Archive for July, 2011

Kem Meyer :: #Echo11

by Tim Schraeder on 07/29/2011 in Echo 2011 with 1 Comment
  • The art is secondary.
  • It fuels an objective.
  • You are not the destination.
  • Regardless of what we do, we all have to work with people.
  • Even with the right intentions, we can run into roadblocks.
  • This is a continuous process.
  • In the daily grind, we need a simple framework.
  • If a strategy isn’t working with a person, project or department, you need to try a different way.
  • When you have your own personal reboot it won’t be complex.
  • The toughest thing that happens when you have a new idea is having a passion to see it through and waiting for it to catch on with others.
  • People are fearful of change.
  • It’s easy to get frustrated when people don’t “get it.”
  • God has built in our own personal smoke alarm.
  • There’s an underbelly to ministry we don’t talk about.
  • When we get out of sync in life, our reaction can be to give up or quit.
  • Emotion helps inform us that we need to calibrate.
  • You can’t lead change with static.
  • You can’t truly see the other people you are working with if you have static.
  • The more agitated you feel you need to think about how you can reset.
  • The reality is… all of us are under pressure to get things done.
  • We are under pressure to have results.
  • We work under tight timelines.
  • We need a system to stay connected to the needs and beliefs around us.
  • We are the last to know how we are coming across.
  • Take a chill pill.
  • We are all exponentially more effective when we learn from people who think and see differently than we do.
  • It’s not our job to send the right message, it’s our job to release the right response.

Make Space

  • We have too little time.
  • We have too many answers.
  • We have too much self importance.
  • If you have too little time, make some space.
  • A lot of the work we do is insecurity work.
  • When you work on the right things, God makes sure we get it all done.
  • Make space for conversation.
  • Start with what’s hurting most.
  • It’s difficult for departments to share information with each other because we all have projects we are trying to accomplish.
  • Listening can be a disturbing experience.
  • It requires a level of self-awareness and self-criticism that is not easy to endure.
  • We can’t control anyone else but us.
  • It’s more of an attitude than it is a skill.
  • This should empower you.
  • Adopt an attitude of wonder and curiosity vs “how is this going to slow me down?”
  • It doesn’t come from technique but from being genuinely interested in what matters to the other person.
  • It’s not just space on your calendar, it’s space in your heart.
  • When you are making space, it’s a trip… not a destination.
  • It IS a trip!
  • If we are always focused on the outcome we will constantly feel the frustration instead of the win.
  • If we focus on the people over the project, or the process over the event, relationships will gradually increase.
  • Managers do things right. Leaders do the right things. – Warren Bennnis

Man to Man

  • We can get territorial because we are responsible for something.
  • We need to run point.
  • We are highly talented, equipped and resourced… we have passion, calling and a cause.
  • The simple things are what hold us back.
  • We might not look like this guy but we may look like him to others:

  • Take the time to learn about your audience.
  • We are more effective if we do man-to-man vs zone defense.
  • Zone defense protects the turf.
  • Man-to-man allows the team to make the right decisions.
  • Be less concerned about defining the process and more concerned about the right people to be involved in the process.
  • Personal conflict can get in the way.
  • We have to be willing to learn about one another’s worldviews.
  • Learn other people’s vocabulary.
  • Define a common vocabulary.
  • The more we communicate the less we communicate.
  • When all lines of communications are open for input, decision-making becomes paralyzed
  • Build rapport. Develop relationship.
  • Don’t strive for consensus.
  • We should be less concerned about consistency and more concerned about cohesiveness.
  • We all don’t need to tell the whole story, we all need to tell the same story.
  • If you want to maximize the response, minimize the options.
  • Give people one, clear step.
  • Have you ever noticed how we judge ourselves but our intentions and others by their actions?

Do the JFK

  • Ask yourself, “what I can do for the other person instead of what can they do for me?”
  • Think less about what we have to say and more about how it will come across to others.
  • What can we do to free others to do the work they were meant to do?
  • It’s hard to take something away from someone without giving them something back.
  • Are you in love with your process or the people you are serving?
  • Can your job description.
  • Instead of focusing on your task or your talent, focus on what impact will you leave.
  • Condense your end goal to one sentence that answers the question, “At the end of the day, if I do this then I have done my job.”
  • The secret to changing others starts with changing ourselves.
  • If you stop learning you will forget what you already know.

