[Opinion] Ok…So Ad Blocking is Here…

Ok…so ad blocking is here….

From browsers to mobile hardware, the drive is on (whether from the creators of ad blocking software or just from us all talking about it now) to empower consumers of content to block advertising they don’t want to see via software based means. This advertising, small and large web publishers argue, is part of a fundamental principle of mass media, going back at least a century. The principle comes down to a deal, which—like many deals—can be renegotiated and changed to reflect shifting values and principles:

We (web publishers) create content without charging you for the creation of that content, and in exchange you (the content consumer) give us attention and we charge a third party, the advertiser, to put ads in front of, and around, our content.

This same deal drove the development and growth of platforms, such as television, radio and newspapers, and the development and growth of content on those platforms, for the last 100 years.

But, the Internet was supposed to be a different content delivery platform.

Right?

Apparently not.

Now, consumers—instead of just choosing to ignore interruptive ads like they always have (and because measuring audience engagement is difficult (but not impossible) there are more intrusive, interruptive ads, not less)—content consumers are choosing to block everything.

Seth Godin wrote with hope fifteen years ago about permission marketing. Cory Doctorow writes with abandon about the anarchy of the web. But both of those writers and thinkers assume a fundamental point about most content, whether it’s on the internet, on the radio, on television, or in a magazine or newspaper, that must be written down and repeated out loud:

Most content on any platform isn’t good enough, interesting enough, relevant enough or entertaining enough, to act as the glue binding the audience of content consumers to the content creators in a “revenue for value” exchange based relationship.

This is why there are millions and millions of cat and baby videos on Youtube, but only a few breakout “stars.” This is why Vogue magazine (or Burberry on Instagram) will be fine with ¾ of their magazine content (or their social distribution feed) being ad space, but Mother Jones or The National Review might just wither and die with ad blockers. This is the reason there are 152 million blogs on the Internet, publishing 1.3 million pieces of content a day, but no blogger has risen to dominance on the web in 15 years.

Thus advertising.

There are a few ways out of this bind, but before we get to that, the question of “What kind of internet do we want to have?” must be answered. We (and we are including ourselves in this group as a content consumers) have not answered this question in any kind of meaningful way. Content consumers have to be a part of the conversation before the endpoint of plopping and advertisement in front of our eyes is reached. Content consumers (to build trust and get their permission) have to be engaged in the building, creating and disseminating of a product from start to finish—or not at all.

The first way out of this bind is by crowdsourcing content development. There are some sites on the web that do this well; there are many more that do it badly, or not at all. Crowdsourcing journalism, entertainment, and other forms of content may lead to less ad blocking—and higher revenue—rather than more by content consumers who feel emotionally invested in the product.

The second way out of this of this bind is by creating more subscription-based platforms. For subscriptions to work, there must be a consideration (and a careful one at that) by the web publisher about what kind of content is being created. Long tail philosophy should be ruling with brand-based content, but many are still stuck in the 1950’s. By the way, this is the only way that data gathering, analytics and implementation based on the data is useful as a tool for content creators and publishers, as well as the incorporation of micropayments via cryptocurrencies. Don’t believe me? Ok. What’s in your Netflix queue right now? And have you paid for a reSnap recently?

The third way out of this of this bind is by rethinking distribution systems. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Google and Apple are going to war with each other to decide who controls the ad space of the mobile phone screen and the app walled garden. This war has to be fought (I guess) but thinking of these platforms less as content delivery systems, and more as content broadcast systems, would free many creators from the false choice of “Do I or don’t I put an ad in front of my content?” Email and RSS feeds circumvent broadcast systems and go directly to the audience content creators want. This is also the reason that creators on Meerkat and Periscope who are live streaming events (and their lives) are going to have trouble monetizing their content if the platform ever has to respond to the vicissitudes of Wall Street shareholders.

The fourth way out of this bind is by rethinking all the assumptions underpinning the web. The Internet has moved over the last 25 to 30 years, from being a niche communication channel to a worldwide, glorified telecommunications delivery system. What if the Internet shifted from being a global mass bullhorn, to being an individualized, personalized content delivery system? Mobile phone, tablet and app development is pushing the Internet in the direction of this development, but frankly, not far enough. Which is where blockchain technology really comes to the forefront.

The fifth way out of this bind is for content creators to make conscious choices—and stick to them—about how and where to monetize their content with ads. We are not naïve enough to think that advertising will disappear; there were ads broadcasting the services of prostitutes painted on the walls of buildings in Pompeii and Ancient Rome. However, when everyone can publish (but not everyone will publish) everyone has the choice to run a Google ad (or not) in front of specific content, they produce. We run ads in front of The Earbud_U Podcast, but not on the HSCT #Communication Blog, for a reason.

