Tips for Improving Your Learning Agility

by: Columbia University

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Learning to be an agile learner takes practice.

In a new white paper, Learning About Learning Agility, a team of researchers from the Teachers College, Colombia University, describe the five main facets of learning-agile behavior. Innovating, performing, reflecting and risking are learning enablers — and defending is a derailer or inhibitor of learning agility.

If you want to look more closely at these learning behaviors, read Are You an Agile Learner in last month’s issue of Leading Effectively.

To boost your learning agility, try these tips:

#1 Innovate. We often choose the first solution to come to mind rather than taking time to consider whether it is truly the optimal course over the long term. By trying out new approaches, you can uncover ways of doing things that could save time and energy and surface new learning that may otherwise have not been considered.

• For each problem you face, challenge yourself to come up with new solutions, even if seemingly tried and trusted ones exist. Make it a habit to push for new ideas — the less traditional, the better.
• When faced with a challenge, ask yourself two questions: What is holding me back from trying something new and different? If these constraints were not in place, how would I approach this situation differently?

#2 Perform. Under pressure, you probably feel the urge to get things done quickly. Ironically, consciously searching your mind for ideas and solutions closes us off to both the wisdom of others and our own experience. Inspiration often comes from the unconscious; being open to this can spark new ideas and strengthen performance.

• When faced with something new, look for similarities between the situation and things you have done in the past. Draw on these similarities to frame the new challenge.
• Ask questions to understand, not to be understood. Really listen to what others are saying and trust that you will have a response when they have finished talking.
• When you find yourself feeling stressed, pause. Don’t just say or do the first thing that comes to your head — take a moment to consider what is really required.

#3 Reflect. Learning occurs when you take the time to reflect, to shift your thinking beyond merely what happened to ask why things happened the way they did. Finding ways to accomplish this, both alone and with others, is essential to learn from experience.

• Find someone who you trust to give you open and honest feedback and challenge them to do so. Show that you are open to the process by only asking clarifying questions. Resist the temptation to explain your actions or make excuses.
• Conduct after-action reviews where you, and relevant others, reflect on recent projects by asking three questions: What happened? Why did it happen that way? What should we stop/start/continue doing in order to ensure success in the future?

#4 Take Risks. Taking on new challenges allows you to develop new skills and perspectives that may become an important part of your repertoire in the future.

• Take on a new challenge that scares you; find something that is meaningful but not so important that failure will have serious personal consequences. Most importantly, tell others what you are doing, and ask for their help and support.

#5 Don’t Defend. When you enter a mode of self-preservation and try to defend what is, you close yourself off to what could be. To practice non-defensiveness:

• View feedback as a gift that someone is giving you. You may not like it, and it may be uncomfortable, but there is value in it nonetheless. Regardless of the other party’s motivations for giving you feedback, there is always the opportunity to learn something about yourself.
• Resist the temptation to respond to feedback, especially at first. Try not to explain your actions to the other person or generate excuses in your own head. Always try to thank the other person.

Ultimately, your ability to continuously learn and adapt will determine the extent to which you thrive in today’s turbulent times — and succeed in the future.

Read more here.

Tags: Center for Creative Leadership, Columbia University, Leadership Engine, Learning Agility

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Laypeople and the Mission of God, Part 2

by: Ed Stetzer

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Today I continue my series about laypeople and the mission of God. If you missed the first post in the series about killing the clergy-laity caste system, you can find it here.

In the first church I planted we did something strange, but we were tying to communicate something important. In the Sunday program, normally you would print the name of the church, phone number, and the obligatory: “Ed Stetzer, Pastor.” Instead we listed everybody. I was listed as the pastor but we included the greeters, the children’s ministry coordinator and a host of other ministers– since all God’s people are the ministers. What I learned was that was a nice thought, but it takes much more than an announcement.

Every church must have a strategy and a process to equip people for ministry and mission. Thus, they create an environment where people are empowered and enabled to do ministry. Yet, and perhaps this is the greatest challenge in many churches, you have to recognize that there are many factors working AGAINST engaging all God’s people in ministry.

There is a role for leadership, but we cannot miss the reality that, in most churches, there are many more passive spectators than there are active participants in the mission of God.

The question: why?

Well, there are many reasons, but one is this: pastors and attendees want it that way. They may bemoan passivity, but they empower it personally.

Let me start with the attendees.

Anthropologists tell us that “religion” is a universal cultural reality. Every culture creates a religion. We find religion all around the world, in every culture.

