“A constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change — we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough.”

If you believe that “God causes all things to work together for good,”¹ then you must be wondering what God is going to do to redeem the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Disruption’s Opportunity

Whatever our thoughts, stances, and opinions are in relation to the pandemic, one thing is clear: it has disrupted all of us. Disruptions are jarring because they are unplanned and usually happen very quickly. Typically, when disruptions affect us, our reaction is to think of them as problems. But their positive side—and yes, they have one—is that they force our attention on to a new reality and create an urgency to do something so that we survive the disruption with good prospects for the future. 

Now is an opportune time to reimagine ministry to meet the challenges of new conditions and take advantage of the opportunities they provide. I believe those opportunities are a gift from God to the church. While the pandemic is a terrible scourge, it is not beyond God’s power to redeem it by bringing some good out of it. We need to open this gift of opportunity and use it! How will you participate with God in drawing out that good to bless others? CCCC members can discuss this post in The Green.

Surviving a disruption requires a mindset that goes beyond incremental changes to how we think about and do our work. There may be some very helpful tweaks to make, and those should be done, but more importantly when in a disruption, we need bold, creative ideas for completely new initiatives that make the most of the possibilities inherent in the disruption. 

Some questions to start a discussion with your team about innovation in your ministry include:

• What new needs have been created by the disruption?
• What other ways to pursue our mission does the disruption make possible that weren’t possible or desirable before?
• How can we make sure we are open to the expansiveness of God’s possibility and will for our ministry in this moment and going forward?

Whether we like it or not, both we and our society will be changed by the disruption of COVID-19. But there is good news in that if we take the initiative and act proactively we can achieve greater mission success because of those changes. 

The choices we make might even bring about changes that are much needed and overdue.

Without minimizing the terribleness of the pandemic, this time of disruption holds an opportunity for churches and Christian ministries to further develop and expand how they work on their missions.

Making the Most of the Opportunity

The current disruption is already benefiting the church in that it has:

• Highlighted more than ever the difference between the church and its buildings,
• Forced us to find new ways to be the church without relying on buildings or large gathered groups, and
• Upset regular routines and practices, making people more open to change than usual.

What we learn from our experience during the pandemic can continue to be used when large gatherings resume. Our new skills and practices can go forward and augment (and in some cases replace) the traditional ways of doing ministry. 

To make the most of the disruption, churches and ministries need to think innovatively about their activities with respect to two time frames: what they can do during the pandemic and what they need to do to prepare for ministry after the pandemic.

During the Pandemic

“Saddleback has never been closed during these past eleven weeks,” Warren says. “On the contrary, we’ve been doing more in our communities than ever before. Our buildings have been closed, but the church is not a building. We are a living, breathing body …we are a people, not a place.”

Rick Warren

A number of churches and ministry leaders have shared how they are creatively responding to the pandemic. Follow the links to be inspired by their stories and then see what ideas your own team can come up with.

• The quote above comes from Rick Warren’s interview about how Saddleback Church is making the most of the pandemic not only to serve but also to evangelize through its members rather than its programs.
• This church transformed an existing program that was no longer needed as it was into a high value program meeting specific pandemic-related community needs. 
• Some churches are thinking about the new possibilities of being a church without walls.  
• Fresh Expressions helps churches build new forms of churches alongside themselves to attract non-church people. Their post discusses how distributed leadership makes possible a distributed church that can minister during the pandemic. It also covers integrating your church into the digital era and listening, loving, and serving your neighbourhood.
• Here are a number of suggestions for engaging and re-engaging people with your church while reaching out to new people with new programs.
• Christ’s Church of the Valley in Phoenix, AZ developed a new mental health program based on text messaging, their website, and telephone and is providing financial assistance to individuals for their first ten counselling sessions.
• A ministry leader offers ten creative ideas to continue effective ministry.
• Here’s a church that turned to the ministries it supports to find ways to help them with their missions. The church is also supporting its local Social Services office.

But don’t just look at what other churches or ministries are doing. For real game-changing ideas, look to see what other industry sectors are doing. We are all in the same boat, having to innovate during the pandemic. Secular charities could have great ideas and so could the retail, manufacturing, hi-tech and other sectors of our economy. Hospitals, for example, improved their patient management system by examining automotive factories. Look for transferable ideas from sectors that are very different from our own. 

For guidance and ideas in developing creativity, please see my post on imagination. 