Ad blocking will not be the end of Internet publishing, nor will it serve as the death knell for advertising on the Internet. By defaulting to the opposite of these five alternatives to advertising on the Internet, many content creators will wither away, and die, on the web.

-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] 3 Fundamental Reasons for Escalation

A large part of negative escalation is the insistence on advocating for a perspective, not with courage, but with obstinance.

The moment of truth is revealed when, through such negative escalation, we become trapped in a paradigm of our own making, between the relationship we have with reality through our own perspectives, and the relationship with reality that the other party has.

That dynamic tension—between two different views of what is the reality in a conflict scenario and what is not—drives forward negative escalation. Parties in conflict often throw up their hands and proclaim later on “I had no other choice.”

But this is a statement said so often that it is no longer in the provenance of a lie, but it goes into the area approaching truth. Parties in conflict genuinely believe that they have no choice but to escalate a minor communication issue into something larger for three fundamental reasons:

They feel powerless and impotent in the face of the situation, the other party, or the atmosphere of the conflict.

They want an outcome that they either feel they can’t get, or they feel that they are “owed” but are being blocked in pursuing, or they feel as though their options are limited because of inherent issues they bring to the conflict that have nothing to do with the material nature of whatever is going on.

They are full of the desire to be right as well as possessing the will to make the outcome come to pass that they favor.

So, they escalate negatively.

The way out of this is to dive further into the relationship with the other party in conflict. But many times, we don’t want to…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What’s Underneath All That Risk…

The trouble with most conversation that leads to conflict isn’t that it’s earth shattering or amazing, but that it’s banal and boring.

This is one of the many reason why there will always be more online content consumers than online content creators. It is hard to be interesting to others when you secretly are not that interested in yourself.

This is one of the many reasons why, in the context of conflicts, many participants seek to avoid any type of conversation that could trigger latent, unresolved conflicts; bringing to the surface old issues and never addressed concerns.

Participants, when asked later, will identify their conflict engagement style as being “avoiding” or “accommodating” of the other person, but it’s really a style that is based in the inability to engage in an interesting, high risk conversation. This inability, however, hobbles the potential in participants for learning new skills to manage, engage and resolve the inevitable arrival of the kind of exciting, conflict driven conversations that they seek desperately to avoid.

There are two things to recognize (other than just the banality of many conversations and the ability to avoid) that can help anybody craft a meaningful strategy for talking when the topic is high risk, but the participants are not:

Fear is at the root of avoidance, accommodation and even assertive tactics—At its root, fear of consequences, outcomes we can’t control, the situation, other people, the material facts of the conflict itself, “getting involved” and many other emotional situations, lead to the desire to pursue continuing the status quo. This fear is why a person at work who causes confrontations because they are addicted to the power rush they get from domination behavior, is “allowed” to continue the behavior, while people whisper behind their backs.

Boredom (and the desire for entertainment) is at the root of banality—The corollary to fear is boredom. Boredom happens when a person is surrounded by uninteresting conversations, uninteresting people, or uninteresting situations. The reason for the rise in conflict avoidance tactics as an interpersonal skill set among many individuals is based in the fact that many in-person social interactions are not exactly intellectually stimulating. And when and entertaining (or intellectually stimulating) alternative is offered people will take it. This is not exclusive to the now: there are many artistic representations of people ignoring each other while reading the paper, while crowded around the radio, or while watching the television.

There are arguments to be made for developing resilience, being polite, knowing enough to have a conversation, and being forgiving of people and situations. But when conflicts (particularly around issues that matter) arise, the default is to embrace the banal, continue to be boring, and hope it all blows over.

Such as it ever was…

-Peace Be With You All-

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-

[Opinion] Strategic Escalation

Most of the time, in a conflict management scenario, escalation of any kind is viewed as a net negative.

Most trainings—whether corporate, academic, online or in-person—focus on teaching techniques and tactics that will bring the other party from a less defensive emotional position to a more collaborative emotional position.

These are great tactics if each party is emotionally invested in the process and outcome of the conflict, but what happens when the other party is apathetic at best, and disengaged at worst?

