[Advice] The Wider World

“How are you planning to scale?”

“You’ve gotta have a plan to grow this thing.”

“I don’t see that as a viable business model.”

“You can’t scale that.”

“Consulting never scales.”

The savvy peace builder will have to get used to hearing all of these statements (and multiple other variations) when they take their project to the wider world, for three reasons:

The wider world tends to understand and accept things that relate to the experiences, thoughts, feelings and dreams that already experienced or that are already known quantities.
The wider world tends to be skeptical of progress, differentiation and innovative thinking, because the human brain favors the safety of the status quo, the known, the shortcut and the predictable.
The wider world isn’t always against the savvy peace builder (though it may feel like it). But they are sometimes lacking self-awareness while at the same time being incredibly self-focused.

The savvy peace builder has to build their “no” muscle. This is the muscle that comes into play, every time such statements (and many, many others) that reflect doubt, disbelief, or a lack of understanding about the project they have begun to build.

Using this muscle builds determination, persistence, grit and resiliency in the face of trial, error and even failure.

The wider world only understands what it already knows. It is up to the savvy peace builder to commit to doing the hard work of changing the frames and perspectives, so that something new can be seen.

Scaling is not the be all and end all. And once the savvy peace builder’s “no” muscle is strong, she will be able to answer the underlying, unstated doubts, concerns and critiques in order to truly bring her product to center stage when she is ready.

And not a moment before.

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

[Strategy] The Line From Emotional Awareness

Lines are everywhere.

They denote boundaries and connote separation. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The shortest distance between two points is a man and his money. The lines are on the map.

Redlining was the process by which people were segregated from each other in urban (and rural) areas in order to prevent (or expand) access to resources. Gerrymandering is the process by which boundaries are eliminated (or created) to get political parties in power.

Lines are everywhere.

They are inside of us. They are metaphorical, but when people decide to avoid a conflict, or suppress an emotion, they are either cleaving to lines already created for them, or they are creating their own lines.

Emotional competency begins with the awareness of these lines inside of us. It begins when we look at the lines and actively decide to take our emotional well-being into our own hands. This is tough, and tenuous and it is not guaranteed.

Here are three things to consider on your way to emotional competency:

Gain emotional awareness—many people in organizations are aware that they have emotions; they are people after all. However, they sometimes lack the courage to assess their own internal lives. People in organizations where we have done corporate training have often approached us afterwards and said “I knew I should have done (X) differently, but I had no idea what was going on with me.”
Develop emotional intelligence—many people underestimate the importance of stories that they tell themselves, the role of fear of failure and the importance of framing and emotions. Without understanding these areas (and taking the time to engage with them) gaining emotional intelligence can seem like a lifetime long, twilight struggle.
Attain emotional competency—many people confuse competency with intelligence or awareness. Many people in organizations (some in the C-Suite) would rather pay for intelligence and awareness, rather than competency. But emotional competency matters more than even talent or skill. In an organization, the people who advance the furthest are those who are the most emotionally competent in the end.

Lines are everywhere.

But they don’t have to be in you, your organization or even your life.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Justice Is Blind

Justice is blind.

Or so it is said in Western culture.

The issue with justice is not the fact of justice, which is applied through law, morals, appeals to theology and philosophy. The issue with justice is that the narratives around it are often confused with several other things.

Desire for vengeance. Dissatisfaction with outcomes. Disappointment at a lack of desired consequences.

Crime victim families walk before cameras and state: “We came here for justice and justice was done.” Or, “We came here for justice, but there was no justice today.”

A character in a movie once stated that, “Karma is justice without the satisfaction. I don’t believe in justice.” Another character infamously intoned in another film “For justice, we will go to Don Corleone!” We should remember that Lady Justice carries both scales–and a sword.

Many people scream loudly for a narrative that includes and envelops justice. They even make signs and placards with the phrase, “no justice, no peace” emblazoned upon them, but what they are really seeking is karmic retribution.

Retribution, vengeance, revenge; wrongs righted with immediacy and swift, unambivalent consequences. Punishment, meted out by at the highest order, in the fastest way, with as few innocent people harmed as possible.

