a lot of organizations will be hollowed out and replaced, because performing emotional labor will become secondary in value to the immediate revenues that lower paid, more compliant people, algorithms, or robotics can provide.

-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] Relational Resonance

Resonance is a term from physics that describes what happens when an object’s natural vibration frequency responds to an external stimulus of the same frequency.

Resonance occurs in nature when an object vibrates without you even touching it. Resonance happens when people fall in love with each other; and, resonance shifts when people fall into conflict with each other.

The reason that litigation is such a poor method for resolving disputes is because most—if not all—disagreements, fights, and “differences of opinion,” are about relationships, built on reciprocation and maintained through common resonance. When the frequency gets disrupted by an external change, the resonance goes away and the struggle to resolution really a hero’s journey back to resonance. Litigation changes the frequency of the relationship between individuals and between individuals and organizations, from one of commonality and vibrating at the same frequency, to one of vibrating at different frequencies.

What does all of this have to do with the conflict resolution professional?

Creating stories that resonate with audiences and clients who are seeking to get back into relationships with resonance, is one of the most important skills that peace builders must grasp in order to design, market, and promote products, services, and processes that will get them revenues.
Creating resonances is about getting to the same frequency—at the same time—that audiences and clients are no matter when and where they are in conflict. Thus, peace builders must consider whether advocating for early-stage interventions (rather that primarily trying to promote late-stage resolution products and services) is a better way to proceed long-term.
Creating the conditions for conflict resolution professionals and audiences to speak the same language—and thus be on the same frequency, will require conflict resolution professionals at all levels to abandon the higher language of “conflict as an opportunity for growth” and move toward the audience language of “conflict as a roadblock to be avoided, accommodated, or attacked.”

The first two are easy. The last is hard.

Peace building is about doing the hard things, doing them well, and doing them consistently—and in a committed way—and building a field and a brand over time that audiences will flock too, that clients will gladly pay money for, and that peace builders can hand down to the next generation of professionals.

Relational resonance must move from the table between clients and the peace builder to the platforms between peace builders and the world.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Projects for the Peace Builder I

It’s not easy to do what I do, if you’re a peace builder—a negotiator, a lawyer, a social worker, an educator, or an executive director.

It’s not easy to manage social profiles, blog regularly, connect with clients, fans, audience members, and event participants in ways that can grow your brand.

It’s not easy to keep up with changes in marketing, digital content creation, traditional marketing, and the worlds pf publishing, podcasting, privacy, and security.

It’s really not easy if you’re a peace builder that is struggling between the poles of “I just want my business to work” and “I just need my clients to pay me.”

Well, I’ve got some projects that are upcoming that might be of help for the peace builder:

The book, Marketing For Peace Builders: How to Market Your Value to a World in Conflict is coming out in March. I am taking pre-orders for the book right now and will send people on the list a pre-order copy if you send me your email address at jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com

As a follow-up to the book, I am designing a series of workshops that will cover the material in the book, and provide updates, interactions, and engagement opportunities for peace builders. I have not decided how this series of workshops will be facilitated—in-person, online, etc.—but if there is enough interest, it’ll happen.

As another follow-up to the book, I am redesigning the HSCT website to reflect the importance of the book and it’s materials. I am launching another podcast the Marketing For Peace Builders Show, in late 2016. This will be a podcast featuring interviews from marketers, business development experts, and others who have taken their peace building brands and businesses to the place of connection and engagement.

Finally, I will be launching a LinkedIn Group—Marketing For Peace Builders—that will be a place for peace builders, marketers, and others to connect, engage, ask and answer questions, and to promote services, products, and processes that will plug-in to the peace building community in a positive way.

And that’s just the start.

I don’t believe that peace making and money making should be mutually exclusive.

I don’t believe that academic programs in the fields of dispute and conflict resolution can continue to churn out graduates who can’t pay down their student loan debts.

I don’t believe that the fields of peace building can continue to be a rump, human resource process—considered only after litigation, but almost never before—in organizations and societies in the Western world, even as disputes, disagreements, and fights continue to escalate.