Customer center call representatives, from organizations that can’t outsource that service (i.e. local utility companies, local banks/credit unions, bill/debt collectors, etc.), or retail clerks, tend to be emotionally at either one of those two poles: apathetic, or disengaged. Rarely does a employee call a customer’s house, or interact with a customer at a retail store, in a way that reflects emotional engagement and intrinsic care to potentially escalate (even negatively) if the interaction doesn’t go as planned. And the solution to this issue is not more automation, and less human to human interaction, because escalating with a machine is ineffective, time consuming and pointless.

Strategic escalation is the process of positively escalating the other party to a collaborative emotional position, from a net apathetic one. The skills to do this effectively are at the opposite of the skills we all possess (name-calling, judging, moralizing, blaming, threatening, denial, etc.) that we default too naturally if we believe that an interpersonal interaction isn’t going well—and we feel powerless to make it better.

Escalating an interpersonal interaction toward a positive outcome involves:

Complimenting (“You’re doing a good job…”)
Thanking (“Thank you for the help you gave me today…”)
Calling a person by name (“Cindy, that’s great that you got that for me…”)
Taking responsibility for being wrong (“I took the wrong approach to asking for what I wanted…”)
Using positive feedback (“I’m going to tell your manager what a great experience this was…”)

We must shift the ingrained, Industrial Revolution thinking that has us believing that such interactions are meaningless, irrelevant and unimportant, because increasingly, they are the only kind of interactions that matter.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Antifragile Engagement

The very thing that you can’t predict happening in a conflict scenario has a high likelihood of actually happening in a conflict scenario.

The other party buckles; or doesn’t.

The other party makes concessions; or doesn’t; or makes so few as to be insulting.

The other party bargains in good faith; or doesn’t.

Your responses should not be predicated on what the other party will/won’t do in a negotiation.

That’s a fragile bargaining position.

Your responses should be predicated on what you will/won’t do in a negotiation.

That’s an antifragile bargaining position.

Engagement, in order to be successful, requires a knowledge of the furthest you are able to go, regardless of how far the other party goes in the engagement.

But if you don’t know how far you’ll go, then you’ll just spend your precious time, resources, and energy chasing a party who knows where they’re going, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode #4 – Yvette Durazo

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode #4 – Yvette Durazo, Conflict Engagement Practitioner, Teacher, Ontological Bi-Lingual Coach, Onion Peeler, Fence Destroyer

[powerpress]

Time zones are tricky things to navigate.

First, we’ve gotta do the math in our heads, and figure out how far back or forward a person (or organization) is either behind us, or ahead of us.

Then, we’ve got to write that information down and not forget it. And then we’ve gotta be sure to follow up on the day that we are supposed to talk, interact or do business.

It’s hard enough getting the guy down the street to show up for a meeting, but when we are working with a person or company in another time zone, the barrier of a few hours of difference—the lines and boundaries separating us—can seem insurmountable.

Our guest today is Yvette Durazo and she lives in another time zone. She is also bilingual and she coaches, and asks questions in two languages.

We talked about lines and boundaries on this episode of Earbud_U and we forget that lines are powerful. They demarcate. They separate. They serve to—as my mother would say—fences that make good neighbors.

But, our world is in the process of changing, right?

Boundaries and lines, time zones and fences don’t matter much anymore when I can reach out and Skype with another person half a world away.

Or, maybe they do.

Maybe lines and demarcation matter now more than ever.

Maybe there is comfort in separating and being alone. The rise of mindfulness practices, meditation for executives and the idea traversing it’s way around Twitter of building tiny houses, are testament to the fact that human beings are feeling rushed, crowded, jostled and overwhelmed.

Yvette lives in San Diego and whenever I visit New York City (or think about traveling or living in a large metropolitan area); I often flash back to the crowded, dirty settings of films like Soylent Green or BladeRunner.

Have we come much further than those dystopian future fantasies would suggest?

I don’t know. But maybe Yvette does.

Connect with Yvette in all the ways that you can below:

Google + Profile: https://plus.google.com/+YvetteDurazo/posts

Blog: http://www.unitiveconsulting.com/#!blog/cp6k

Website: http://www.unitiveconsulting.com/

Other Ways to Hear Yvette’s Voice:

Conflict Engagement Specialists Show: http://www.conflictengagementspecialists.com/blog/bilingual-workplace-mediation-and-coaching-with-yvette-durazo-unitive-consulting-conflict-management-mediation-and-coaching/
Impact for Coaches: http://impactforcoaches.org/coaches/yvette-durazo/
Sales Leadership Alliance: http://www.salesleadershipsd.com/contact-us/meet-our-members/yvette-durazo/
UC San Diego Profile: http://crg-stemm.ucsd.edu/affiliates/industry/durazo.html

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/conflictmanagment

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/yvette-durazo-ma-acc/4/564/b07

[Advice] Our Children

What we don’t teach our children in school for eight hours a day would be classified as child abuse, if we actually believed that the nature of the world of work has changed for adults.

