Ministry Innovation Travels on Two Legs: The People-Centric Process of New Ideas

by: Tim Kastelle

0

Tweet

When we talk about things like disruption and radical innovation, and innovation tools and processes, it’s easy to forget that people drive innovation.  But if innovation is a process (and it is), it is surely a people-centric process.

This means that innovative ideas spread from person to person – and even though we have tools now that make this easier, it still mostly happens one person at a time.

I’ve run across a few examples of this recently.  The first is in the book Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.   They talk about “the seminar” – the six-month series of meetings that David Ben-Gurion undertook to try to understand how to prepare for the conflict he viewed as inevitable once Israel was declared in independent state:

He spent days and nights meeting with, probing, and listening to military men up and down the ranks. … Ben-Gurion was keenly aware that the midst of ongoing fighting, and plan for the existential threats that were nearing.

At the end of the seminar, Ben-Gurion wrote of the men’s confidence in their readiness: “We have to undertake difficult work – to uproot from the hearts of men who are close to the matter the belief that they have something.  In fact, they have nothing.  They have good will, they have hidden capacities, but they have to know: to make a shoe one has to study cobbling.”

Senor & Singer go on to describe how Israeli companies use similar approaches to prepare for disruptive innovations in modern times.  In both cases, it is the face-to-face contact that both generates the new ideas and then helps them to spread.

Warwick Absolon told a similar story in an Executive Education innovation course a couple of weeks ago.  He talked about the innovation program that he has been running  for the past three years.  One of the critical components of building that capability is the series of meetings that he held all around their Australia-New Zealand region.  Warwick travelled to all of the main offices, where he held workshops all day long.  In each spot, he told people that meetings would start every hour on the hour, and he would talk about innovation with whoever showed up.

This approach worked.  The face-to-face meetings accomplished several things:

• They demonstrated a much higher level of commitment than you get from a memo, or an intranet announcement.
• Because attendance was purely voluntary, Warwick was able to identify most of the people in the firm with an interest in innovation.  He calls this “assembling my tribe.”
• In face-to-face meetings, people were willing to tell him what was working and what wasn’t.

The main thing that Warwick built through this process was buy-in.

Atul Gawande wrote a great piece in the New Yorker last week on how ideas spread.  Here is what he says about it:

In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.

But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

Innovation is social.  It is people-centric.  Innovation requires a change in behavior, and that is why we need to activate our networks to get new ideas to spread.

In a workshop yesterday I was asked “How can I find out what people want?  It seems like the only way to do that is to talk to them, and that’s so slow.”

It is slow.  But that’s still the best way to do it.  Talk to people, all the time.  That’s how you’ll get new ideas, and it’s how you’ll get them to spread.

Even in our wired world, innovation travels on two legs.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Tim Kastelle

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Build New Habits to Insure You Meet Your Goals

by: Tim Kastelle

0

Tweet

The problem with goals is that most of them are too big, and they take a long time, and that requires work.  That’s also what makes them worthwhile!  But on a day-to-day basis, you need to figure out how to build the habits that will eventually get you to your goals.

Charles Duhigg wrote a great book on how to break bad habits and build better ones – The Power of Habit.  Here is his flow chart for building habits (click on the image to see it full-size):

 

> If your goal is to lose weight, you need to change your eating (input) and exercise (output) habits.

> If your goal is to write a book, you need to change your writing habits.

Austin Kleon wrote a great post on breaking goals down into habits. He says to do something small, every day:

Figure out what your little daily chunk of work is, and every day, no matter what, make sure it gets done.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time for the work?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies. You find it in the cracks between the big stuff—your commute, your lunch break, the few hours after your kids go to bed. You might have to miss an episode of your favorite TV show, you might have to miss an hour of sleep, but you can find the time to work if you look for it.

What I usually recommend: get up early. Get up early and work for a couple hours on the thing you really care about. When you’re done, go about your day…

Do the work every day. Fill the boxes on your calendar. Don’t break the chain.

This approach works pretty well for most of our personal goals.  But what if our goal is to make our organizations more innovative?

That’s a bit trickier.  The main reason is that innovation is a lot more complex.  Complex systems are trickier because they require us to approach our goals indirectly.  This excerpt from John Kay’s terrific book Obliquity outlines the issue:

If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in the other. Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim. The name of this idea? Obliquity.

