HIT Piece 9.15.2015

It’s always interesting to watch people’s faces when I talk about exploring the efficacy of attaching market value to emotional interactions.

At first they are confused, as if I’m talking about emotional intelligence. Sometimes, if they get it right off the bat, they are downright hostile. Occasionally, the person will go past both confusion and/or hostility to the question of “How are you going to do that?”

It’s amazing to me how successful the Industrial Revolution was at convincing people of three ideas that are immediately are exposed as false when I begin talking about this area:

The emotional content of work based relationships is meaningless and not worth considering.

The only energy that matters is the energy put behind the process of producing either what we can see, touch, taste or feel (a product) or what we can conceptualize and turn into a product (a service) and everything else is a scam.

The work that people do inside of families, homes, and communities really doesn’t matter, because we can’t quantify it, measure it, or slap a KPI on it, and so it’s worthy of being ignored, dismissed or devalued.

The mechanical/technological process of determining, developing and executing compensation for the market value of emotional interactions, is on humanity’s horizon, even as we speak. Overcoming the fear, resistance and hostility to the material fact of this, will be the true work of nonprofits, charities, and other organizations for the next couple of hundred years.

-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/

[Opinion] On 9/11

14 years ago today, out of a sunny blue sky, two planes hit the towers at the World Trade Center.

Since then, the United States has fought two wars—Iraq and Afghanistan—and, as of this writing, a third war might be ramping up to start against Syria.

When an event of the magnitude of 9/11 happens, the typical, talking head tendency is to wax poetic about “what ifs,” “might have beens,” and to mourn the victims while also demanding endless cycles of vengeance.

What tends not to happen is the asking of different questions about the event, or the placing of the event in a geopolitical and historical context.

We in the United States tend not to stop and consider the nature of events that happen to us context, because our nation, for good or for ill, consists of the multi-generational descendants of immigrant populations that had a strong desire to exist outside of history, politics and the past—and to escape those ties that bind by coming to these shores.

But, as a conflict engagement consultant, I believe in two things:

Sometimes war—or conflict—is the answer. It just depends upon what the question is that has been asked.As for the violence and bloodshed that war produces, along with the political, cultural, historical, emotional, psychological and spiritual disruptions, well violence is never inherent to conflict, though managing disruptions is key to navigating toward successful resolutions.
The sins of the past revisit us over and over again in the future until we figure out new ways to resolve them. The 16^th, 17^th and 18^thcentury pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial sins of the British and French Empires toward the Ottoman, African and East Asian Empires, have yet to all shake out and everything that has happened in the first 14 years of the new Millennium is proof of that.

Let us honor the dead, keep consideration of the living and work toward positing more questions that can be answered with peaceful conflict instead of the violent kind.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 09.08.2015

Whenever I get together with people in a social setting, they ask, “What do you do for a living?”

And I tell them.

Their very next response, depending upon their educational background, is “Oh yeah, I took some organizational development classes when I was in school. They were the best classes I took.”

We talk for a few minutes more about how what I do (engaging with conflict) helps organizations become better at what they do (whatever that may be) and then they wander off.

Or I do.

If organizational development classes are some of the best classes offered through MBA (or other business programs), why are so many individuals within organizations still resolving conflicts poorly?

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 09.01.2015

The drumbeat always starts after August vacation in the month of September, at the beginning of the fourth fiscal quarter of the year.

“If you had worked harder, you wouldn’t be here.”

“If you had planned better, this wouldn’t be so bad.”

“If you had been better with ‘this’ client or ‘that’ client, you would have the call back now.”

“If you had written faster, or better, or with more emotional laceration, then you’d have more followers, clicks, attention, trust, by now.”

It’s the drumbeat of failure. It’s the drumbeat of fear. It’s the drumbeat that leaves me wanting to curl up in a corner and not really do anything for the rest of the day, the week the month, the year.

Speaking and believing in life, success (whatever that means) and moving forward, inexorably, is the key to overcoming all of this. But the drumbeat doesn’t care. The drumbeat wants me to dance, with the steps of anxiousness, fear, and trying to predict a future that I can’t possibly know.