I believe that the fields of building peace are at a zeitgeist moment right now, at the intersection of marketing, content creation, relationship building, and the only way forward to our future as a field is to grab the marketing moment, right now.

Would you like to join me in this moment?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Great Sorting

On President’s Day, it’s useful to remember that meaning and mattering matter more now than ever before.

This is reflected in the shift from important impersonal interactions at scale to important personal interactions between individuals. Meaning has always come from relationships and the community and family has always been the first incubator for the rules and traditions of relationships.

But the family incubator is breaking and changing—and has been for some time now.

This breaking and transforming leads to conflicts, disagreements, and disputes that loom beneath larger relationships with their power, their virulence, and their ability to last. Mattering generated through disagreement—what we are against as opposed to what we are for—is the great sorting, occurring as societies and cultures shift from a post-Industrial Revolution landscape to whatever comes after that.

When meaning and mattering only come from the narrative of conflict, the pure function of dysfunction becomes the call of the day, and the larger narrative shatters into a thousand pieces of glass.

What are we to do?

Relationships between people are still going to be the key to overcoming the dysfunction of the broken incubator of family, tribe, and community. Relationships, no matter the overall structure behind them, still matter more than the gossamer of tradition, economics, location, or history.

Narratives between relationships are going to become more strained and less collaborative because the difference between your tribe’s meaning and my tribe’s meaning matters more than the similarities we may share across tribes.

Meaning and mattering will become more elusive to attain, and harder to maintain, as the bonds that used to hold—tradition, family, religion, even the nation state itself—fray from the edges to the center, and those in authority (presidents, politicians, prime ministers) lose their power (but not their authority).

People seek meaning above all else, whether through conflicts, or through relationships. Joining across artificial boundaries pushes this meaning through conflict and relationship to a whole new frontier for humanity.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] The Story of Your Fight

The stories of disagreements, disputes, arguments and fights matters more than the disagreements, disputes, arguments and fights themselves, to both the professional peace builder and the public looking for the right advice at the right moment.

The frame, or story, that conflict engagement professionals tell themselves about conflicts that they resolve, their professional strengths, and even what they have to offer to the public, is typically a positive, education based framing.

But the public frames conflict in negative terms, embedded inside personalized frames of reference:

“This happened to me!”

“He’s the problem, not me.”

“I’m right. They’re wrong. You fix it!”

No one needs help resolving conflicts in their lives, and the dichotomy between public and professional storytelling about conflicts backs up this assertion. The story of conflict for the public—and the narrative framing they operate in—is one that does not line up with the product offerings of many in the field of peacebuilding.

Ourselves included.

In the public, there are people who don’t see disagreements, disputes, arguments, fights, or confrontations as relevant occurrences in their own lives. Sure, other people have problems, but not them. The story that they tell themselves is one of floating through the world, disagreement free—and all a peace builders fervent framing efforts aren’t going to persuade them otherwise.

However, when other people around them are privately asked “Who causes the most problems around here?” the answer comes back to those individuals who think they aren’t the problem.

There is one way out of this for the public and two ways out of this for the professional peace builder:

For the peace builder, if the terms “conflict,” “dispute,” “resolution” and others have no meaning for the public (or target market) who you want to buy your products, processes, and services, then change the wording. And peace building professionals know, that when the wording changes, the framing shifts.
For the peace builder, as the framing shifts, turn the in-person and face-2-face moments of the narrative from a focus of trying to persuade the public (or the target market) that they have a conflict, to educating the public (or the target market) on what the impact of the story of the conflict is having on their personal relationships.
For the public, there are moments inside of every disagreement, dispute, argument, or fight, where you seek advice, counsel, and direction in what to do, how to proceed and how to respond to other people. These are the moments to seek the blogs, videos and podcasts of professionals that can entertain, inform and advise—without breaking your story.