Obliquity is relevant whenever complex systems evolve in an uncertain environment, and whenever the effect of our actions depends on the ways in which others respond to them.

Innovation is another thing that we need to approach obliquely.  So what habits should we build to help?  Here are some ideas that I’ve run across in the past couple of days:

• Take care of yourself.  Jason Cohen points out that we are happier and more productive when we get enough sleep, exercise, and take time to think.
• Practice divergent thinking. It’s a mistake to jump straight to solutions when we’re trying to innovate.  First, we have to explore a broad range of ideas.  Olaf Kowalik writes about how to use divergent thinking to do this – and this is a key innovation skill.
• Read widely. Jorge Barba makes an important point at the end of his post recommending some innovation books to read:
  One more thing: everything is connected in some way, so read about anything and everything. Not just books that have “innovation” in the title.
  

To innovate, you need the process, but you also need to muddle your way through a bit.  So some of the habits you need to build are oblique – like getting enough sleep.  Others are more direct, like blocking out time for thinking and allocating resources for building your ideas.

The main point is that things that are worth doing take effort over an extended period of time.

You need to build habits that will ensure that you make that effort.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Innovation, Tim Kastelle, habits, ministry innovation

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Rewriting the 10 Myths of Creativity

by: VRcurator

0

Tweet

If we want to be more creative, if we want our organizations to be more innovative, then we have to learn from organizations and individuals who are rewriting the myths of creativity.

David Burkus, professor of management at Oral Roberts University and a researcher on leadership, innovation, and strategy, has conducted studies into how individuals and organizations approach the creative process,

The research by Burkus found ten myths widespread in the modern world relating to creativity and innovation. These are myths in the traditional sense: they’re based on observing something seemingly unexplainable, and then crafting a logically sound (but faulty) explanation. These myths were prevalent almost everywhere Burkus looked—everywhere except in the most innovative companies and people.

The Ten Myths of Creativity

• The Eureka Myth
• The Breed Myth
• The Originality Myth
• The Expert Myth
• The Incentive Myth
• The Lone Creator Myth
• The Brainstorming Myth
• The Cohesive Myth
• The Constraints Myth
• The Mousetrap Myth

The truth is that all new ideas are built from combing older ideas. The novelty comes from the combination or application, not the idea itself.

But many of these myths of creativity are plainly false. They aren’t supported by research or history, and in some cases what Burkus found about creative efforts directly contradicts the myths we choose to believe. Any model or method for creativity based on the mythology will offer little help in making us more creative.

If you want to develop more creative individuals and build more innovative organization, then it’s time to question existing models.

It’s time to rewrite the myths of creativity.

>> Download Rewriting the Ten Myths of Creativity here.

Tags: Creativity, David Burkus, Innovation

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Do What You’re Capable Of

by: Seth Godin

0

Tweet

Start Your Journey Before You See the End

The resistance wants to be reassured. It wants a testable plan. It wants to know that before it endures the pain, it is guaranteed the prize at the end.

“Give me more case studies, more examples, more reassurance. Give me proof!”

The lizard brain has succeeded in making you stuck. The best art is made by artists who don’t know how it’s going to work out in the end. The rest of the world is stuck with the brainwashed culture that the industrialists gave us, the culture of fear and compliance.

But culture is a choice. You don’t have to accept a culture of fear or a culture of failure.

Right now, just down the hall or just up the street, is another artist, someone filled with hope and excitement, someone choosing a different culture, even though he’s in the same town, the same industry, and the same economy you are.

Others have always done that art, always chosen that culture of hope, but you haven’t done it enough (“too risky,” the lizard says), because you’ve been held back by a need for proof, by a reliance on assurance, and by the fear of humiliation.

Art is a project; it is not a place. You will build your dream house and it will burn down. You will start your business and it will succeed, until it doesn’t, and then you’ll move on.

You will stand onstage and speak from the heart, and some people in the audience (perhaps just one person in the audience) won’t get you, won’t accept you, won’t embrace you.

That’s what art is.

Art is a leap into the void, a chance to give birth to your genius and to make magic where there was no magic before.

You are capable of this. You’ve done it before and you’re going to do it again. The very fact that it might not work is precisely why you should and must do this. What a gift that there isn’t a sure thing, a guarantee, and a net.

It’s entirely possible that there won’t be a standing ovation at the end of your journey.

That’s okay.