Preparing for after the Pandemic

During this time of disruption, churches and all other ministries should re-explore their missions and take a deep dive with a fresh perspective into what the words of their mission mean, what success of their mission looks like, and how their mission can be fulfilled. A process for how to do this will be the topic of my next post.

Conclusion

If the church makes the most of God’s gift of opportunity in disruption, it will emerge from this pandemic fresh, reinvigorated, and highly relevant to whatever the new normal turns out to be. 

The post Finding God’s Gift in Disruption appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Day two started with a great presentation from Lisa Kay Solomon of Innovation Studio. She says that scaling is about leading the design of better futures. Scaling includes designing the conditions within the organization that are needed for change.

Start the scaling process by defining the response you want to trigger in other people that will lead to mission success.

When it comes to your own staff, the people whom you want to be successful in their work every day, Lisa says that people who believe they’ve had a good day are more successful than those who don’t. And the most significant factor in judging whether or not you’ve had a good day is whether or not you feel you made progress that day. So leaders, design your organization and its work so that staff and volunteers can know they made progress every day. Her book, Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change describes how to do this.

The key points are:

1. Create conditions for discovery. Exploring always involves risk of failure, but the key is to fail productively. Others have said that when you fall, “Fall forward.” Encourage curiosity, zest and optimism among your staff. Have strong ideas to give clear direction, but hold them loosely to encourage creative thinking. Have fun exploring. If everything has been reduced to a Powerpoint presentation, she says little can go wrong, but then little can go right too. Risk exploration.
2. Be an ‘otherish’ giver. Collaborate and set your partner up for success. Engage others outside the organization to think and imagine with you.
3. Think visually. This really helps you to break away from linear thinking and it is much more creative. Dan Roam has two great goods about thinking visually: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and Blah Blah Blah: What to Do when Words Don’t Work. She also recommends Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers because you can’t scale anything if your don’t know its business model. I have this book and it is outstanding! And yes, charities have business models just as much as for profits do!
4. Act like a television or movie producer. They are the people who steward the vision for the show and make sure that it gets produced. You need to ensure that everyone is creatively working on the vision. Don’t let the organization drift away from what you are trying to achieve!! Sometimes we get bogged down in process and perfectionism and lose “the fire”. We lose urgency. Keep the organization stoked, active and committed.
5. Create a culture of hope. This will help everyone get through the tough work of scaling up.
6. Move beyond the “Yeah, but” people. They need to develop a more adaptive way of thinking. They are stuck in a rigid perspective and can’t see past their reservations. So when you hear “Yeah but”, ask “So how can…?”

Some Lessons on Scaling That Were Shared

Michael Smith of the Social Innovation Fund shared some lessons he’s learned over the years about scaling up.

• One in eight American NFPs (Not for Profits) spend no money on evaluation, and more than 50% have no theory of change. Their typical success measures are either simply a story about a person who was a success for one of their programs (was that person the only one?) or a statistic about the number of people served (yes, but did anything actually change for them?). Evaluate results! A template for how to do evaluations (a step-by-step guide) is available for free.
• If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.
• The three ingredients for scaling are: 1) collaboration, 2) a fierce sense of urgency, and 3) plans for sustainability.
• A really hard, demanding mission. A mission that is hard to figure out how to do is better than an easy mission you already know how to do. Aim high, think big!
• You must know what the system is that you are working within. What are all the parts? How do they relate to each other? You must bring all parts into alignment with your desired end result. A great book to help you define systems is The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. This is another one I have and it is well worth reading for several reasons.

Collective Impact

Lalitha Vaidyanathan of FSG spoke about getting results at scale. She defined collective impact as having the commitment of actors from different system subsectors holding a common agenda to solve a problem at scale. To build collective impact, you must first know within what system(s) you are working. If you were to work with others across this system, who would be involved and what work would you be doing together?

Here are the elements for effective collective impact:

• Five conditions for collective impact
  • A common agenda
  • Shared measurements (for learning and accountability)
  • Mutually reinforcing activities (no duplicate effort)
  • Continuous communication
  • Backbone support. The backbone is the people who are dedicated to making the group work effectively.
• The mindset and disposition for collective impact
  • Shift from technical solutions to adaptive solutions.
  • Shift from focus on evidence to focus on evidence and relationships
  • Shift from looking for the silver bullet to using silver buckshot
  • Shift from taking credit to sharing credit. Ask “Who can we blame the good results on?”
  • Be willing to take risks. Nothing happens by staying safe.
• Structure everything for collective impact
  • The old way of structuring has predetermined solutions to implement.
  • The new way of structuring has predetermined rules of interaction from which the solution will emerge.
  • Be intentional about impact and uncertain about solution

Conclusion

This two-day conference really was all about working with others in a spirit of open-handed generosity to get a common mission accomplished. The key concept woven through everything was creativity. I really liked something that was said at the end of the day:

Imagination is a preview of life’s coming attractions!