There is a revolution underway in both the Western world and at a larger, global level. Societies, groups, cultures and even individuals are confusing the results of that revolution with their own desires for karmic retribution. The karmic retribution narrative begins something like this:

“Never before in the history of world, do we (typically meaning “I” or “my in-group”) have access to more information, more money and more power to transform the world in ways reflecting how we would like it to be, rather than the frustrating, unjust ways that it has always been. No longer will we (typically meaning “I” or “my in-group”) wander the world, merely satisfied with outcomes formerly guaranteed to us by ‘people in power.’ We want more. And if we don’t receive the more we are guaranteed, then we will either move on those in power to get it. Or we will call for justice until we get the material outcomes we seek.”

This narrative underlies many current calls for justice, with the immediacy of the narrative being employed, following ever newly discovered injustices, as wave after wave of more access, more mobility and more individualized power seems to wash over the societies and cultures we inhabit.

But so what, right? Under a Rawlian (or even a Lockean) philosophical world view, why shouldn’t narratives be reframed and cries for justice recried?

Well, conflicts occur when narratives differ, when perceptions of justice don’t match and whenever disruptions happen. Conflicts happen when narratives of injustices (and perceived narratives of injustice) rub up against each other.

And when the only resolutions come in the form of power transfers and shifts, conflicts escalate quickly to violence. And, while this is nothing new (see Don Corleone) one need only look at incidents around the United States (and the world) last year to see the evidence of the conflicts and how quickly and irrevocably they can escalate.

What are we to do?

What is the balance between justice, vengeance, and the more revolution that we are experiencing worldwide?

What is the most unambiguous way for all people (even those who have chosen not to participate due to inability, lack of ability or lact of interest) to benefit from the new largesse that our recent scientific/moral/ethical/legal revolutions promise to provide?

What are societies and cultures to do, even as the center disintegrates and the power holders in culture, media, journalism and on and on, lose out in the shifting narratives of our times?

Who gets to choose?

Who gets to make the world?

We don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

But far more energy should be spent on discussing and solving those questions and advancing the narrative of peace. Much less energy should be spent on advancing narratives that cry out for karmic vengeance, too often framed in the language of justice, while always proclaiming that fairness and equitable treatment are the ultimate goals.

-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] Which Way to the Champagne Room?

We’ve talked about the savvy peace builder working on their project and about how to measure the value and worth of applause.

We’ve talked about the people that matter when building your project and how to consider their contributions, versus the contributions of those who don’t matter.

And how to negotiate the difference.

We’ve even talked about the importance of business mentors and how they can provide both overall, and project-by-project clarity, as well as guidance from an emotionless perspective.

But the area that we haven’t really touched on is partnerships. Every project, the savvy peace builder can’t birth on his own, and thus, there is the need to partner with other people. There are two kinds of project partners:

Those who bring expertise

And

Those who bring money.

Everybody else may call themselves a partner (and sometimes there are those people who come to the table with both expertise and money, but unless the savvy peace builder is willing to exit from their own project, these people are best viewed the same way that VC’s are viewed) but, they really aren’t.

Choosing a partner should take a long time, and the character of the potential partner (or partners) should be considered carefully. The pros and cons of the relationship should be weighed, because, at the end of the project, the savvy peace builder would rather have a successful project, than a bitter taste in the mouth.

Think of partnerships in the same light that one thinks of marriages: Date a long time first, gauge the temperature of the individual (or individuals), then go to an engagement, and then get hitched. Then (for the sake of this metaphor) head to the marital bed.

As in personal relationships, the savvy peace builder knows that jumping into bed with a partner right away, can lead to bad consequences in the end, once the initial excitement wears off.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Culture Matters

Culture means something.

We forget about the clarion call of culture in our pell-mell run toward the future. But culture matters, particularly in companies and organizations. Culture, as defined by the cultural anthropologist E. B. Taylor, is the complex whole that includes morals, knowledge, arts, beliefs, law, customs, capabilities and habits, acquired by people as a part of society.

Culture means human beings connecting with other human beings.

Start-ups get this sometimes. The ones that don’t fail, the ones that do succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

Established organizations forget that culture matters after a certain level of cultural inertia happens. When organizations begin hiring, and it expands to more than 150 people, culture is often forgotten in the pursuit of making profits and appealing to the shareholders’ demands.

Nonprofits underestimate the power of the culture they create and that they help develop. Then they wonder why they can’t raise more money, or struggle to justify grant funding year-on-year.

All of these different stories about culture in different organizations create the dynamic cloud that covers the creation of a society, and an overall culture.