At least you lived.

Before we take the steps to reach our goals, we should understand why we’re taking them. Part of the fulfillment lies within the process of reaching them. 

– Seth Godin

Seth Godin wants to know what you are afraid of.

In one of his most challenging books yet, Godin shows why true innovators focus on  trust, remarkability, leadership, and stories that spread. And he makes a passionate argument for why you should be treating your work as art.

>>Download a short PDF excerpt from Seth Godin’s “The Icarus Deception”.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Seth Godin

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Larry Osborne’s 3 Mission Essentials

by: Will Mancini

0

Tweet

My friend, Larry Osborne, leads North Coast Community Church with a group of gifted leaders. I enjoy his writing as much as any pastor who writes on leadership. This October, he releases a book entitled, Innovations Dirty Little Secret. (I just sent an endorsement after pre-reading the book.) Whether you like the title or not, this book is worth getting for the chapter on mission and the short section on vision alone.

In short, there are very few books that tie organizational clarity to practical aspects of innovation in a ministry context.

Here are three essentials he talks about for mission, with a chapter subtitle, “How clarity accelerates innovation.” Larry writes that mission must be:

• Ruthlessly Honest
• Widely Known
• Broadly Accepted

Here are some snippets

RUTHLESSLY HONEST

First, to be useful, a mission statement must be ruthlessly honest. It should reflect your organization’s passionate pursuit, not merely your wishful thinking, your marketing slogans, or a spirit of political correctness. Anything less is disingenuous. And worthless. It doesn’t take long for people inside and outside an organization to recognize what the real priorities are. If your mission statement says one thing but all of your decisions and actions pursue something else, the predictable result will be cynicism and confusion.

WIDELY KNOWN

A second trait of a powerful mission statement is that it’s widely known. Even if it’s ruthlessly honest and laser focused, if it’s too wordy and complex to remember, it’s pretty much useless. To impact the daily decisions of an organization, a mission statement must be easily remembered and repeated ad nauseam—and then repeated again. When a mission statement is so complex and wordy that no one remembers what it says without stopping to re-read it, there’s not much chance that daily decisions will be made in light of it or even align with it. Too long to remember is too long to be useful.

BROADLY ACCEPTED

In the early days of a startup, it’s easy to gain broad acceptance of your mission. If it’s genuine and clearly stated, you’ll attract people who agree with it and you will repel those who don’t. That’s why so many startup teams have a Camelot-like sense of unity.

But it’s difficult to maintain that sense of unity and broad acceptance of the mission over time. As organizations grow and mature, there’s almost always some measure of mission creep. It’s inevitable. New staff and new leaders subtly redefine the mission in terms of their own personal perspectives, preferences, or the position they have within the organization. And those subtle shifts add up. Eventually, many organizations end up with competing silos, each with a slightly different.

WHY  MISSION CLARITY ACCELERATES INNOVATION

A clear and memorable mission statement will tell you what to feed and what to starve, what to focus on and what to ignore. It will give you a framework by which to judge success and failure.

Without mission clarity it’s easy to be seduced by every innovative idea or proposal that appears. Especially if something is novel, has been successful elsewhere or promises to make a solid short-term profit. But over the long haul, if something doesn’t take us toward our mission, it takes us away from our mission, even if it’s a great idea and a potential game-changing innovation elsewhere.

It’s hard to hit the bull’s-eye when it’s a moving target, or when everyone thinks it’s a different target, or no one knows for sure what the target is.

NORTH COAST’S  MISSION

Making disciples in a healthy church environment

Read more from Will here.

Tags: Innovation, Larry Osborne, Mission Statement, North Coast Community Church, Vision, Will Mancini

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Vision >

Think Inside the Box

by: Steven Furtick

0

Tweet

When it comes to our limitations, most people operate out of an if, then mindset.

If I had __________, then I would ___________.
If I could __________, then I would ___________.

So…
If I had more money, then I would buy a nicer house.
If I could sing, then I would be a musician.
If my children were in a different stage of life, then I would move.
If my church had a state of the art facility, then we would grow.

You encounter this same kind of thinking in the corporate world. It’s called thinking outside the box:
What would you do if you had unlimited money? Could sing? Had children who were at a different stage? Had a state of the art facility?

Sounds nice, but this mindset is a breeding ground for frustration. Why?