This isn’t about business, or money, or security.

The drumbeat is always about fear, surrender, and playing defense.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 08.25.2015

I am a live streaming video fan in general and a Meerkat partisan in particular.

You probably haven’t heard of the mobile application Meerkat, though its two more popular cousins, Blab.im and Periscope.tv are getting a lot of attention from tech bloggers and online magazines. The Meerkat app “blew up” at SXSW this year because of some shenanigans with the Twitter API, which you can read about here[link]. Part of this is because live streaming video is popular right now as a way to immediately connect with public events and personalities. The other part of this is because live streaming video is the next step in the continuing disassembling of television as a content delivery mechanism.

I like the Meerkat app for many, many reasons. The top two are:

The app integrates seamlessly with Twitter and you can publicize your Meerkat streams to your Twitter followers to grow your audience on two platforms.
The app also allows you to invite others onto your stream to either “host” a show with your viewers or to be interviewed by the host of the “show.”

Now, if you are a peacebuilder in any of the conflict management spaces—from facilitation to coaching to mediation to negotiation—you can probably already see the benefits of live streaming video to grow your business practice, develop a niche following and to grow your brand.

Here are a few thoughts I have around this new intersection between peacebuilders, marketing and technology:

Live streaming a mediation or coaching session to your Twitter/Facebook followers and fans might not be the best way to ensure client confidentiality and build trust, but you might have some clients who would be willing to have their lives placed on view for you to showcase what you do in real time. This would work particularly well if those clients are connected to you as a peacebuilder online.

Live streaming samples of you working (i.e. “This is what a session looks like,” “This is me explaining my philosophy and approach to peace,” etc., etc.) would be a way to immediately get feedback from potential clients and customers around tone, approach and other areas, rather than the one sided bubble of blog writing. There’s already a person on Meerkat who streams his Tai Chi sessions and talks to followers as he’s performing.

Live streaming to build a brand presence requires maintaining the same habits that you have to in order to blog daily: Show up on schedule, on time and engage effectively. This is easier (and harder) with live video than with the more controlled spaces of Youtube, Vine, SnapChat video or any other service that allows you to edit your presentation before uploading the content. With live streaming, it happens as it happens. However, this can be a way to schedule time with another peacebuilder and build an “Oprah” type show via Meerkat that goes on the air everyday and builds a sense of consistency and relationship with viewers.

These are just three ideas I have after messing around with the Meerkat app and researching live streaming video for the last few months. I am sure that some enterprising and entrepreneurial peacebuilder will use this platform (or Blab or Periscope) to begin to explore the possibilities of live streaming for peace.

If not, maybe I’ll host my own show on Meerkat….

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 08.18.2015 – #outrage

There’s an awful lot of fake outrage out there.

In the parlance of political writing—whether of the right or the left—the vast majority of what the web based and traditional media decides is worthy of reporting on and what isn’t, is driven by what type of emotional response it can generate from people.

The old catch phrase from the 80’s “If it bleeds, it leads” seems to have transformed in our own micro media saturated day to “If it creates a feeling of outrage in the reader, then it gets clicks.”

It’s not as catchy or as rhythmic, but you get the point.

The fact of the matter is, relevant, interesting, and tough decisions are made every day regarding conflicting desires that impact people in real ways: in their homes, their jobs, their civic and religious lives, and many other realms. These decisions deserve to be reported on via the web. I remember the great promise of content on the web—that it would be factual, long form, considered and consistent—rather than what it has turned out to be—clickbaity trash designed to engender an emotional response in a reader.

I have succumbed to the siren song as well—I am a writer, a content creator, a publisher, a marketer and a consumer. The key question in battling the rise—and spread—of fake outrage, is “What’s my role in perpetuating the problem?”

I’m going to struggle with this for the next year and when I have an answer, I’ll write about it here.

-Peace Be With You All-

[ICYMI] Stories We Tell Ourselves

The stories we tell ourselves about conflicts and our roles in them, tend to have three characteristics in common:

Stories We Tell Ourselves

They tend to be incredibly personal,
They tend to begin with the word “I,”
They tend to primarily be focused on self versus others.