The religions they create have at least two characteristics:

• people create religious rituals to ceremonialize their devotion
• people create a religious hierarchy to outsource their religious obligations

So, the default mode of culture and people is toward ceremony and hierarchy, rather than devotion and ministry engagement.

(Note: I am not addressing liturgy here, but rather cermonialization– where the rituals replace the relationship.)

Christianity is not another created religion, but we should note the fact that every created religion has these characteristics in common. In other words, these forces are so powerful that they are, well, everywhere. But, Christianity is so radically different– or at least it is supposed to be– that it would show another way.

Yet, it is important that we recognize the nature of people and the constructs of culture both push away from the idea of all of God’s people are priests (1 Peter 2:9) and ministers (1 Peter 4:10). We don’t want a priesthood and ministry of all believers. Instead, we want people to go to God for us and leaders to do the ministry to us– that is the default condition of the heart. It is the religion that we seem to crave– yet it is not Christianity, at least not biblical Christianity.

So, my point is this. To deal with the issue you have to fight against the causes. Biblical leadership (and, as I will address later, church offices) are put in place by God for the purpose of “for the training of the saints in the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12). Yet, too often they (we) are perpetuating the system they bemoan.

Which leads to addressing the reasons pastors often disempower the priests.

Many pastoral leaders enjoy (and take their identity from) doing the work of the ministry more than training and equipping all God’s people to do that ministry– that hurts the pastors and the people. Some pastors are concerned about their employment, wondering, “If I train them for the ministry then why would they need me.” Others are concerned about their identity asking, “What do they need me for if they do the ministry?”

This is a tricky topic and, to be honest, many of the commenters on the last post seemed upset at pastors. So, lest I be misunderstood, let me be clear: I love pastors. But, I love pastors enough to say, “You are to equip God’s people for ministry, not be the shopkeeper of the religious store providing religious rituals to ceremonialize devotion a religious hierarchy to outsource people’s religious obligations.”

That requires some shifts in how we do ministry.

More on that in Part 3.

Read Part 1 from this series here.

Read more from Ed here.

Tags: Clergy-Laity, Ed Stetzer, Serve, Staff, Structure

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The 5 C’s of Social Media Dominance – Part 1

by: Jon Acuff

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Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time helping leaders navigate the waters of social media.

I don’t consider myself an expert, especially since I haven’t put in the 10,000 hours of expertise yet that folks like Malcolm Gladwell talk about. I still end sentences with prepositions for instance.

But I have been swimming for a few years, and I’ve learned a few things. Lots of them by failing, some of them by floating into the right wave at the right time, a few of them on purpose.

So this week, as I work on creating the most intensive guide to social media I’ve ever built for the upcoming Quitter Conference, I thought I would share the 50,000 foot view.

There are only 5 words you have to understand in order to dominate social media. Here’s the first one, with the next four coming in the days to follow:

1. Content

If you had a nickel for every time someone told you that “content is king” you could have been the one who purchased Instagram.

This word has been bandied about so often on the Internet that it’s become a cliché, which is a shame, because content still runs social media like Jay-Z runs New York.

So what is content? Let’s demystify it.

Imagine you owned a store. You were having a grand opening. You spent hours and hours promoting your big day. You spent thousands of dollars inviting people to the ribbon cutting, doing everything you could to drive traffic to your location.

The day arrived, the parking lot was slammed full of people and it was a wild success …and then you opened the doors. And all the shelves were empty. In the excitement of promoting your store, you forgot to stock it. You’ve got an immaculate layout. The store isn’t just a store, it’s an “experience.” The design is unbelievable … but it doesn’t matter. People were expecting products. And as soon as they took a look behind the curtain, so to speak, and realized the store was empty, they left and never came back.

Content = Products.

That’s not just true for businesses, but that’s true for bloggers too. Even if you never want to sell a single thing via social media, if you want to build a community, you have to have a foundation to build it on. And that foundation is the content.

If you start with the promotion, the building will be well known and well ignored.

If you start with the design, the building will be beautiful and empty.

If you start with the community, the building will be temporarily crowded but eventually abandoned.

Content is king.

Content is currency.

Content is critical.

In the old school, “Who? What? When? Where? Why?” model of journalism, content is the “What?”

What blogs will you write?

What videos will you share?

What will you create?

Or, in the Facebook/YouTube model, what content will you enable other people to create on your platform? CNN didn’t start the “iReport” feature, which allows people at home to submit their own news, because they like lowercase letters. They started it because it turns the entire country into content machines. And content matters most. The times I’ve forgotten this have been the times I’ve made my biggest mistakes with social media.

