I know it’s January 5 already, a bit late to share a prayer for 2012, but I really loved this one and I have it printed out and hanging in my home office. My friend Lindy sent it to me and I absolutely loved it and wanted to share it with you…
All posts tagged change
Some Things I’ve Learned About Leading Change
We live in a changing world.
Things are changing right before our very eyes and what was on the bleeding edge moments ago is now almost obsolete. We live in an instant society and culture, which brings tremendous challenges and opportunities to the Church. We have an unchanging message but the methods used to communicate it have continually adapted. From burning bushes and writing on the wall, to Baalam’s donkey and an audible voice complete with a dove descending from Heaven, God has chosen a wide array of mechanisms to communicate with men. In more modern times the Church has used stained glass, print, media and even flannel graph [that's how I was taught as a child] to communicate the Gospel.
The game has changed significantly in the last few years and what worked before isn’t working anymore.
We have a tremendous challenge as communications leaders to leverage what’s working now to communicate and engage with our congregations and communities. And, in so doing, we bring up a word that some churches have a hard time dealing with: CHANGE.
While churches get that change needs to happen in people’s lives they are oftentimes a bit resistant to the word when it comes to their methods and ways of doing things.
As communications leaders, who tend to be ahead of the curve on what’s happening, change usually comes from our end and knowing how to lead change is an indispensable art in leading communications. Over the last 10 years I’ve led both churches I’ve worked for through some significant changes in the ways we communicate and here’s a few things I’ve learned about change:
Earn Trust First
Before you can effectively lead change you need to earn trust. When I started on staff at Park I had a shortlist of things I wanted to change: the logo, website, bulletin, email, etc. However, if I would have jumped right in and started making change it would have caused some ripples. So, instead, for the first nine months I was on staff I took time to learn the culture of the staff and church, investing in relationships and getting to know people. During that time I maintained what was already in place and only changing things that absolutely needed to be changed. By taking that time to earn trust when I did start rolling out new ideas for how we were communicating I wasn’t “Tim the new guy,” I was “Tim who is my friend.” By earning trust I earned permission to begin bringing change.
You Aren’t a Smart as You Think
Just because you “get” social media, blog, are addicted to twitter, read Seth Godin and have an iPhone doesn’t make you an expert. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself and think you know more than you really do, and all too often we can come across with a “know-it-all” kind of attitude. Don’t be like that. Realize that while you may be on the fast track to knowing all there is to know about what’s hot right now that there’s still a lot you don’t know. We need to always be in a posture of learning and not take ourselves too seriously.
Don’t Assume and Don’t Expect
You know what people say about assuming, right? Don’t assume that people will instantly understand or get what you are trying to sell. Realize that in the chaotic and ever-changing world that we live in that people are still catching up. Don’t assume people know and don’t expect them to understand why certain changes need to be made.
Be a Teacher, Not an Expert
Teachers help people understand a concept or idea. Experts often talk in lofty themes that only insiders understand. Choose to be a teacher. Teach people along the road of leading change. Explain to them in words and terms they understand why change needs to happen. Whenever people ask me why social media matters I always point to the Social Media Revolution video. That video, in under 4 minutes, explains what social media is and why it’s important in ways people can easily understand. Save yourself some breath and energy and use that! 
Remember people have different ways of learning, so be adaptable and have some empathy!
Show People Change
It can be hard to get people to agree to buy into something they can’t actually see. Instead of presenting a lofty idea of what is possible give people a picture of what change could look like. When I sold the idea of a monthly bulletin to the team at Park I made a prototype for them to see, touch, and take with them. Instead of saying, “we are going to kill our weekly bulletin and do a monthly,” and leaving them hanging, I was able to show them what the change would look like if it were implemented. They liked it and the rest is history.
Recently, my friend Mike at Calvary Chapel in Ft Lauderdale led the staff at his church through the change of going from a weekly to a monthly bulletin and created a webpage to explain the change and included multiple ways of explaining it… short form, long form and with a video. Brilliant!
Showing people what the end result is will help them make the decision to embark on the journey much, much easier.
Remind People that God is always Doing a New Thing
Whenever change is introduced in the church setting we naturally hear the response, “well that’s the way we’ve always done it.” I don’t know how or why it happened but a lot of churches have made an idol out of the way they do things. We’ve put the method over the message and get more upset over the method changing than the fact that the message isn’t being heard clearly. [I'll get off my soapbox on that one.] In these situations it may be a good time to conjure up some verses where the Bible clearly shows and says that God is always doing something new…
2 Corinthians 5:17
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new
Isaiah 43:18-19
Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.Ezekiel 36:25-27
And I will give you a new heart with new and right desires, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony heart of sin and give you a new, obedient heart. And I will put my Spirit in you so you will obey my laws and do whatever I command.
- Philippians 3:13-14
No, dear brothers and sisters, I am still not all I should be, but I am focusing all my energies on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us up to heaven.
- Ecclesiastes 3:11
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
- Lamentations 3:22-24
The unfailing love of the LORD never ends! By his mercies we have been kept from complete destruction. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each day. I say to myself, “The LORD is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”
Remain Adaptable
One of the hardest parts of leading change is the fact that changing things are always changing. No one would have guessed about six years ago that anything would ever top MySpace. Well, today we have Facebook. Things are changing rapidly today and one of the challenges we face is that we always need to remain adaptable and willing to change when we need to. There have been many ideas or changes we’ve pursued in the way we communicate at Park over the past few years that worked for a season but eventually needed to be changed or phased out. Part of leading effective change is knowing when to pull to the plug and being willing to adapt.