Scott Belsky :: #Echo11

by Tim Schraeder on 07/28/2011 in Echo 2011 with No comments
  • My passion is for the past 5-6 years has been to try to figure out how people in teams are consistently able to make ideas happen again and again.
  • We need to be driven to our work out of our passion.
  • Creativity is a double-edged sword.
  • It gives us great ideas.
  • It also gives us too many great ideas.
  • That makes it hard for any single idea to see the idea.
  • Some ideas should never happen.
  • Even the greatest ideas suffer the against the odds of actually happening.
  • Energy and excitement is high when a new idea strikes.
  • After a few days, life catches up with us.
  • We enter into the doldrums of project management.
  • We want to return to the energy and idea when the idea first struck.
  • We use our creativity to come with a new idea.
  • It’s a repetitious cycle.
  • Thee are are more half-written novels in the world than actual novels.
  • We have to learn to survive the project plateau.

The Creative’s Pitfalls

  1. A Love for Idea Generation.
  2. The Gravitational Force of Operations.
  3. A Lack of Feeling Organized.
  4. A Lack of Accountability.
  5. A Lack of Feedback Exchange.
  6. Disorganized and Isolated Networks.

What Behance Does

  • To help organize the creative word’s work.
  • Created a network of creative professionals by developing a platform for them to share their ideas.
  • The Behance Network is a “LinkedIn” of the creative world.
  • Build a platform for creatives to get more exposure for their work.
  • You can organize the creative world’s work when you have it on the same platform.
  • Action Method is a method they’ve developed to help people make their ideas happen.

Genius is 1% inspirations and 99% perspiration. – Thomas Edison

  • Focus on the 99%.
  • There’s too much discussion of where ideas and creativity come from.
  • Focus on the execution of those ideas.

How Do Some People and Teams Defy the Odds and Make Ideas Happen?

  • Organization & Execution
  • Communal Forces
  • Leadership Capability

Organization

  • We are being inundated with “stuff.”
  • Emails, texts, messages, etc.
  • We spend our time trying to whittle away at the collected inboxes of our lives.
  • We live in an Era of Reactionary Workflow.
  • We react to what’s coming at us instead of being proactive to the work that matters.
  • We can be constantly reacting and never be proactive.
  • We can longer rely on being forced to deep thinking.
  • We need a window of non-stimulation in our day where we aren’t reacting or tuning in.
  • We need to focused on a short list of 2-3 things that are important to us in the long-term.
  • Think about things that are important.
  • Spend energy on staying organized.
  • Organization is the competitive advantage in the creative field.
  • A Formula for Impact: Creativity x Organization = Impact
  • You can have all of the greatest ideas and creativity but if you have no organization around them, you will never have impact.
  • Spend more time organizing around your ideas.
  • Organized teams and companies have a greater impact.
  • Organize with a bias to action.
  • The best systems for organization or made by ourselves.
  • Be proud of what you are developing for yourself.

The Action Method is Just 3 Things:

  1. Action Steps
  2. Backburners
  3. References

Action Steps

  • Leave meetings focused with next steps beginning with verbs.
  • “Call this person…” “Email…”

Backburners

  • Things that could be actionable but aren’t ready yet.

References

  • Notes, attachments, and handouts

Meetings

  • Meetings are extremely expensive.
  • People pull for agenda items to have
  • Meetings are an arbitrary measure of time.
  • We leave without anything actionable.
  • When we have meetings that have no action, should they have been an email instead of a meeting?
  • Have a standing meeting… knees get weak as people commentate instead of content-making.
  • Have a bias towards action.
  • Have a culture of capturing action steps.
  • Take time at the end of the meeting going around asking people what they are going to do next. What are their actionable steps?
  • Ask people, “Did you capture that?”

Backburners

  • Create a backburner ritual.
  • File ideas.
  • Make a ritual of going through your backburner and taking a pen, editing what is actionable or crossed off the list.
  • Something that came up in a meeting 6 months ago could finally be actionable.

Surround Yourself with Progess

  • Show your goals and milestones in a visual way.
  • The ability to come up with an idea is easy to do when you love what you do.
  • The execution is difficult unless you surround yourself with progress.
  • Progress is an impetus for action.

Prioritize Projects Visually

  • Create an energy line focused on how much energy should be allocated for projects.
  • People put too many projects on high or extreme.
  • Focus on what’s almost due not on what you are most excited about.
  • When teams miss deadlines it’s because you disagreed over where a project should be on the energy line.

Optimize to Surpass Your Horizon of Success

  • We are always told to fix what’s not broken.
  • However, to make things happen you have to build on your success.
  • Success has a horizon that’s blinding.
  • We tend to spend a lot of our energy on what’s not working instead of building on what’s already working.

