[Contributor] The Use of Time

Contributor – Alexander Gault
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

Time in this age is considered a resource, like money or water.

Whether that’s an accurate description of time is unimportant, because that’s how it’s treated. To that end, just as we develop water-saving technologies, we have also been developing time-saving technologies, or so they have been marketed.

Does the technology of today actually save us time, overall?

It isn’t a question that can be answered with a simple yes or no, unfortunately.

It may seem that now, it’s so much faster to get a message to someone than 50 years ago, so much faster to get information, products, entertainment. But on the opposite side of that, we make up for these expedited services by using more of them. For example, when the television was first sold on the market, people claimed that it wouldn’t take off because nobody had the time to sit and stare at a screen. Lo and behold, the television was the most used method of entertainment in the western world for much of the 20^th century, and the beginning of the 21^st.

Technology, as it innovates and provides us with more services, prompts us to use those services. That’s to be expected.

But what most people don’t expect is that just as those services offer themselves for our use, we in a way offer ourselves for their use. Instead of allowing the expedited systems to save us time, and applying that extra time to other ventures, we instead use the time those services saved us for more of that service.

This can clearly be seen in services like Netflix.

It was fairly uncommon in earlier days to television entertainment to sit and watch a full day of a series. If you did watch multiples of a series, it was on days when a marathon was being aired, and even then you likely didn’t stay for the full marathon. Now, it’s very common to “binge-watch” a television series on Netflix, watching many episodes with minimal breaks in between them. This, because Netflix is on demand, can go on for days at a time, whenever the viewer wishes to watch something. In this way, innovation has caused us to devote more time to the service that’s been innovated.

This can be seen in many aspects of modern life.

In the workplace, people tend to bring their work home more often than before, as it’s as simple as bringing a laptop, or even more simply, a flash drive, with them. Instead of doing more work at work with these technologies, and keeping it all there, people do a lot in the workplace and a lot at home. In the earlier days of computing, it was almost impossible to bring work home, as most computerized industries were worked by people without computers at home, and even if they did it was unlikely they had the ability to bring their documents and programs with them. This meant that, for the most part, when someone came home from work, they didn’t spend any time on it that they normally would have spent with their families.

Its irrefutable that technology has come a long way from the punch-card computers and cathode-ray televisions of the early to mid 20^th century. Much of these technologies are now advertised as time saving, and in a certain way they are. However, how we use them hasn’t changed how much time we spend on the things they streamline, but rather how much of that action we do in the same amount of time. This has definitely made the workforce more effective, but is it healthy for them?

Alexander Gault-Plate is an aspiring journalist and writer, currently in the 12^th grade. He has worked with his school’s newspapers and maintained a blog for his previous school. In the future, he hopes to write for a new-media news company.

You can follow Alexander on Twitter here https://twitter.com/AlexanderBGault

[Advice] KPIs for Conflict Resolution Skills Training

We talked about KPI’s (key performance indicators) for New Years’ Resolutions toward the end of 2013.

It was pointed out to us at a workshop recently that, while our content was compelling and valuable, there seemed to be no KPI’s or metrics to indicate to the organization (or any organization that would hire us) that our training had any long-term value.

Good point.

As a result, we went back and though about our recent posts on CRaaS (here and here) and how to integrate conflict resolution skills training into the workplace, and came up with some relevant KPI’s and metrics.

Follow along with us:

The primary KPI for conflict resolution training is to measure changes in levels engagement at the supervisory/management level. This can primarily be accomplished through having reports and higher-ups engage in 360 degree evaluations with special emphasis on conversations with impacted employees, with a particular focus on quality, frequency and type.
The second way to measure performance improvement at the entry and mid-level positions, is by tracking reductions in registered complaints and concerns, reductions in reported and perceived conflicts and tracking reductions in sick day/vacation day usage by entry level employees, interns and others who are front facing but rarely receive training or mentorship.
Finally, measuring increases in productivity is hard. However, increased customer engagement, overall employee satisfaction and measuring employee retention, goes a long way toward measuring the efficacy of conflict resolution skills training in your organization.

Of course, if you don't want to measure in these three areas, you could always track reductions in lawsuits and litigation efforts by employees, supervisors, managers, customers and others.