Change Starts with You
Remember that change always starts with you. Change matters and God has placed you where you are to make it happen. When you consider what’s at stake it makes the battles and challenges you face making change happen worthwhile. Just remember to stay humble, pray for wisdom, and ask God to guide you as you take what you are passionate about and bring it to bear in the life of your Church. Your ideas matter… you can do it!
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
A friend shared this link with me this morning from designer Bruce Mau… all I can say is WOW.
If you are a creative, designer, or anyone who tries to be, this is worth the read.
Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations. Collectively, they are how (they) approach every project.
- Allow events to change you.You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
- Forget about good.Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.
- Process is more important than outcome.When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
- Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
- Go deep.The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
- Capture accidents.The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
- Study.A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
- Drift.Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
- Begin anywhere.John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
- Everyone is a leader.Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
- Harvest ideas.Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
- Keep moving.The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
- Slow down.Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
- Don’t be cool.Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
- Ask stupid questions.Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
- Collaborate.The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
- ____________________.Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
- Stay up late.Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.
- Work the metaphor.Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
- Be careful to take risks.Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
- Repeat yourself.If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
- Make your own tools.Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
- Stand on someone’s shoulders.You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
- Avoid software.The problem with software is that everyone has it.
- Don’t clean your desk.You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
- Don’t enter awards competitions.Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
- Read only left-hand pages.Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”
- Make new words.Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
- Think with your mind.Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
- Organization = Liberty.Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’
- Don’t borrow money.Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
- Listen carefully.Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
- Take field trips.The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
- Make mistakes faster.This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
- Imitate.Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
- Scat.When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.
- Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
- Explore the other edge.Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
- Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
- Avoid fields.Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
- Laugh.People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
- Remember.Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
- Power to the people.Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth by Bruce Mau is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Switch
Dan Heath is an insightful and engaging communicator, widely recognized business consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and is co-founder of Thinkwell, a publisher of innovative textbooks.
Chip Heath is an author, consultant, speaker, and popular professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Management. His unique research on what makes ideas succeed has been featured in a wide range of popular media programs and publications.
- Switch is all about how to change when change is tough.
- Think about something about you or your organization that needs to change.
- People’s first knee-jerk reaction to change is the idea that people don’t like change.
- If your goal in life is to minimize the amount of change you experience, you’ve made a terrible mistake!
- There’s certain kind of changes that are big (marriage, children, etc) that come effortlessly; but there’s other changes that are excruciating.
- Sometimes the smallest things are the most difficult to change.
An Elephant and A Rider
- Change is filled with conflict.
- Part of wants to save for retirement; the other part wants to spend.
- There’s a battle in any circumstance of change.
- Part of us sees the need for change, the other part of us resists change.
- There’s two parts to our brain: the thinking side and the side that actually does the work.
- The rider can think of where we need to go, but the elephant doesn’t want to move.
- Part of change is aligning the goal of the rider with the will of the elephant.
- Emotional appeal triggers change.
- Reach past intellectual arguments and tap into something that motivates for the long-haul.
From a ministry-perspective… you have 9 major ministries… 2 are working well, 5 are marginal, and 2 are failing miserably… what would you do?
- Ignore the bottom 2; brush past the working 5 and focus on the main 2.
- In a time of change, there’s a lot that’s not working… you’ve got to find what’s working, find the bright spots.
- Bright spots prove success is possible.
- You’ve got to study and clone bright spots.
- There’s a new type of therapy that is focused on bright spots instead of negative memories or issues from the past.
- Bright spots prove we are capable of solving our problems.
- We tend to focus on areas that are weakest, but we need to focus on where God is really working, the bright spots.
- When dealing with problems, ignore the True But Useless info (TBUs) and focus on learning from what is working and replicating it.
Big problem, small solution.
- Big problems are rarely solved with big solutions.
- Big problems are typically solved by a sequence of small solutions.
- To accomplish meaningful change, you must be convinced that there is a goal worthy of the pain of changing.
Shrink the change.
- By breaking big problems into a series of small solutions, those small success provide motivation.
- If you find yourself demoralized, it’s a sign you haven’t shrunk the change enough.
- Small victory is impetus for great change.
- We often get frustrated and depressed because we ourselves can’t change and we can’t get people to move.
The Valley of Insight
- When IDEO starts a new project, the team leader goes to a whiteboard and draws a “U-shaped” curve… you’ll start on a “high” called hope and you’ll end on a “high” called confidence. In between there will be a “dip” of insight.
- Insight won’t come as quickly as we want it to come.
- We have to struggle through it, because struggle leads to confidence.
- We can equate the valley of insight to hell.
- How to people interpret hard times?
A Growth Mindset + Failure
- People with a “growth mindset” view life through the lens that they can get better, with work.
- A “growth mindset” has a tolerance for failure.
- Built-in to the “growth mindset” is a tolerance for failure.
- We often equate failing to missing God.
- Failure is a necessity in a time of change.
- If you are going to have a growth mindset, you have to pursue to the point of failure.
- Failure is an early warning sign of success.
- Some people need to be empowered to fail!
We might not have a person problem, but a situation problem
- When we make assumptions about people, we attribute things to them without questioning their situations.
- The Fundamental Attribution Error – we look at people but we don’t look at their situations.
- We need to think broadly about people’s situations.
- Good leaders have the gift of seeing people’s situations.
- Sculpting the path is part of creating change.
When change occurs, there’s usually a predictable pattern.
- What’s effective is a deep emotional appeal.
- The reason we get married and have children is because there’s something deep and emotional we experience.
- Think of all the things society does to shape the path.
- We need reverse engineer successful changes when facing new ones in front of us.
If there’s something you’re facing, God will help you overcome what you see as a challenge.
The “dip” is a place to gain insight.