There are three things to remember when developing a culture for your project:

Conflicts will happen, whether you have 30 people or 150 people. It seems cool when you’re talking about 30 people and “how exciting it all is,” but how people deal with conflicts will determine how the project grows…or doesn’t…
Hiring people is really important. Teams, belonging, and pedigree matter. Or they don’t. When building a company culture, knowing what you’re going to emphasize versus what you’re not going to emphasize is important. And it has to show up on more than just your website’s home page.
Failure is not an option, but learning is. This is not an excuse to make bad decisions. There are enough of those excuses out there. However, learning about how people—customers, clients, investors, fans, audience members, etc.—react and respond to your product and your culture, gives you an opportunity toward growth. Typically called a feedback loop, we here at HSCT call it a learning curve.

Here is the challenge question for your organization: If culture means something when developing your project, when was the last time you took the time, to examine how your culture could be better?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 4 Locus of Control Questions

Confirmation bias occurs when a person believes that the situations and experiences they continually run into, reaffirm their persepctive on their place in the world, and their preconceived beliefs or practices.

Case in point: When a person looks at the amount in their paycheck every week and mutters “ Well, I guess we’ll always be middle class.”

Or, when a person tells another before a difficult decision, or contlict, “Well, you had to know that Bob was going to react that way.”

Confirmation bias occurs because we want reassurance that the stories we tell ourselves are the only way reality could possibly be organized. This is why we emotionally, psychologically and somtimes even physically, resist when we are confronted by a different outcome someone else has experienced in the same situation. The fact of the matter is, we are in charge of our own stories—and the stories that we tell ourselves—but we often don’t believe it.

This dovetails with locus of control.

Based in studies and research from the 1950’s, locus of control says that some people believe they are in control of their lives, and other people believe outside forces determine the direction of their lives and their decision making processes.

People with a high internal locus of control believe the world is something they control.

People with a high external locus of control, believes the world controls them.

Confirmation bias reinforces the stories of both personality types: If I believe that I’m in charge of my destiny, then I will continually tell myself the ” I’m In Charge Story.” But if I believe that destiny is in charge of me, then I will continually tell myself the “I’m Not In Charge Story.”

Most often, when things are going well, confirmation bias and locus of control concerns become secondary to a good time. But in a difficulty, confrontation or a conflict around things that matter, confirmation bias and locus of control (both internal and external) can serve as drivers that both intitiate and continue the conflict spiral.

Perceptions, stories and triggers are the fuel in the car of conflict situations, and the only person who can alter the fuel successfully is you. Here are four challenge questions for determining your conflict story:

What did I learn about difficulty, confrontation, control and conflict from my family?

Family is the world’s first organizational structure. And many of us learned the wrong lessons from those in charge. But the real issue is that we keep confirming the same lessons repeatedly with others.

What did I learn about control over my environment when I left the home?

Formal schooling in (at least in the United States) begins at around 4 or 5. This is when true confusion sets in, and when uncomfortable questions get asked about “reality”—and sometimes hushed up.

What messages have I had reinforced through my friends, associates and even the media I chose to consume?

There is a reason that many individuals with high internal locuses of control, refuse to watch the news, choose their friends carefully and are elitist about companies to whom they decide to give their money, time and talent.

What messages am I sending out to the world that are reinforcing difficulty, confrontation, control and conflict stories that are no longer relevant to my experience?

If you have succeeded in overcoming a poor story, or have moved the needle on your locus of control, revisiting old stories that are no longer relevant is the surest way to experience the same things over again.

-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/

[Advice] Changing Our Approach to Distribution

Content distribution is hard.

Really hard.

Here’s why: It’s really difficult to research content, write content and edit content without a commensurate plan to “get it out there.”

Here at HSCT, we looked at the distribution part of creating content as secondary to the problem of generating enough content to actually be of value in the virtual space that we occupy.

As we have learned more and more about the process of writing, we have had to learn more and more about distribution systems. In our estimation, for the conflict consultant, seeking to make a dent in the conflict space, there are a few distribution mechanisms for getting attention (and eyeballs) on their content:

Social media—Everyone knows that social media is a place of content curation and content creation, but many people (not B2B/B2C brands) don’t think about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Pinterest as being 2^nd party distribution mechanisms.

Email—Everyone knows that email isn’t “sexy,” but it keeps right on moving along. Email as a method for B2B content distribution drives around 4% of all traffic to the HSCT blog, with over 75% of that traffic being new visitors.