Communal Forces

  • How do you leverage your comunity to find traction for your ideas.

3 Types of People

  • The Dreamers – have a tendency to come up with something new.
  • The Doer – the “Debbie Downer” of the world. Constantly at odds with the dreamer.
  • The Incrementalist – rotates between being a Dreamer and a Doer. They do too many things.

Regardless of who you are, you need people. Ideas don’t happen in isolation. The idea of the lone creative is a myth.

Share Ideas Liberally

  • The benefits of sharing your ideas outweighs the cost.
  • The community provides accountabillity.

Share Ownership of Ideas

  • You have a decision to make about an idea.
  • Do people work with you?
  • Are you empowering others to make decisions?
  • Are you willing to share ownership to engage your team.

Seek Competition

  • Competition is a dirty word.
  • We are all colleagues.
  • The impetus to act on an idea can come from your community in the form of competition.
  • Pace yourself… with other people on your team and people in your community.

Find Your Way to Breakthroughs

  • There is a benefit to fighting.
  • People have strong opinions about how execution should happen.
  • Explore one another’s opinions.
  • Unfortunately, we get heated… we care about the solution.
  • Suddenly, someone will let go of the rope.
  • Apathy hurts our constituents.
  • Fight apathy ruthlessly.
  • Care enough to battle.

Don’t Become Burdened by Consensus

  • What are the sacred extremes?
  • What are the 1 or 2 things that cannot be compromised.
  • Don’t settle for the least common denominator.
  • What will move people?
  • Hold 1 or 2 things dear.

Overcome the Stigma of Self-Marketing

  • Our community needs to be aware of what we’re capable of doing.
  • BUT, we can’t be overly-promoting of who we are and what we are capable of doing.
  • We don’t want to be overlooked.
  • We have to overcome the stigma of self-marketing.
  • Have a respect-based self-marketing strategy.
  • Gain credibility by becoming a curator.
  • Share about things that interest you.
  • Build a following.
  • Whenever you embark on a new project, everyone will already know.
  • Care for the stream that you create for people.

Leadership Capability

  • What great leaders are doing or not doing in the creative world to keep their teams engaged with projects.

Leaders Talk Last

  • Silence the visionary.
  • Buy engagement from your team.
  • People will leave their jobs because they don’t feel fully utilized.
  • They aren’t being asked first about what we should do.
  • We need to listen first.
  • We shouldn’t tell people what we think the plan should be.
  • Engagement leads to involvement in a project through its completion.

Find and empower the “Hot Spots”

  • Your contributions should outlast your stay.
  • Who are the nodes that people look up to in your organization?
  • It’s rarely the senior leader… it’s the assistants.
  • The nodes to be kept and empowered.

Value the Team’s Immune System

  • The human body has an immune system that keeps us healthy.
  • It kills anything new that tries to enter into our body.
  • In a creative team, the doers are the immunes system.
  • The doers kill off everything that is new.
  • They keep us healthy.
  • During a brainstorm, the dreams are empowered and the doers are suppressed.
  • You need dreamers and doers.
  • Great creative teams often fail because their leader is a dreamer.
  • A group of dreamers are intoxicated by ideas and have no sober monitors.

Seek Restraints

  • Failure in most teams centered around the problem of not having a l
  • In the creative community we shun restraints.
  • Restrains are empowering for the creative process.
  • When they aren’t given we need to seek them.

Be the Bureaucracy Breaker

  • The best way to break it is to ask the annoying questions:
  • “Why can’t we try this?”
  • “Who needs to sign off on this?”
  • “Why do we have to wait?”
  • As stewards of ideas, we need to ask our bosses to make decisions.
  • Ask difficult and annoying questions to keep things moving.
  • They pierce with annoying questions.

Push People Into the Intersection

  • Successful people live in the intersection of their Interests, Skills, and Opportunities.
  • How can we make sure we are working in our overlap?
  • How can we push people into working from their overlap?
  • Give people opportunities that match their passions and skills.

Gain Confidence From Doubt

  • The more people doubt you the more you are probably onto something.
  • Society is hypocritical.
  • We shun people before we celebrate them.
  • Gain confidence from being doubted.
  • Nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means.

See Yourself As the Steward of Your Ideas

  • Responsibility > Opportunity
  • Are you a prototypical creative mind?
  • Where does the responsibility lie?
  • See your creativity not as an opportunity but as a responsibility.
  • Make your ideas happen.
  • Embrace the practices that push ideas to fruition.
  • That’s what moves the world forward.
  • Ideas are greater than ourselves.