The post Stanford Day 2 – Scaling Nonprofits appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

And that raises an interesting question: Which is more important – growing your ministry or growing your impact? The first is internally focused while the second is externally focused. If your goal is to grow a large ministry because you want to lead a large ministry, I’d suggest you take a hard look at your motivation.

• If you could achieve much greater mission impact but with no growth and even less visibility than you have today, would you do it?
• Is leadership driving you or is your mission driving you?

Here’s what I learned on Day One.

Achieving Transformative Scale

Jeff Bradach of The Bridgespan Group gave us nine pathways to scaling up for impact.

1. Distribute through existing platforms. You don’t have to build everything yourself. Many other organizations have developed assets you can use to get your messages and programs out in public. Think about cooperation and collaboration. Or at least think about using them as a supplier.
2. Recruit and train other organizations. This goes beyond simply using someone else’s platform. Here you actually give them a packaged program that they can then run (and even adapt) themselves.
3. Unbundle and scale for impact. Perhaps it is too challenging to think about scaling up everything you do. Why not take a complex program and break it down into pieces that are easier to scale? Scaling a small thing is better than not scaling at all.
4. Leverage technology. Research shows that for profit companies spend double the amount on technology than what nonprofits do. Social media, apps and other technologies can greatly broaden your audience.
5. Strengthen the field. Find ways to lift the performance of all the players in your field. What can you do that would enable others who are working on the same mission (or closely related aspects of it) to do better? For example, could you develop shared measurements of mission performance? That way, everyone can try their own methods, but have a basis for comparing results and seeing what works best.
6. Examine the ‘system’ you are all working within. Could you change a critical part of it so that everyone wins? Jeff said that bad systems trump good programs every time! Change the system and maybe your programs will work better.
7. Influence policy change and you’ll change the playing field.
8. Consider for profit models. If you can, minimize your reliance on donations and grants. A good example is the micro-credit sector that has become a viable, standalone business.
9. Change the attitudes, behaviours and norms that work against mission success. Are there negative communal habits that should be changed? Smoking and drunk driving are two examples where bad habits became socially unacceptable.

Jeff reminded us of a few important strategies not to forget while scaling up:

• Keep replicating what’s working. Don’t just do new things.
• Cost matters. Innovate to drive costs down (but not at the cost of effectiveness)
• Money matters. You need large capital for new capabilities, so rethink your funding model and see where you could generate additional revenue
• Constituent engagement matters. Sometimes we rely on experts instead of grassroots wisdom. Instead of either/or, think both/and

 Building networks and movements for social impact

Heather McLeod Grant of Open Impact said that the best nonprofits work outside of themselves, engaging business, government and other nonprofits with their cause. Here’s her definition of scaling:

Scaling is a leader building an organization that can build a network to grow a movement.

NFPs (Not For Profits) often stifle movements by saying “Here’s all that could go wrong.” If we don’t support movements of creativity, we will be sidelined as irrelevant organizations.

Design Thinking and Rapid Innovation

David Viotti, CEO of Smallify, talked about how to attack a really big goal. To smallify something is to get to the root cause of a challenge and then take quick action. It is to break something down to a small piece that can be worked on.

To smallify is to make small bets with relatively low risk and an affordable loss if it doesn’t work out. The attitude needs to be, “What can we do this Monday?” Do something, anything, NOW!!

Viotti gave five tools for rapid innovation:

1. Experiment more and fear less. Don’t wait for the perfect idea, just start testing and don’t be afraid it might go wrong. You’ll learn something and move forward.
2. Empathize and show up. Approach the challenge from other perspectives. Talk to people and discover what they think about. Be an actor – do something – and not just an observer.
3. Generate and say “Yes”. Be creative and be open to trying new things out. Think of options. “How could we…” is a great question.
4. When you are up against constraints, take them as gifts. They force you to be more creative, and that’s always good.
5. Your mindset is a choice. Do you believe that intelligence is fixed? If you do, then you will give up more easily and achieve less. If you believe that intelligence grows, then you will embrace challenge and achieve more. Choose to believe that intelligence grows. Every time you try something, you learn something, and then you are closer to achieving your goal.