Next, we’ll talk about the second word, “Context.” But the other words won’t matter a whole lot if we don’t get this one right first.

Read Part 2 of this series here.

Tags: Awareness, Content, Jon Acuff, Social Media

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The Importance of the Pastoral “I Don’t Know”

by: Jared Wilson

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“My happy conviction is that pastors ought not to be experts on everything.”
– John Piper

One of the most valuable sentences in a pastor’s arsenal is “I don’t know.” The pressure to know and be everything everybody expects us to know and be can be pride-puffing. I once worked at a bookstore where we were told never to say “I don’t know” to a customer. We must give them some answer, any answer, even if it was a guess or a likely wrong answer. Customers don’t want to hear “I don’t know” from service people, but even a wrong answer makes them feel helped. I confess the temptation to “satisfy the customer” has persisted through my ministry days, for a variety of reasons. I want people to feel helped. And I also don’t like looking like a rube.

Why is it important for pastors (and Christians in general!) to say “I don’t know” when they don’t know?

1. Because it’s the truth.
First and foremost, if you don’t know the answer to something, say you don’t know the answer. Making up stuff up is not our calling. We all know some folks who seem pathologically unable to admit ignorance in any area. I don’t trust those people, and neither should you. Better a disappointing truth than a manipulative or misleading fabrication.

2. Because it impresses the right people.
I’ve done more than a few Q&A’s after preaching or on panels at speaking engagements before, and the desire to impress with wisdom and insight can be nerve-wracking. Once during a Q&A after a sermon at our church in Nashville, I got real honest when a question stumped me. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember realizing I had no information available to my brain to even begin formulating a halfway intelligent response. So I just said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know the answer to that.” Afterwards a young lady approached me to thank me for saying “I don’t know.” She said she wished more “religious people” could say it too. The reality is that acting like you know everything impresses shallow, naive, or otherwise easily impressed people. But saying “I don’t know” impresses people who value honesty and appreciate their pastor admitting weakness, ignorance, or just general fallibility.

3. Because it trains others not to be know-it-alls.
A few weeks ago a fellow came up to me after our service to ask about the Old Testament figure Ahimelech. I recognized the name but could not recall his biblical importance or the narrative where he was found. My inquirer expected that, as a pastor, I would know all about this figure and even the references where he would be found. I blanked. When I looked him up later, of course, I “remembered” who Ahimelech was, but in the moment, despite losing face with a relatively new Christian, I said, “Brother, I don’t remember. I just don’t know.” This led to a great talk about so-called “Bible trivia,” knowledge, learning, wisdom, and righteousness and the like. I think it was a teachable moment for both of us, but I walked away believing that when a leader is open about the gaps in his knowledge it trains others to be okay with not knowing everything. Of course, we want to know our Bibles as well as we possibly can, but we want to remember that knowledge puffs up and that the Scriptures and the doctrines they teach are meant to make us full-hearted with Christ not big-headed with minutiae.

4. Because it cultivates humility.
It is good for a pastor’s heart — no matter the reception — to make his “I don’t know”‘s public.

Read more from Jared here.

Tags: Clarity, Humility, Leadership Engine

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What Does It Take to Lead Innovation?

by: Center for Creative Leadership

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Does your organization stifle creativity even as leaders push for innovation? Have well-meaning efforts to become “more innovative” stalled or fallen short?

In a new white paper, “Becoming a Leader Who Fosters Innovation,” CCL’s David Horth and Jonathan Vehar argue that actively pursuing innovation requires considerable resources and deliberate focus — and that innovation leadership is often missing.

In the paper, Horth and Vehar create a picture (and to-do lists) for leaders who seek innovation but have been frustrated by lack of results. They draw on recent studies, best practices and hidden gems, as well as their own research and experience working with individual leaders and client organizations. They share:

• The differences between innovation thinking and business thinking — and how leaders need to manage the tension between them. Leaders and organizations that are able to switch between these two modes of thinking will find a powerful antidote to complexity and an engine that can help them thrive — even during uncertain times.
• Two myths of innovation … No. 1: Individual Creativity Can Be Mandated and Managed. No. 2: Simply Unleashing Creative Talent Can Help You Navigate Complexity.
• Three essential building blocks of innovation leadership — the tool set, the skill set and the mind-set. A collection of tools and techniques are needed to generate new options, implement them in the organization, communicate direction, create alignment and cause commitment. Innovation leaders also need a framework that allows them to use their knowledge and abilities to accomplish their goals. The mind-set is the fundamental operating system of the creative thinker and distinguishes those leaders who enable creative thinking and innovation from those who shut it down.