Bianca Olthoff :: #Echo11

by Tim Schraeder on 07/28/2011 in Echo 2011 with No comments
  • Our identity is forged at an early age.
  • Our identity is either forced or forged.
  • Once we have labeled and categorized ourselves, things change.
  • The labels that define us in high school don’t change after high school, they morph.
  • The Internet allows us to create our own identity.
  • We can reveal whoever we want to be to whoever wants to listen to us.
  • It can thrust us into celebrity literally in the blink of an eye.
  • Our ego needs to be left at the door.
  • Equally, our timidity and insecurities need to be left at the door.
  • Both are devastating.
  • Regardless of where you are from, be YOU.
  • K-I-R … Keep It Real
  • Be honest with who you are.
  • As our artists, our quest plays down into the quest to be known.
  • OUr value isn’t in what other people think of us or in what we create.
  • Twitter is 140 characters of a billion characters that really make up your life.
  • Every single one of us wants to be known.
  • We want to be known for what makes us unique and be accepted regardless of our brokenness.
  • We want to be known, heard, though of and care for.
  • It plays off of our deepest insecurities.
  • For creative types it’s difficult.
  • What we produce is, an essence, a piece of who we are.
  • Our art should reflect who we are.
  • True art not only reveals a story but reveals who we are at our core.
  • The first tweet said, “Inviting coworkers.”
  • Jack Dorsey developed a software tool that plays into all of our insecurities.
  • Social media’s success plays upon on insecurities and deepest fears.
  • We want to mask our loneliness.
  • We put on facades to mask our loneliness… clothing, accessories, hair styles, etc.
  • We can’t throw stones at the institution because we are a part of the institution.
  • The broken pieces of us are what draw us to reach other and draw us to reveal the Gospel message of redemption.
  • Who we are bears mark on who we are and what we do.
  • Art is painful.
  • Art is hard.
  • Art that is vulnerable is beautiful.
  • God is the author and finisher of our faith.
  • We are like clay in the hand of a potter.
  • God was the originator of life.
  • God was the creator of all.
  • God who is a creator of good, true and beautiful cares about the work we are creating.
  • The God, who is Lord over all, gave us free will to choose.
  • Choose to accept or reject the life He’s given us.
  • God didn’t leave His masterpiece on the wall.
  • God interjected Himself into creation through Jesus.
  • We have been called to create and be a manifestation of Christ through what we create.
  • Is what you do injected with soul?
  • If we are made free, it is our obligation to use our gifts and talents to make other people free.
  • What we do has 2 reasons: to free us and to free others.
  • We have to billing to be known.
  • We have to reveal ourself.
  • To be vulnerable, authentic and REAL.
  • If you want to be known you have to be willing to expose yourself.
  • You take good art to great art by infusing it with soul.
  • You cannot be known unless you reveal who you are.
  • What we do should bring freedom.
  • The power of us being real and vulnerable gives other people the power to be real.
  • When we are open we give people the ability to be open back.
  • It is for freedom that we have been set free.
  • We have been created to do good works.
  • We have been given gifts with a creative bent.
  • We have it for a reason.
  • Our identity changes when we encounter the living God. Our art should reflect that.
  • We can sometimes come to places when we don’t think we are good enough.
  • We need to be honest and transparent about who we are: a broken work in progress.
  • Our art should reflect that.
  • Where God has us where we are to be uniquely who we are
  • With this privilege comes responsibility.
  • We are artists creating what God has called us to create.
  • Make yourself known.
  • Allow people to incrementally know you.
  • People won’t be real with us unless we are real with them.
  • We are all in a position of leadership.
  • Be who you is.

Discussion

  • In your art, how do you find you infuse your art  or your work with your identity?
  • Keep your identity intact but manage the broken parts of who you are.
  • I.e. if you are emotional, manage your emotions.
  • The greatest weapon you have is doing what only you can do.
  • Our life is the best Gospel we can preach.
  • Don’t deny who you are.
  • If we can explain it God probably isn’t in it… God works in the impossible.