But, we don’t.

The world of work is a place where adults are thrown together with other adults we didn’t choose to be with, with whom we have little in common, and must be “nice” to (meaning non-confrontational, but not too nice) in order to “get tasks done.”

School prepares our children for this, disappearing work world. The world of the white-collar office or even the disappearing, blue-collar factory. School tells our children to sit in desks for 8 hours a day, while an adult stands in front of them, lecturing every hour, on the hour.

No naps. No crackers. No grape juice. Not even in kindergarten anymore.

Governments get involved in schooling because people in power (politicians, political consultants, et.al) want nice compliant voters, workers and adults.

Parents send their children to school because that’s the only way to “get opportunities” out of an adult life that seems more and more volatile, or because of the threat of jailing.

Society overall demands schooling (and the ways we currently school children are a product of the Industrial Revolution, John Dewey, Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor—among many others) if no other reason than some adults would rather not see children “running around town” questioning the carefully constructed adult worlds.

Seems like an environment ripe for bullying, stress, mismanagement, organizational conflict, and avoidance of outcomes.

There are some ways out of this:

Teach to individuals, not groups.

The group lecture doesn’t work without individual engagement, even for well-trained adults. There’s a reason Greek philosophers taught outside by asking and answering questions, taught walking around, and were constantly considered to be “corrupting the morals of the youth” of Ancient Greece. If Socrates could do it with 15 kids under an olive tree (or walking through a marketplace), so can the post-modern, 21^st century educator with all the technology that we have.

Teach principles, not values.

Here’s a principle: “Choose to be good to one another and learn how to get along with people you don’t like, and who don’t like you.” Here’s a value: “Let’s not bully each other because it hurts the other person’s feelings and it’s wrong.” Children are incredibly gifted at sensing the adult hypocrisy that lies dormant behind adults employing the language of principles to hide other motives that are sometimes value driven, and sometimes not.

Teach emotional intelligence, principles and individuals from ages 5 through 12, teach skills, abilities and life options from ages 12 through 17, then let children decide to go to college, or not with their families.

At a practical level, the current formation of primary schooling in this country is broken, no matter whether the governing policy is Common Core, No Child Left Behind or even Midnight Basketball (remember that from the 90’s). This is because the next world that our children face is post-industrial, requiring the ability to dance with fear, fail with grace and be courageous without shame (which children need reinforced between 5 and 12) and requiring people to be really skilled immediately, regardless of credentialing (what children need reinforced between 12 and 17).

Adults (who have children and vote and who don’t have children and don’t vote) need to change our story of why we send our kids to school, and change the assumptions and expectations that we have around learning and the world of work, before anything will change in the school system itself.

Until that happens, we will raise, and nominally educate, generations of people, who will be released into adulthood, with little understanding of what is happening to them in their working lives, why it is happening, and how to overcome it.

Which is a recipe for increasing societal conflict, not decreasing.

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-

[Opinion] A Modern History For Labor Day II

There’s a lot of political commentary floating around about the perils of income inequality.

This issue—which can lead to conflicts—is mask for a much larger, more pervasive, and more pernicious kind of inequality though. And this conversation masks discussing the core question, buried deep inside the second type of inequality.

Here’s the question that a conversation around income inequality can‘t touch: Why do some people become “successful” (whatever that means) and other people don’t (whatever that means)?

Labor Day is a day to focus around outcomes and inputs:

Labor is an input. Work is an outcome.
Effort is an input. “Success” is an outcome.
Childhood is an input. Adulthood is an outcome.
Actions are inputs. Consequences are outcomes.

Conflicts come about when there is an avoidance, an accommodation or an attack as an outcome related directly to deeply held perceptions about the nature, range and efficacy of a particular consequence, for a particular action.

Different people respond in a random variety of ways to inputs and outcomes, consequences and conflicts.

Trying to focus on equalizing responses—and thus removing the risk of conflicts related to differing outcomes—is an exercise best left to academics, politicians and political commentators on the news.

The celebration on this day should be about how successful and persuasive efforts have been (inputs) to create different, and materially better, outcomes, rather than continuing to circle the room, searching in vain for better outcomes.

-Peace Be With You All-