When the stories of disagreements, disputes, arguments and fights matters more than the disagreements, disputes, arguments and fights themselves, there will only be more, not less, and the moment for peace builders—and the public—to start talking the same language is now.

H/T to Justin R. Corbett for his thoughts on this.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Clarity, Candor and Courage in Communication

Establishing clarity and getting candor are often confused with the use of profanity and “brutal” honesty in communication relationships too often filled with more noise than substance.

There has long been a desire from audiences—whether in a family, or on the other end of an email communication—for the clear sending of a meaningful message.

Consumers of messages want clarity in order to understand what the sender is asking and candor in order to determine the appropriate level of transparency and authenticity. Because there is so little direct communication in all manner of relationships, elements and techniques of persuasion from the sender are interpreted by the receiver as lying, obfuscation and methods of deception.

Transparency and authenticity cannot be replaced by the appearance of courage, which appears when content creators use profanity in the content they produce.

Accountability and responsibility are sometimes abandoned with this approach; and still, in many communications, candor can be preserved with courage, while also getting to truth.

Which is what every communication is really about; whether it’s an advertising message from a brand or the message a person receives from their ex-partner across a negotiation table.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] On Fences, Boundaries and Good Neighbors

Does the admonition my mother gave me during my childhood still ring true in an era of refugees, immigration and fears?

Natural boundaries have existed since the dawn of human existence to separate “them” from “us” and, once Dunbar’s Number kicked in at scale, political boundaries existed as stories that developed into myths designed to separate “us” from “them.”

In the 21^st century though, the illusion of noise as communication has convinced many people that boundaries (natural and otherwise) are the provenance of a time long past, and a people long dead.

The ability to erect an artificial barrier(anyone remember the Maginot Line) or to manipulate a natural one (“Don’t bring troops across the Rubicon River…”) has always acted as a trigger in the human psyche to the prelude for greater conflict. This is not necessarily always cast in military or political terms but, as human beings are conflict prone and naturally political, it often comes across in such ways.

And then we throw race, gender, national origin and culture into the mix and things get really dicey.

Which leads me back to my mother. When I was a child and my two sisters and I would have a conflict, unless we could work it out between ourselves (most often we could) my mother would separate us with the admonition that “Good fences make good neighbors,” and would put use each in our rooms—with the doors closed. This would precipitate a “cooling off” period before the real negotiation/resolution would begin.

Political boundaries existed as symbols, designed to protect and grow cultural stories around “us” and “them” and to allow people in charge to manipulate power, create conflicts, control resources and at the furthest end, start larger conflicts.

This all seems so illusory in an era of the 24/7/365 news cycle and the false dichotomies of conflicts. But in the world that average people live in, fences, borders and boundaries are still fiercely enforced, from families to neighborhoods and even at scale. And without such stories—which is all that those political boundaries really are—the chances of conflicts arising and becoming more virulent as those stories change and grow due to the reactions to the human choices to make war, migrate, emigrate or to have fears, is more and more likely.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] How To “Make A Ruckus”

There are two ways to “make a ruckus,” if you want to:

The first way is to be generous, give away your knowledge and spiritual wealth (and maybe even your material wealth if you are led to) and to collaborate with others to use the power you have gained to help others less powerful.

The second way is to race to the bottom on price and cost, worry about the corners and the fractions of an inch, to create/lobby for regulatory environments that favor incumbents, to use power as a weapon and to deny the human individual, and only look at the masses.

One way leads to abundance and an ownership mindset, no matter what environment or context you happen to be in.

One way leads to scarcity of resources and a perpetual employee mindset, no matter what environment or context you happen to be in.

Envy arises in individuals and groups of one mindset when they observe the physical, external manifestations of an internal set of choices. This feeling of envy, based in fear, clouds judgement, and leads to the false premise behind some conflicts. These conflicts—that are really about mindsets and values rather than about material resources—can almost never be resolved, they can only be engaged with—or moved on from.

If you want to “make a ruckus,” you have to make three decisions first:

What kind of mindset do you want to have?
What kind of environment or context will create the circumstances for acting on that mindset?
What kind of outcomes are you willing to advocate to advance, to protect and to reject?