And, with the rate of personal self talk averaging around 300-1000 words per minute, per day, there’s a lot of storytelling going on out there about the world and our place in it.

Is it any wonder that we have such trouble hearing other people’s conflict stories above our own noise?

-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/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

HIT Piece 07.21.2015 – How I’ll Be Spending My Summer Vacation

There are four seasons in the United States.

The second season is the one where not much work gets done. Deals don’t get struck between the months of June and September. People take vacations. Families try to get away.

I’ve heard the same thing happens in Europe.

During the month of August, I am taking a break–a vacation, if you will–as well. I have developed sort of a European approach to running HSCT, however, I am still planning on doing three things every day:

Writing these posts
Thinking deeply
Reading (or completing volumes in various stages of bookmark migration) the following books (click on the title to get the link to check out the book on Amazon):

Clearly, I’ll be busy.

Enjoy your vacation—if you’re taking one—and take some time to read, write, and think deeply.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 08.04.2015 – The Prevent Defense

The prevent defense, used as a response to an opponent, has always been around, from the start of human conflict all the way to today’s social media fueled fires.

The prevent defense is a tactic that relies on being a little ahead—winning either realistically, rhetorically, or in any other way you can think of that human beings think of “being ahead”—and then doing the bare minimum to stay ahead of your erstwhile opponent.

There are two main flaws in the prevent defense, and we see them both play out in sports situations, where the tactic is the most obvious to everybody in the crowd, or politics, where the tactic is the most muddied:

Your erstwhile opponent has the option to not go along with your way of looking at the field of battle, and to be aggressive in pursuing their own outcome, their own “win” if you will.
You have the opportunity to become lazy and apathetic; to coast on your past victory and dominance in a particular space, which breeds hubris, vanity, and ultimately, a loss at the hands of a more aggressive opponent with less to lose.

Why am I talking about the prevent defense?

One of the trends I have noticed increasingly, is the idea out there, that all of the major innovations, discoveries and progressions that would benefit humanity, spirituality and our material world, have already been discovered, plumbed and exploited. And all that’s left is for humanity to wallow in the detritus of exploitation that has been left behind.

The other trend that I’ve noticed is a nostalgia (even I have experienced it, heck, I was watching Firing Line videos on YouTube last night) for a past that seemed more monolithic, more streamlined, and less complicated. This is, of course, a misnomer. The past was as complicated to the people living in it then, as the present is complicated to people living in it now.

The final trend that I’ve noticed is the growing acceptance of mob justice solutions, intimidation tactics, “doxing” of opponents, and other negative “resolutions” that seem easy, but in reality create more complications. With allof these approaches, simplification is honored over understanding, and context is lost in favor of the crowd.

The inundation of noise, information, and knowledge, but not real wisdom, has served only to stratify and create false division, fake outrage, shortened attention spans, a lack of patience and an inability to balance current orthodoxy with long held principles.

Many people, unable to articulate these feelings in words are playing prevent defense, hoping that the inundation won’t come to their door, visit their family, or impact them too much.

But the prevent defense has never really worked, and I for one, am not going to rely on it.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 07.28.2015

With the seemingly overwhelming flood of content, voices, opinions and “takes” in the social media world, there are two common responses to the feeling of being drowned in mediocre content:

Throw up your hands, declare the Internet “dead”, and retire from the space…

Throw more content out there in a never-ending “race to the bottom” for attention, trust and money.

Both choices are false, for me.

Content is a passenger for success, not the driver (or the gas) in the car of any business. The people who are doing the best in the content “game” are those who combine the development of content with the material fact of doing something else (creating, collaborating, consulting) in another area that complements what they do online.

Am I going to develop the next great content management system? Probably not. Am I going to keep workshopping, writing, speaking, collaborating, connecting, and meeting with people off-line, while my online content grows and grows?

Yes.

And that’s the way out of the bind for many people.

-Peace Be With You All-