Curation Options—Many peace builders (and other content creators) don’t focus on curation tools such as Flipboard and StumbledUpon, as well as Quora. There are also secondary content creation options out there from Medium.com and LinkedIn publishing.

The “dark” Web—Sharing of articles, reposting and republishing of articles into private newsgroups (yes those are still around) and chat rooms (yes, those are still around as well) can be powerful connection drivers for the development of a peace builders’ content. We have found this is a growing area for our content, our approach and connecting people to our philosophy and business model.

Here at HSCT, we are using all of these methods. Our strategy is simple: Keep learning and researching, keep writing our articles, keep distributing our perspective and keep growing through distribution.

-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] Committing to Persisting

Persistence is tough.

The savvy peacebuilding consultant knows this, because she has dealt with clients who would rather give up and return to the comfort of their past dysfunction, rather than attempt to go through the hard work of pushing through to create something new.

Persistence requires energy.

The savvy peacebuilding consultant knows this because she is drained at the end of a coaching session, a mediation session, a workshop session, or after writing a blog post about her work.

Persistence is formidable.

The savvy peacebuilding consultant knows this because, she realizes that having the will to do what another consultant won’t (as long as that thing is moral, ethical, legal and not fattening) is the difference between success and failure for her project, her clients, and for the niche she serves.

The savvy peacebuilder commits to persist, even when it’s not sexy, interesting or engaging, because she knows that one less peacebuilding project in the world turns out one more candle in the dark.

-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/

[Advice] Business Mentors II

Business mentors are not the most important parts of your business, but they are definitely an integral portion of the game.

Good business mentors can provide three things:

Sound, positive feedback that is both constructive and developmental
The space to know when to let you fail, and when to push you to succeed
Emotional distance from your “next great idea”

They can’t prevent you form making the next big mistake, nor can they really help you launch and iterate. But they can form the basis of a potential Board of Directors, and sometimes, they may take on a role that’s even more important for the savvy peace builder:

Fans.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Building Better Work Relationships

Relationships at work are third level relationships.

First level relationships are familial ones, all the way from the family in your house that you grew up with to your cousin Wanda in Oklahoma. Second level relationships are close friends and associates, schoolmates, neighbors, etc.

But the people that we work with are not ones that we would have chosen. Even in an era of choosing yourself, or four-hour work weeks, the vast majority of us still work under conditions that resemble the ones that our grandparents worked under, albeit with less pollution and physical effort.

And, for the foreseeable future, since human beings are going to continue to build organizations, establish and maintain hierarchies, and engage with mechanisms of active and passive social control, there will always be workplaces.

Always.

With that being said, the question becomes, how does a person build better work relationships? With everything that we now know about neuroscience, psychology, the genetic code and even the world of software and computers, developing the resources to build better workplaces should be easy. But it’s not. And what’s even more distressing is that the most common solution proposed, with access to all that knowledge and data, is to replace humans with software programs and/or mechanical objects.

Robots are fun and AI is coming, but we are a long, long way from building something—well—more human than human. So, here are the top five ways to build better relationships, one human to another:

Empathy is huge—and we don’t mean in the “touchy feely” way that empathy is often thought of. In a workplace culture, empathy begins with Wheaton’s Law and ends at actively listening to someone else. Even if you disagree with them.
Do emotional labor—we wrote about this last week, but it bears repeating: in the economy that we all work in—no matter if we are co-working with others or on a distributed team—doing the hard work of caring, listening and acting out of self-interested selflessness is the only way forward.
Remove the fear—acting out of fear: of getting fired, of irritating a boss, or of confronting a co-worker, has to be jettisoned. Fear is a common reaction when things that matter to us (i.e. our values, our needs our emotions, etc.) are threatened. But, the brain only knows what we tell it. So tell it good, factual self-talk, rather than allowing biases and false ideas to fill the brain space.
Lead on doing the hard things—this is the 2nd hardest thing to do in building better work relationships, because there are so many things that we would rather avoid. But doing the hard things that are also the right things, is the only way that an organization can survive. Which leads into the last thing…
Leave if it doesn’t fit—most of the pushback that we get around the five things comes down to this statement “If I do all of these things that you suggest and nothing changes, not even the place I work, then what do I do?” This statement reveals a common workplace false parallel: A person’s value is not determined by their work. There are other positions, cultures and value systems represented in other workplaces out there. And if you’ve already done the hard work of building better work relationships, do you think that this work will make you less employable in the future, or more employable in the future?

-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/