It’s easy to say “I make a ruckus.” It’s not that easy to do.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode #8 – Nicholas Jackson

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode #8 – Nicholas Jackson, Children’s Book Illustrator, Artist, Graphic Designer, Man of Faith, Entrepreneur, Thinker & Thought Leader

[powerpress]

Let’s talk honestly about the unmentionables.

When I was a child—and then as I transitioned into adolescence—I was warned by my parents to never talk about the three following subjects in “polite” company:

Sex
Religion
Politics

But, as the top of the world has blown off with the presence of social media and with everybody revealing everything from reality shows to magazine covers, no one—at least no celebrity anyway—seems to have time to follow this admonition.

It has almost become de riguer in our culture, and some on both the political right and the political left would claim that we are at the end of Western culture. Because the masses and the audiences seem to favor showing off rather than putting the work into becoming a person of substance.

Substance, some would say, is the appeal of showing up, being committed and consistent—but not if you’re wrong about something. Then, we don’t want commitment and consistency. And you better apologize quickly for being wrong before it gets out to Twitter and social media that you were wrong.

Others would argue that style is more important than substance.

But, for my money, style comes after hard work and is a by product of substance. And my guest today, Nicholas Jackson, is putting the work in and moving slowly and surely towards realizing his own, unique vision.

With substance, clarity and even a style that’s all his own.

Now, on unmentionables.

Look, we’re gonna talk about money on the podcast today.

Making money. Spending money. But most importantly, charging clients’ money.

One of the things that I have said to people in the past is that this work that I do—the corporate training, the consulting and coaching,—is not done for free. This isn’t the March of Dimes (apologies to them, they’re a great organization), and while it may seem that money—as well as sex—is something that the American public—and the marketers relating stories to the American public, seem to be something we can never shut up about, we often still sensationalize “money talk.”

Or maybe we don’t. I don’t know. Nick and I will hash it out in this hour and half long talk.

Check out all the places below that you can connect to Nick as he makes money, doing highly valuable, substantive and meaningful work that matters:

Nicholas Jackson Illustration: http://www.nicholasjackson.net/

Nicholas Jackson on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicholasjacksonartdesign/

Nicholas Jackson on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nickjjackson

Hire Nicholas Jackson here: http://www.hireanillustrator.com/i/author/nicholas-jackson/

Read his Interview w/Freelance Fuse here: http://freelancefuse.net/2010/08/nicholas-jackson-how-his-drawing-allows-for-his-freelancing-lifestyle/

[Advice] Conflicting Narratives

Storytelling, when a name is put to it, is the act of getting across to other people who we are, why we matter, what our thoughts and feelings are and what we value.

This process happens from the time that we begin to learn to talk (and sometimes before) and continues throughout our lives, creating narratives, and strings of narratives, everywhere we turn.

Many people claim that they don’t have a narrative, or that they don’t view their lives and the things that happen to them, in the context of a storytelling triangle, or arc. Instead, many people claim that things “just kind of happen” to them.

This lack of agency over the narratives in our own lives leads to frustration, stress, feelings of futility, despair, and at the furthest end of the spectrum, depression and nihilism. This lack of agency over the narratives in our own lives, can lead to some of us starting and perpetuating dysfunctional communication patterns and engaging in destructive conflict. Because, after all, if there is no narrative, no purpose, and if life events truly are “one damn thing after another” then what is the point?

But here’s something to consider:

Every story reveals the storyteller’s desire to create meaning.
Every story reveals the storyteller’s desire to create mattering.
Every story reveals the hearer’s desire to create relationship.
Every story reveals the hearer’s desire to connect to the teller of the story.

When told, the five most common workplace stories, reveal all of the desires for both the hearer (the consumer) of the story and the teller (the creator) of the story. When these desires conflict—and they tend to around values, behaviors, and choices revealed through stories—then the process of change begins in either the hearer or the teller.

-Peace Be With You All-