There is no doubt that Craft Brewing Business is growing as an industry. For beer lovers, this is a great time to love beer. For brewers, this is a great time to brew beer. For investors, this is a great time to fund breweries. It seems there is a lot of "win" to go around.Unfortunately, tension grows between all three. Craft beer lovers (or geeks, like myself) embrace the ethos, as it were, of the craft beer industry while enjoying the suds. This ethos is difficult to define, but its salience remains strong among this group. Brewers now have the option, opportunity and a willing audience to try new recipes or tweak old ones. Creativity remains a strong factor in brewers' motivation. Investors see flocks of people rushing to local breweries' taprooms to fork over money for beer. The demand is super high, so the supply must increase.Here is the dilemma: Precision, time, money, supply, demand, quality, quantity and profit do not play well together as separate factors. They are not parts of the same pie; they are the pie. A baker does not dump flour, sugar, water, eggs and butter into a pan and place that pan in an oven and expect a cake to appear. Ingredients must be blended together correctly to achieve success.Same with craft beer. There must be a careful blend of brewing, investment and patronage to produce and sustain a healthy industry. This means that each aspect ought to understand the others, communicate openly and regularly, and give and receive feedback with civility and encouragement. Of course, this is not as easy as baking a cake...or a pie...but to be sustainable, difficult tasks need successful undertaking to lead to optimal completion.This blending is not easy. People are unique and have unique life experiences that may affect this blending process, which involves disagreement, dispute, communication, perceptions and learning. We do not look forward to such aspects of this blending.We all felt anxiety with that first phone call to a potential date, or before meeting that date's parents. A salesperson's first cold call ripples with anxiety. So, too, does public speaking for most people. Why? After all we are just talking to fellow humans. Yet, humans are a funny lot, which makes the above communication and interaction fragile, complicated and tense.This is a delicate balance of brewer, investor and consumer must be maintained, or at least pursued, to keep a craft brewery a profitable, creative and enjoyable business. Tipping the scale one way will see the other aspects reeling off the other end. A brewery without investment certainly faces tough times. An investor without product most likely faces taking a loss. A beer geek without beer just might dry up and blow away. To be sure, this brewing business is chock full of relationships that must be maintained. In this respect, people (and their interconnections) are a core ingredient in brewing.There is no shame in asking for assistance with important and complex issues. The shame is not asking.
Six Factors That Can Make Matters Worse
We all face some form of conflict every day. From navigating traffic to deciding what to watch on TV after a long day. Most of these are "flash-pan" conflicts that are usually forgotten in minutes and ostensibly have no bearing on our lives. Unfortunately, conflicts do not exist in a vacuum; many factors can affect our conflicts thereby increasing their affects on us and others. Like a snowball rolling down a mountain gathering more snow, increasing its size and momentum, a conflict can grow with the addition of several small influences until it demands attention.When conflicts arrive to this point, management, resolution, or reconciliation should be sought to prevent further damage. These efforts are reactionary, and as such (ironically) require a conflict for their application. But what about addressing conflict situations before they gather momentum? What are those small influences that engorge a conflict? Let's take a look at six factors that can make matters worse and what their influences can be. In doing so, we can shed some light on how you can take steps to nip conflict escalation in the bud.
First up: Communication ------------------------------------
Six Factors That Can Make Matters Worse: Communication
First and foremost is Communication. This may seem obvious, but the devil lay in the details. Communication is more than a relay of information. Many things impact communication:
- Choice of words
- Volume
- Proximity
- Sarcasm
- Language, culture, nationality, etc
- Medium (letter, email, in person, etc)
- External noises
- Social media (facebook, twitter, reddit, etc)
- Body language
- Relationship with other party
- and Listening (more specifically, Active Listening)
Active Listening signals that the listener is actually listening. Rephrasing is a method of active listening and is much more effective than saying, "I'm listening". Most, if not all, conflicts can be attributed to some degree of communication issues. The basic problem is that we automatically assume we understand what the other is saying, why they are saying it, and what it all means. With the speed of communication these days we spend less time listening and, therefore, do not fully understand the information relayed…but we think we do.Communication has its own importance, but it also extends to the next influence on conflicts: Trust
Six Factors That Can Make Matters Worse: Emotion
Emotion is the known-unknown influence. We know emotions are always involved in conflict. Just which emotions, and how strong they are, is difficult to actually calculate. This is where communication and trust can help. When emotions are involved, they can override the controls that gauge communication and trust. Open communication and strong trust help manage emotions and understand where they originate, as well as not letting them escalate the conflict further.Emotions can be confusing. Actions are different from emotions, but they can look the same. Venting, a valuable human technique, can be conflated with focused anger. Silence is sometimes seen as acceptance or indifference. And so on. The only way to understand which actions are emotional, and which emotions are present is to talk about them, which requires trust and communication.Next up: Relationship -----------------