[Strategy] Top 4 Outcomes of Emotional Intelligence

In a negotiation, absolute emotional intelligence corrupts certain outcomes.

Outcomes where one party feels as though they were take advantage of
Outcomes where both parties feel as though the negotiation was a waste of time and effort.
Outcomes where one party isn’t sure that the other party dealt with their needs in “good faith”
Outcomes where both parties feel as though they are handcuffed to each other by virtue of the way in which agreement was concluded

Absolute emotion intelligence feels unattainable for many negotiators, because caring about someone else’s motivations and emotions, opens the door to cooperative—rather than coercive—power.

And, let’s admit, coercion sometimes feels good. But isn’t it our higher calling, to put aside what feels good in the moment, to do what is good for the long-term?

Even if the long-term is defined by the parameters of the contract language…

-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] 3 Steps for Reframing Organizations

Many organizations still prefer to litigate—or lobby for legal changes—to protect their standing in the open market.

This includes not just external protections, such as market access, intellectual property protection and copyrights on branding efforts, but also, internal protections around hiring, recruiting, onboarding, and resolving internal employee disputes.

Organizations and businesses still handle conflict as a product rather than as a process. This comes with the perspective of conflict resolution—however they are resolved—as “the way we do things around here.” This leads to thinking of conflict resolution as just another method of gaining a favorable organizational outcome.

However, by focusing on the design of the architecture of their internal conflict resolution systems, organizations can evolve beyond merely protecting their place in the market and move toward innovating with people.

Here are three steps to accomplishing this:

Creating new design architecture requires unbundling every step in the hiring to firing funnel and reexamining all of the assumptions that are baked into your organization, particularly those around the idea of “who gets to work here.”
Developing new design architecture requires dissecting the culture of an organization and determining what the real purposes of the organization are, not just the purposes displayed on the masthead, or for stakeholders.
Embedding a new design architecture for resolving conflicts requires a transforming of organizational thinking around conflict—shifting from thinking of conflict as an unfortunate by product of another process to be resolved as quickly as possible and in the organization’s favor, to thinking of conflicts as a process to be engaged with as a a natural part of evolution, growth and innovation.

Unbundling, dissecting and transforming will take any organization toward building a conflict resolution system as a service working for employees and other stakeholders, rather than a service working against employees and other stakeholders.

-Peace Be With You All-

The One Limitation on Greatness

The one thing that destroys most negotiations is differing assumptions around value, resources and time.

One party may view resources as limited, value as scarce and time as a precious commodity to never be wasted.

The other party may view resources as approaching abundant, time as flexible and thoughts of value may never enter into their mind.

The destruction happens when one party cares little to nothing about attempting to enter the “headspace” of the other party, in order to see things from a different frame of reference.

They may lack patience, empathy, understanding or even the personal willpower to make that cognitive and emotional leap.

This is why there are so few diplomats, business “moguls,” great salespeople and great orators. It’s also why from the boardroom to the living room, life is littered with the corpses of failed negotiations.

The issue is not tactics—which everybody wants more of—but strategies—which require weeks, months and years to get right.

-Peace Be With You All-

Motivation and the Seven Second Attention Span

The well documented decline in the ability to focus has everybody who can focus for more than 7 seconds talking about it for at least the length of a book manuscript—or the length of a blog post.

But, the real estate worth fighting over, for our money, is not focus, but attention.

Focus happens after attention has been attracted. And, with so many forms of noise distracting the masses from messages that may or may not be beneficial for them, attention is at a premium.

But not focus.

Yes, we realize that the immediacy of social media responses and the immediacy of Internet based information has created concern that the human brain is changing—and it is—but the real battle is still not focus.

The reason we believe that the decline in focus is a symptom of the current Social Age, and not the disease, is because the core of attention, intrinsic motivation, has always been—and will always be—a limited resource.

And while we don’t personally believe that resources are limited, we know that society has been arranged to bring into reality the belief that while attention is limited, internal motivation should be limitless.

And yes, we have seen the neuroscience research around attention and focus, as well as the research around Pavlovian operant conditioning, punishment and reward studies and other behavioral studies since the 1950’s.

But, we still hold that as our technology has increased, from the oral tradition to Twitter, there has always been misplaced concern over focus rather than attention.

We really should have a few more books and blog posts about motivation…

-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/