Andy Crouch :: #Echo11

by Tim Schraeder on 07/28/2011 in Echo 2011 with No comments
  • Geeks are known for their passion for obscure knowledge.
  • Andy opened up signing us the song “Picture in a Frame” by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan
  • What makes works of creativity excellent?
  • What are he ingredients of excellence?
  • One of most extraordinary movies on the idea of creativity is “Ratatouille.”
  • Pixar is the only major studio producing feature films that has a number of Christ followers in positions of executive leadership.
  • This studio consistently produces incredible movies that break all kinds of boundaries.
  • A movie without 20 minutes of dialogue…
  • We need to study what they are doing if we are going to hope to be creative ourselves

The Structure of a Story

  • Every story is driven by a sender that wants to deliver something [the object] to a receiver.
  • The fundamental engine of story is at quest to get the object from the sender to the receiver.
  • The sender sends someone, the subject.
  • The subject is what we traditionally call the protagonist.
  • The sender is more like a quasi, God-like figure. Not always present, but necessary.
  • In Lord of the Rings, the object is the ring, the subject is Frodo, the sender is Gandalf, the receiver is Mt. Doom.
  • In the course of the story, the subject encounters oppositions, so there are two other forces that enter into the story: the helpers and the opponents.
  • Every Pixar movie is asking the question, “What does it mean to be a human?”
  • Our job isn’t to make culture safe for people.
  • Christian music says it’s “Safe for the family.”
  • Great culture is rarely safe for people
  • In every story, Act 1 ends in frustration.
  • In Act 2, the subject becomes the receiver.
  • In Act 3, the situation of the first act comes back, but all of the ingredients are in place for the quest to be fulfilled.
  • Act 3 brings new opposition.
  • Some people only know how to criticize culture.
  • Christians don’t just like culture, we love it so much we hate it.
  • We never show that we love culture.
  • The role of a critic in creativity is to articulate and defend what is new.
  • Gains that are won without opposition are no gains.
  • If you win without an opponent you haven’t actually won.
  • We demand real oppositions from our stories because our life is about real opposition.
  • If you don’t have a credible, real opponent in your story you don’t have a story at all.
  • How often do Christians tell a truncated story that doesn’t do justice to the real opposition in our world and in our own lives?
  • The greatest opposition to creating what we were meant to create comes from inside us.
  • The reason we don’t create what we were meant to create isn’t because of anything outside of us, it’s because of ourselves.
  • Our inner critic can convert from being our opponent to being our helper.
  • To create good work you need an inner critic.
  • The conversion fo the opponent and the happier ending are what make the difference between formulated stories and great stories.
  • Stories always have an enemy and an opponent.
  • There are often enemies that don’t convert.
  • All you can do with an enemy that doesn’t convert is to eliminate them.
  • The opponent begins in opposition but ends as an ally.
  • A happier ending… more happily than you could have ever anticipated.

Story of the Gospel

  • Why is this the structure that we expect?
  • It’s because this is the structure of the cosmos.
  • What is our story?
  • There is a sender, the creator of the world who wishes to deliver something to the receive.
  • God wishes that the world He created will be filled with His image-bearers.
  • That we would be fruitful and multiply.
    God sent His image into the whole world.
  • He send us, humans, His image-bearers.
  • Act 1 ends in frustration because we have an opponent but no helper.
  • The opponent was the voice of opposition.
  • In Act 2, the original subject has to receive something.
  • A new subject enters into the story to deliver something we could not acquire on our own.
  • God sent the Incarnate image of God… Jesus.
  • Jesus delivered to us what we needed to fulfill what we were meant to be.
  • Act 3 ends with a happier ending.
  • If it were a formulaic story, we’d go back to the garden… to the way it should have been.
  • God works differently.
  • In Act 3 of our story, not only are God’s image-bearers restored and filled… there is a new city.
  • This is the story human beings are hungry for because it’s the one true story.
  • Every story has a “Jesus” figure.
  • Otherwise, people won’t be satisfied with them.

Andy ended with Prelude & Figure #1 from Bach

The Ingredients of Excellence

  • A happier ending.
  • Is the culture you are creating giving people a glimpse of something glorious beyond what they would expect?
  • The best culture in the world deosn’t deliver expected resolutions, it takes you beyond the expected and into chaos and noise, that it provides a happier ending.
  • The full catastrophe.
  • The only way to deal with long-term chronic pain is to experience the full catastrophe… to focus on the pain.
  • Most human beings try to avoid the full catastrophe.
  • The human story is dissidence.
  • Great art always acknowledges the full catastrophe.
  • Is what you are creating do justice to the full catastrophe?

Faithfulness to the Form

  • Great works do not break most or all of the rules.
  • Be faithful to the form before you improvise and create.
  • Our creativity should cultivate our world.
  • Until you know the form you cannot create excellence.
  • Innovate in form.
  • Respect form but innovate.
  • God is a creator of order and abundance.
  • In the order of creation, God has given us to the work of filling the world with good things.
  • The greatest works of art eliminate what’s not necessary.
  • Great art calls you to listen.
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