Because you don’t have unlimited money.
You can’t sing.
Your children aren’t in a different stage of life.
And your church still has the same building.

In other words, for now you’re stuck with your limitations. And while it might be liberating to think about life as if you didn’t have them, they’re still there and you have to work with them.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t plan ahead or that you shouldn’t dream. Of course you should. But your box is never going to expand to the place where you’re thinking outside of it until you learn to live in it.

I would challenge you to think inside the box. Stop waiting for what you want and work what you’ve got. How much money do you have? What talents has God given you? How can you maximize your church or corporation with the assets and resources you currently have in place?

Your greatest limitation is God’s greatest opportunity.
If He wanted you to have ________, He would have provided it to you.
If He wanted you to do ________, He would have made you able.

But He didn’t.

So there must be something greater in mind that He wants to do through your limitation. He must have something in mind He wants to do with what you actually have and actually can do.

Most of us are so focused on what we don’t have that we’re blinded to what we do have. If you had what you think you needed you wouldn’t be able to use what God’s actually put inside of you.

And what He has put inside of you is all you need to accomplish all that He’s called you to do. It’s all He needs too.

Even if it seems limited to you.

Tags: Innovation, Limitations, Steven Furtick

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Vision >

The Lab or the Factory

by: Seth Godin

0

Tweet

Seth Godin uses a business example to point out that some organizations are content with doing what they’ve always done while others are always in search of the next great idea. This has HUGE implications for ministry work, but first, listen to what Godin says:

At the lab, the pressure is to keep searching for a breakthrough, a new way to do things. And it’s accepted that the cost of this insight is failure, finding out what doesn’t work on your way to figuring out what does. The lab doesn’t worry so much about exploiting all the value of what it produces–they’re too busy working on the next thing.

To work in the lab is to embrace the idea that what you’re working on might not work. Not to merely tolerate this feeling, but to seek it out.

The factory, on the other hand, prizes reliability and productivity. The factory wants no surprises, it wants what it did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

Some charities are labs, in search of the new thing, while others are factories, grinding out what’s needed today. AT&T is a billing factory, in search of lower costs, while Bell Labs was the classic lab, in search of the insight that could change everything.

Hard, really hard, to do both simultaneously. Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.

Did you catch that? If the fear of change in the advancement of the Kingdom here on Earth keeps us from choosing to experiment with new ministry ideas and models, then we have also said we w0n’t value innovation! It is impossible to please both God and man. Why do we hold on to things that keep us focused on trying to please the latter?

Here’s the question: Is your church or ministry a lab or a factory?

Tags: Factory, Innovation, Lab, Leadership, Seth Godin, church, ministry

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Vision >

Thriving Ministries Do Something Different Tomorrow than They Did Yesterday

by: Seth Godin

0

Tweet

Why is it so hard for organizations to understand what Tony Hsieh did with customer service at Zappo’s? Instead of measuring the call center on calls answered per minute, he insisted that the operators be trained and rewarded to take their time and actually be human, to connect and make a difference instead of merely processing the incoming.

People hear this, see the billion dollars in goodwill that was created, nod their heads and then go back to running an efficient call center. Why?

In the industrial era, the job of the chief operating officer revolved around two related functions:

• Decrease costs
• Increase productivity

The company knew what needed to be done, and operations was responsible for doing it. Cutting costs, increasing reliability of delivery, getting more done with less–From Taylor on, the job was pretty clear.

In the post-industrial age, when thriving organizations do something different tomorrow than they did yesterday, when the output is connection as much as stuff, the objectives are very different. In today’s environment, the related functions are:

• Increase alignment
• Decrease fear

Alignment to the mission, to the culture, to what we do around here–this is critical, because in changing times, we can’t rely on a static hierarchy to manage people. We have to lead them instead, we have to put decision making power as ‘low’ (not a good word, but it’s left over from the industrial model) in the organization as possible.

As the armed forces have discovered, it’s the enlisted man in the village that wins battles (and hearts and minds) now, not the general with his maps and charts. Giving your people the ability to make decisions and connections is impossible in a command and control environment.

And a decrease in fear, because this is the reason that we’re stuck, that we fail, that our best work is left unshipped. Your team might know what to do, might have an even better plan than the one on the table, but our innate fear of shipping shuts all of that down.

So we go to meetings and wait for someone else to take responsibility. We seek deniability before we seek impact. The four-letter word that every modern organization must fear is: hide.