Horth and Vehar also offer specific actions you can take to help your organization develop innovation leadership, including:

• Create a mandate for change, backed by a strategy that embraces innovation. If you are not senior enough to create the mandate, gather peers around you who share your passion for innovation and collectively approach those who can create the mandate, or scale it back to a level where you have authority to make it happen. Use the IBM 2010 CEO Study, IBM 2011 Creative Leadership Studies, 2012 Capgemini Innovation Leadership Study and other evidence to get their attention.
• Model what it will take individually and collectively for the organization to become more innovative. It is particularly important for senior leaders to walk the talk. Make managing the tension between business thinking and innovative thinking a priority.
• Communicate challenging strategic issues throughout the organization. Use them as vehicles for promoting collaboration and seeking creative ideas.
• Create highly diverse teams to address strategic issues. Help them overcome limiting differences so diversity becomes a source of novel ideas.
• Give people access to creative methods and experiences. Even those with creative potential get stuck. Readily available tools, methods and experiences help them reframe and think differently about challenges and opportunities.
• Design and build systems to nurture innovation. Look for low-cost ways to test and prototype new solutions.
• Champion ideas that don’t quite fit, and network with your peers to find a home for them. Actively break down barriers to innovation, including internal politics and destructive criticism, as well as hurdles, gates and other unnecessary systems.

Read the full white paper: “Becoming a Leader Who Fosters Innovation.”

Tags: Communication, Innovation, Leadership Engine, Strategy

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7 Reasons Storytelling is Important for Branded Content

by: Jon Thomas

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Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440.
The first radio transmissions were in the early 1900s.
The television became commercially available less than a century ago.
The Internet is not even old enough to have a drink (legally; at least not in the United States).
Facebook and Twitter are just out of diapers, and the next big marketing tool is still in the womb or possibly just a twinkle in its creator’s eye.

When most people think about marketing, these are the tools they think of: print, radio, TV and the web. None of these, however, are ingrained in us as much as storytelling. We’ve been telling stories for thousands of years, but we don’t have to go back that far to understand storytelling’s powerful effect on our hearts and minds. Go back only as far as your childhood, when you begged your parents to read your favorite story—the one you already knew by heart—just one more time. Why did you do that? Why was it so important to hear that story?

Stories and the art of storytelling play a major role in content marketing today. Not all brands realize the importance of unearthing their core story and learning to tell stories in ways that endear new fans and motivate advocates. In case you need even more reason to learn to weave an effective narrative throughout your marketing efforts, here are seven reasons storytelling is important for branded content.

If you’re reading in RSS and can’t see the images, please click through to reveal the reasons. We’ve also turned this post into a SlideShare presentation!

Experiences leave lasting impressions. They go far deeper than facts, figures or features. And by creating a story-based experience, you cause your audiences to walk away with an impression of your brand that doesn’t rest on the precarious edges of their minds but sits deep in their hearts.

Chances are that if you have an innovative or unique offering, it’s not going to be innovative and/or unique very long. Any amount of success will generate copycats. But what they can’t copy is who you are. What’s your origin story? Where did your brand come from, and how has that shaped your product or service? When your facts, figures and features are in line, your story can set you apart from the competition.

If it weren’t for stories, your brand wouldn’t mean much to your audience. It’s those stories that create a real connection. Facebook now dedicates an entire site to stories. Fans can post stories about their individual and collective experiences. (Facebook even flew a number of these storytellers to its headquarters to surprise a room full of Facebook employees, creating a rock-solid connection between the work they were doing and the difference they’re making in the lives of their users.) Tumblr and Twitter have done something similar with Storyboard and @twitterstories, respectively.

There’s nothing more mind numbing than hearing or reading a bunch of facts and figures. And anyone can recite numbers to an audience. A true marketer will weave a story around the information to createmeaning for the audience.

“Having the data is not enough. I have to show it in ways people both enjoy and understand,” Hans Rosling said. Rosling is well known for the ways he has spun compelling stories around massive data sets. What would otherwise be mundane statistics becomes a gripping narrative with valleys and peaks that keeps interest piqued throughout. Strong visual elements and impassioned narrative elevate his presentations.

Stories are uniquely able to move people’s hearts, minds, feet and wallets in the storyteller’s intended direction. Nobody was better at this than Steve Jobs, who turned sales presentations into coveted experiences. His masterful storytelling motivated fans to rave about the products, creating valuable earned media. The photo above is the line to get into one of his keynote addresses.

When was the last time a friend of yours called you up to tell you the great features of this new product they were interested in? Or how they scored a coupon? Probably not recently. But we share stories every day. This has only been amplified by social media, through which we are able to share with the click of a button. When a story resonates—moves people emotionally—they retell it many times over, ultimately amplifying the message.

When we know we’re being marketed to, we close our ears. We don’t have 30 seconds to be interrupted. But when we’re told a story, miraculously, we have 30 minutes to listen. Our arms unfold and we lean forward, excited to hear what comes next.

With only 23 percent of consumers trusting ads on TV and 20 percent trusting ads in magazines or on the radio, it’s more important than ever for brands to integrate their marketing into their story. Otherwise, what are you marketing?

Do you have any other reasons to add? 

Tags: Brand, Jon Thomas, Social Media, Stories

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The Power of One Word: Can You Describe Your Church in One Word?

by: Tim Peters

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“The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in a person’s mind.”

A church will be in better position to grow if it can find a way to own a word in the minds of people within the community. I’m not talking about a complicated word or a word that must be invented. I’m talking about a word we’ve all heard before; a word taken right out of the dictionary.

When people hear the name of your church in the street, this one word is what they will immediately think. It’s what they associate with you.

Here are some examples:

• If you hear the word “computer”, you think IBM
• If you hear the word “phone”, you think iPhone or Apple
• If you hear the word “copier”, you think Xerox
• If you hear the word “chocolate”, you think Hershey’s
• If you hear the word “cola”, you think Coke

The most effective words are simple and benefit-oriented. You can’t use another church’s word (at least not in the same community). You can’t steal and borrow. This one word is all about you. This is the word you want burnt inside the minds of people in your community. You can’t abandon your word in search of a word owned by others. You have to own this word.

Here’s the real kicker: If you don’t find your one word that describes your church, the people in your church and community are going to create that word for you.

The key to finding your word (and marketing in general really) is narrowing your focus. There’s no way that your church stands for everything. You can’t stand for every injustice, every ministry and every opportunity. If you’re chasing everything, you don’t really stand for anything. So it’s huge to find this one word you want people to use to describe you.

Three steps to finding and activating your church’s “one word”:

#1  Identify. It’s crucial that it starts internally. You don’t want external factors determining your one word. Your one word is sitting inside the hearts and minds of the leaders within your church and members. Collectively and internally, you have to spend time reflecting on what is the one word you feel comfortable attaching to your church.

Here’s an exercise: Get a huge white board and a room full of 5-7 hand-selected leaders who understand your culture and history. Ask each person to get up and write three separate words on the whiteboard they think accurately describe the church and what the external community perceives of the church. After everyone has written their three words, each person will go up and select which one word they think most accurately describes the church. See which word receives the most votes, and if there’s cohesion amongst the team about the one word.

#2  Test. Now you want to test your one word externally. Go into your community and find out if your word accurately communicates your church in the minds of people who are not involved with your church. You want to find people who know the name of your church, but are not members of your congregation.

Here’s an exercise: Send several of your staff members out on a busy Saturday to the mall or a heavily trafficked area like a park. Simply walk up to people and ask, “Have you ever heard of X church? If they say yes, then ask them politely: “What one word would you use to describe this church?” Collect this data and come back and look at it as a team. You want to test externally, but you also want to test internally with people outside your team (congregation members) on a Sunday morning. Pull people aside asking them the same question, gathering the same data.

#3  Communicate. Once you find and commit to your one word, make sure that you consistently communicate it. Any time you communicate internally or externally, this one word should be used in your communication in some way, form or fashion. On top of using this word in the right context and the right communication channels, you can use images, video and design as ways to supports your one word.

Now that you’ve identified your one word, you’ve tested it with the public and your church audience, and you’re consistently communicating this message, it’s important to protect your one word – especially if it’s positive (if it’s negative than you have to go back to the drawing board). Say, for example, your one word is “radical”. You want to make sure every action your ministry takes and every communication reflects “radical”. It all starts internally. This one word is a word that defines your culture, so you are ultimately protecting your culture.

Tags: Aware, One Word, Tim Peters

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Leveraging Technology to Make Disciples

by: Church Community Builder

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Tags: Church Community Builder, Discipleship, Steve Caton, Strategy

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Northwest Bible Church Leader Guide

by: Northwest Bible Church

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Tags: Leadership Development, Northwest Bible Church, Structure

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Design Intervention

by: Mel McGowan

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Tags: Facilities, Mel McGowan, Physical space, Visioneering Studios

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