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-

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/

[Advice] Interviewing for Your Project

The interview process is rife with problems, and the solopreneur consultant has more problems than most at the beginning.

Think about it: If you’ve solved the problem of scaling up from a freelance, “I hire myself because it’s cheaper,” mindset, and have developed a proprietary process that you can sell to others at a price high enough to justify having an employee, only then can you make a hire.

And many solopreneurs/business owners, approach hiring with a mindset grounded in the back end UX they suffered through when they were looking to work for somebody else.

Typically the process goes as follows: You bring people into a room, after putting several of them through a grueling process of assessment—both psychological and sometimes physical. Then you ask them a series of ridiculous, HR designed, pre-formatted questions.

After this, everybody leaves the room and the consultant/solopreneur/business owner makes a blind decision to hire or not hire the people put through the process. This decision typically follows a series of arbitrary, meaningless, showy conversations with partners and others, that have told nothing about how well the potential employee can perform in the position; and, have everything to do with intangible–and potentially illegal to consider–character traits.

This is the interview process and a lot of times both the interviewer and the newly hired individual is dissatisfied with what happened in the room.

Look, if you’ve successfully leapfrogged to business owner from freelancer, then there are three things that you should be looking for before you even think about going down the hackneyed road of interviewing:

Is the person that I am talking to conscientious?
Is the person that I am talking to accustomed to failure and does this person have the grit to get through it?
Is the person that I’m talking to going to fulfill the material needs of my business at a human level?

That’s it. Those are your interview considerations.

Now, you’re an entrepreneur first and a business owner second. Go blow up the model of the process.

-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-

Small “J” vs. Big “J”

Forgiveness is difficult because many people have a deep misunderstanding of what forgiveness is and is not.

Half-Measures-Didnt-Get-You-Into-Conflict-Half-Measures-Wont-Get-You-Out-Of-it

Forgiveness gives fairness a chance. And while we don’t know about a lot, including what’s fair and what’s not, we know that the feeling that fairness has a chance to occur can only come about through the act of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is an active act we engage in, rather than a passive event that occurs to us from the ether without our acquiescence or knowledge.
Forgiveness does not mean that we surrender our right to justice. And justice comes from our moral core.

The act of forgiveness and the process of getting there, is often mixed up with small “j” judgment—focused on determining who’s right and who’s wrong—which often then turns into capital “J” judgment—where we determine where another’s soul might or might not be going.

The Christian conciliator often gets the idea of judgment mixed up with the gut feelings of discernment.

Discernment comes from the Holy Spirit and the move of the spirit in a person. Confirmed through prayer, the Christian conciliator can get closer toward guiding others through the forgiveness process, and past the capital “J” judgment that blocks true understanding.

[Check out The Art of Forgiving by Lewis B. Smedes for more on this.]

-Peace Be With You All-

Actively Listening Past TL;DR

Relationships between humans become complicated in face-to-face communication when there is little use of emotional intelligence, little cognitive understanding of what is going on in a conversation and little ability to engage positively in conflict with another person.

So, in the digital space, tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) becomes a shorthand way of not listening to arguments we’d rather not hear.

Avoiding bad news and curating a social media feed becomes a way of limiting information that we feel is unpleasant and likely to lead to internal conflicts—or external ones.

And emotional intelligence goes out the window with flame wars, spam commentary and useless “noise.”

So, what’s the average person to do to combat all of this?

The way to actively listen online is too do the things that aren’t sexy:

Read the long, laboriously written article that lays out an argument that you can’t follow.
Watch a YouTube video—or better yet a TED Talk—covering an area where you have no knowledge.
Develop a sense of that which is “noise” and that which is “valuable” rather than throwing up your hands in the air and resorting to the old trope of “what’s the world coming too.”

Do these things successfully and you will find that actively listening through the digital noise is the same skill set that you have to engage with to actively listen through the face-to-face noise.

-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/

Gimme An “E”

There are two mindsets and one, which was chiefly dominant throughout the 20^th century is in decline, while the other is ascending.

The Entrepreneur mindset is based on taking on risk, pushing the boundaries and restlessly finding new visions and new horizons.

The Employee mindset is based on committing wholeheartedly to a project, getting paid, and then going off to do a hobby, have a family or use the money to leverage another interest.

The Entrepreneur mindset focuses on what could possibly be and the Employee mindset is focused on what is.

The Entrepreneur mindset is best exemplified through the myths of the Old West. The Employee mindset is as well.

Which mindset will “win” the future?

Neither. And that’s a good thing, because both require each other.

The Entrepreneur mindset requires some infrastructure to be built by those with an Employee mindset. The Employee mindset benefits from the “newness” and adventure in which the Entrepreneur mindset bastes.

-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] Talking to Your Partner

The professional consultant and coach most often acts as a solopreneur.

She is most often alone in the pursuit of dream.

She is typically overwhelmed by concerns about accounting and how much she must charge to make a profit, how her marketing is working (or not) and multiple other competing priorities.

She is alone in her business and her business practice, but she is not alone in her overall life.

She has a partner and/or friends. No woman is an island. She’s driven, but she has to make two decisions early:

How to pick a partner or friend

How much to tell that person about her solopreneurship.

The best practice is to be as honest as possible with intimate partners (and business partners are about as intimate as possible without taking off your clothes) and tell the other party, just how long it’s going to take to scale.

One less conversation to be had can make her life easier and less complicated.

-Peace Be With You All-

Cultural Negotiating

The most important driver for success in the 21st century, as the workplace shifts from being about making things with our hands, to making things with our ideas, is emotional intelligence.

Don’t get us wrong, building physical objects still means something, but the most important building is happening with ideas, a keyboard, and publishing platforms, rather than using hammers, adhering some nails and getting rough hands.

After all, I hear that these days, even a known author can’t get a book deal without an already built-in audience.

With that being noted, cultural competence—alongside emotional intelligence—becomes another tool in the box labeled “FOR IDEA BUILDING.”

Being aware of the personal, political and social cultural backgrounds and ideas of partners on a project (combined with cognitive emotional intelligence) can make navigating differences easier.

In a global world, where the lingua franca is English and everyone can see what you Tweet, post, message or blog, cultural competence (not necessarily sensitivity) becomes even more critical to getting everybody on board.

The hard work now is not only uniting the twelve team members at your table, but also uniting the distributed teams working across the globe–and doing it with a semblance of understanding.

-Peace Be With You All-

Going to Work Angry

Anger and stress are natural reactions to external and internal stimuli. However, it is unfortunate that many of us go to work angry.

Do we do this because we think that we’re entitled to a good time?
Do we do this because we think that we’re going to be able to negotiate a better deal?
Do we do this because we think that we’re going to get a better result on a different day?

Anger–just like its kissing cousin revenge–poisons the heart, both physically and emotionally.

But, we can’t seem to get out of our own way can we?

We are so wrapped up in our own stimulus responses that we can’t see a way out, and by the time that we are ready to be done–and we are emotionally exhausted–it’s too late.

-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/