Our fear of being wrong, of opening up, of creating the vulnerability that leads to connection–we embrace that fear when we go to work, in fact, that’s the main reason people take a job instead of going out on their own. The fear is someone else’s job.

Except now it’s not.

Read more from Seth here.

Tags: Alignment, Innovation, Leadership Engine, Seth Godin

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Ministry Innovation Requires a Bias Toward Action

by: Tim Kastelle

0

Tweet

Dwight Towers wrote a post last week reminding us that a lot of people have their ideas rejected not because everyone else is stupid, but because their ideas aren’t actually very good.  He was basically taking on the commonly used Galileo’s Gambit, which goes like this:

They made fun of Galileo, and he was right.
They make fun of me, therefore I am right.

This is obviously a logical fallacy.  Carl Sagan’s response to this idea was:

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

It’s easiest to hold this view when your idea is just an idea – the best way to work around it is to try your idea out.  This is because the value of an idea is often only found once we try to use it.  There is often a huge lag between when we first see a new idea and when we really find out what it is good for – this is when we are working through business model innovation.  In his great book Pasteur’s Quadrant, Donald Stokes says this:

…the notable examples from the annals of technology, detailed by Rosenberg and others, in which it took many years for a new technology to find its most important commercial uses.  The steam engine was initially seen as a device for pumping water from mines and only later as a power plant for movable ships or carriages.  The railroad was initially seen as a feeder of good for canal transport and only later as a fully articulated system of transportation in its own right. The radio was initially seen as a “wireless” substitute for the electric telegraph for communicating between two ponits that could not be connected by wire, such as ship to shore, and only later as a means of “broadcasting” communication to a mass audience.  Indeed, this is is an almost universal phenomenon in the evolution of technology.  New technological paradigms seldom spring full-blown from the minds of their inventors, and when they do, as in the case of Arthur Clarke’s vision of communications satellites, the visionary is unlikely to be the person who makes the technological dream come true.

Stokes is arguing in the book for a reconceptualisation of research.  For quite a while now we have tended to view research as either basic – concerned with discovering new knowledge, but not with use – from applied – concerned only with use.  Stokes instead argues that a great deal of important research comes from work that considers both knowledge discovery and use.

There are a couple of important points here.

First, it’s not enough to have a great idea – you have to actually try it out to find out if it’s any good.  That is how you avoid the Galileo Gambit.

Second, even if the idea works, we often don’t know what it’s actually good for.  To discover this, we have to put it into use.

Consequently, the best innovation comes when we are concerned with both discovery and use.

Put it all together, and it means that innovation requires a bias towards action.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Bias, Tim Kastelle

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Pushing Ministry Innovation Forward: The Desperate Effort that Comes from Being Hopeful

by: Seth Godin

0

Tweet

As organizations and individuals succeed, it gets more difficult to innovate. There are issues of coordination, sure, but mostly it’s about fear. The fear of failing is greater, because it seems as though you’ve got more to lose.

So urgency disappears first. Why ship it today if you can ship it next week instead? There are a myriad of excuses, but ultimately it comes down to this: if every innovation is likely to fail, or at the very least, be criticized, why be in such a hurry? Go to some more meetings, socialize it, polish it and then, one day, you can ship it.

Part of the loss of urgency comes from a desire to avoid accountability. Many meetings are events in which an organization sits in a room until someone finally says, “okay, I’ll take responsibility for this.” If you’re willing to own it, do you actually need a meeting, or can you just email a question or two to the people you need information from?

Thus, we see the two symptoms of the organization unable to move forward with alacrity, the two warning signs of the person in the grip of the resistance.  “I can take my time, and if I’m lucky, I can get you to wonder who to blame.”

You don’t need more time, you just need to decide.

Read the history of the original Mac and you’ll be amazed at just how fast it got done. Willie Nelson wrote three hit songs in one day. To save the first brand I was responsible for, I redesigned five products in less than a day. It takes a team of six at Lays potato chips a year to do one.

The urgent dynamic is to ask for signoffs and to push forward, relentlessly. The accountable mantra is, “I’ve got this.” You can feel this happening when you’re around it. It’s a special sort of teamwork, a confident desperation… not the desperation of hopelessness, but the desperate effort that comes from being hopeful.

What’s happening at your shop?

Read more from Seth here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Seth Godin

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >