How Much Faster Can We Innovate?
I first saw this video on MichaelHyatt.com, and thought it would be useful to post here. It’s about the crazy fast rise in technology and innovation.
Archive - September, 2009
How Do You React To Criticism?
I don’t think anybody likes to receive criticism; to be told that something you’re doing or leading is somehow not working. But how do you react to it? Do you get defensive? Do you listen with an open ear and heart?
Better yet, do you create opportunities in your organization in which you purposefully seek out what is not working well and give people opportunities to share this?
It seems that leaders of organizations that succeed are quite open to receiving and hearing bad news, to facing down the hard-truths.
Referring to Good To Great companies, Jim Collins said of the Pitney Bowes company:
“The entire management team would lay itself open to searing questions and challenges from sales people who dealt directly with customers. The company created a long-standing tradition of forums where people could stand up and tell senior executives what the company was doing wrong…and saying ‘look! You’d better pay attention to this’” (p. 72).
I recently tested out this principle by having a special gathering in which the entire church body was invited to share and dialogue on some information. Our attendance and giving had dropped significantly in the month of September for some reason. I didn’t really know why, but assumed we could all figure out some ideas. So I showed them the graphs of our attendance and giving going back to January. We analyzed month by month and sought to understand why attendance might have been higher in some months and lower in others.
I’ll admit, it wasn’t the easiest meeting to lead. It’s never easy to hear bad news. But I think the dynamic changes (in a good way) when you, as the leader, are the one inviting it. When you invite people to be totally open and to analyze and process together with you.
I thought the gathering went quite well and we were able to more deeply bring some things to the surface that needed to be addressed and talked about.
So I think here’s the bottom line point: It’s much better if you, as the leader, bring up the difficult topics first and address the hard realities. That’s one of the primary roles of leadership.
Jim Collins says:
“Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There’s a huge difference between the opportunity to ‘have your say’ and the opportunity to be heard. The good-to-great leaders understood this distinction, creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard and, ultimately, for the truth to be heard” (p. 74).
So in the words of Susan Scott, author of Fierce Conversations, “What are you pretending not to know” because you don’t don’t want to deal with criticism or facing difficult facts? Also, what do you think are some good forums for listening to and addressing the tough issues?
[image by BBernie82]
The Quickest Way to Slow Down Your Organization: Part Two
I wanted to followup with a few more thoughts that I didn’t get to process in the last post.
The Time article linked in the last post mentioned that “Wikipedia has added layers of control to bolster accuracy and fairness.”
This comes down to two opposing principles: trust vs. control.
Wikipedia flourished and people gravitated to it because it was based on a decentralized-trust model. You could actually go in and delete or vandalize certain Wikipedia entries. I actually tried it one time. Not vandalizing, but making a simple edit to a post. And what would happen when a post was vandalized? The power of crowd-sourcing would jump in and people would “clean” it up.
This trust model is what fascinated and drew people. “We’re all in this together and it’s all of our responsibility to keep this thing running well,” was the general thought.
But control began to creep in. Was the principle behind the control good? Of course. They wanted to maintain the integrity and accuracy of the posts. Did it have negative consequences? Yes. The slow decline of Wikipedia.
Rick Warren has said that “you can structure for growth or you can structure for control. You can’t do both.”
I think that if we’re going to spread the gospel message to all the world, we have to ultimately rely on a decentralized method built upon trust. Control will only take us so far.
[image by jakigood]
The Quickest Way to Slow Down Your Organization
I read an interesting article recently in Time magazine that detailed the slow in growth in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. It seems that Wikipedia reached it’s zenith in September 2007, and slowly began to flatline and then slow quite a bit in growth.
Various reasons have been suggested as explanation. Some have suggested that it’s because there are no longer any “easy fruit” to pick. The simple topics like “dog,” “John F. Kennedy,” and others were filled a while ago, and now only specialized topics are left. But the author of this article gives a different reason as to why the organization has been slowing down: bureaucracy.
He mentions how Wikipedia has recently been adding various layers that has seemingly moved to stunt it’s growth.
Here’s a quote:
“Chi’s research suggests that the encyclopedia thrives on chaos–that the more freewheeling it is, the better it can attract committed volunteers who keep adding to the corpus. But over the years, as Wikipedia has added layers of control to bolster accuracy and fairness, it has developed a kind of bureaucracy. ‘It may be that the bureaucracy is inevitable when a project like this becomes sufficiently important,” Chi says. But who wants to participate in a project lousy with bureaucrats?”
So how do you slow the growth of an organization? Add lots of bureaucracy in an attempt to protect the value of “fairness.” That’s it. That’s the recipe.
The more difficult you make it for people to interact. The more levels and hoops that you have for people to jump through, the less likely it is that they’ll participate. Make it simple and people will jump. Make it tough, and people will sit.
This is the same theory as promulgated by the authors of The Starfish and the Spider. Organizations that are like the starfish (simple, decentralized) vs. being like the spider (many levels, central organization, complex structure) are ones that are more likely to grow and keep on growing.
This simple principle has really powerful expressions in most areas of church or organizational life.
What does someone have to do to join a small group?
Become a member?
Volunteer?
How are decisions made in your organizations? Do most decisions have to pass through different board or committees?
So here’s the lesson in all of this. Have a really clear and powerful vision, and create really simple ways in which people can contribute and participate towards that goal. Or else you will probably begin to slow.
I’ve seen this at play in my church, and we’re working to address it and simplify in as many different areas as we can.
What about you? Where have you seen this principle in effect?
[image by andrewlee1967]
Free Church Resources
Church Marketing Sucks recently put out a post on different church ministries that put out free resources. Here is the post if you’re ever in need.
[image by Rashed Al Namaani]
And The Winner Is…
Just wanted to give a big thanks to all those that participated in the 100th post giveaway through your comments.
And here’s the winner:
So a big congrats to Nathalia! She had comment #2. This was completely random (thanks to Random.org) and included anyone that made a comment on the post.
You’ve won a $15 Amazon.com gift card! I’m feeling like Bob Barker right now…and I’m liking it =)
Every now and then we’ll have some of these giveaways. I think the next one will be the day after Thanksgiving, on the one year anniversary of the blog.
Well that’s it for now. Thanks for being a part of the community.
Now let’s get back to work!
Trends In The Biggest Churches In North America
I just read Cathy Grossman’s article in USA Today, based upon Ed Stetzer’s research.
There were a few things that stood out to me.
But first, it doesn’t surprise me that Lakewood Church is at the top of the list for a few reasons. They have the “biggest” physical church in North America (that I’m aware of). If you remember the story, they purchased the previous Houston Rockets stadium. And the kinds of messages he preaches are quite popular. And they’re the second oldest church in the group.
What is of particular note, though, is the church that is second on the list: LifeChurch.tv. They are the youngest church in the group, being founded in 1996. So what made LifeChurch.tv different than all the others? They were the original pioneers of the multi-site movement. From the very beginning, they decided to stick with smaller venues of about 600, but to multiply as quickly as possible from there. So they present from the “home studio” church and broadcast to all the other partner churches. This decentralized approach of planting quickly has worked exceptionally well for them.
Since it became popular, all the major churches have moved to have multi-site campuses. Right now it’s quite common for churches to have 2-3 campuses.
I know that they also adhere to a very simple structure. They hold services for children’s, youth, main church, and they do small groups. That’s it. This allows them to be light on their feet.
What was also interesting about the report is that the growing church have a very intentional system to integrate and “assimilate” people. “The best churches have very intentional systems to move people from sitting in rows to sitting in circles (in small groups) to going out and making a difference in the world,” Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research, says.
I think this is a good challenge for most of us to think about the kind of systems we have in place in our churches? Do we have a system in place by which new people can be encouraged to come back, get involved, take next steps, and grow spiritually?
I wonder what other lessons we can extrapolate from that data?
What do you think?
[image by bluesunday1979]