Viotti taught us “the innovator’s bow.” Say “I am [name] and I have failed.” Then take a bow. Well done! You did something even if it didn’t work. That’s better than sitting around and doing nothing.

He also warned us that people who say, “Let me play the Devil’s advocate” are really saying, “Let me kill your idea!” Turn the “Yes but” answers to “Yes and”. Ask “So how can we do it?”

Scaling up Excellence

Bob Sutton of Stanford University said that when you have a pocket of excellence, the challenge is how to spread excellence from the few to the many without “screwing it up.”

Scaling isn’t just about the numbers, numerical growth and so forth. It really is about spreading a mindset – getting people to get on board with a new way of getting real world impact. Organizations that spread excellence have people who feel they own the organization, and the organization owns them. They share a mutual accountability for each person living up to the ideal and getting the job done well.

Scaling isn’t about getting more resources to do more. It’s about doing more with less. You start by cutting out all the ineffective things – those things you do only because everyone else does them.

Scaling is about getting others to help you accomplish your mission. That means that you will have to address the issue of whether you will enforce a cookie-cutter approach or allow for local variation on a theme. Allowing variation may encourage better employee engagement or it might lead to delusions of uniqueness. Some people want to change a program just so that they have exercised some control over it. Variation because of real variations in the local areas are quite okay, but don’t let people reinvent what doesn’t need to be reinvented.

How to Spread Excellence

• Start by firing up contagious emotions first. Trying to enlist people by making a rational case for their work just doesn’t work. Get their emotions in high gear over your cause!
• Then guide people to do the desired tangible behaviours. Get them active, doing what needs to be done right away. Research shows that strong beliefs are created and maintained based on what we do, not what we are told or what we say. Action builds commitment to the mission. Leaders need to live the mindset they want staff and volunteers to have, not just talk about it. Excessive talk and thinking keeps us from doing what we know and believe we should do.
• As organizations get larger, you need more structure and process. Many people think this means having a bureaucracy, but the purpose of hierarchy is to defeat bureaucracy and organize people to work together effectively.
• Keep teams small. Once a team gets to about six people, it starts to have problems. If it has more than ten members, the system gets clogged.
• Cascade excellence by putting people with the right mindset in positions to influence those who don’t.
• Start with a small team of diverse people, so when they go back to their own diverse groups, ideas will spread faster.
• When it comes to attitudes and performance, bad is stronger than good. Bob says “one jerk cuts performance by 40%,” so get rid of the bad fast!
• When you can say “We don’t have time to do it the way we should,” you are doing great scaling. The point isn’t to wait for perfect conditions and processes, but to do something now and make progress. However, balance this by remembering that sometimes the best advice is just to stand there and do nothing but think about it. You’ll have to decide when stopping to reflect is the right thing to do.
• There will be times when scaling will not be enjoyable. The staff may start to lose their happiness about working on the mission. Disney knows that its guests are least happy when they are actually in the park. Anticipating and remembering the park experience are when they are happiest. That’s why Disney makes sure you know where the best places are to take pictures and why they provide photo ops with their characters. When your staff is unhappy, talk up both the past and the future. We are going from somewhere to somewhere. Let’s remember the progress already made and anticipate achieving the vision.
• Scaling up is a manageable mess. It isn’t neat and tidy. So clean up the best you can and keep muddling forward!

I highly recommend Bob’s book: Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling For Less.

That’s it for the first day.

God bless!

The post At Stanford University: Scaling Nonprofits appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

When we share our tough times and what we learned from them, we all learn a bit more and our donors appreciate our confession of being part of the same fallible humanity as they are.

The post Annual Failure Report appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

What Really Happened in Fleming’s Lab

Fleming’s lab fills the tower bay. It is the middle level of the three vertical windows.

Wikipedia and other sites describe Fleming and his lab as untidy, messy, or cluttered, but if you visit the lab, which is set up exactly as it was in 1928, you will find out that what appears messy and cluttered is just another aspect of his experimental work. (Sorry, no pictures are allowed inside the lab.) The museum guide told me that when Fleming was done with an experiment (the experiment he intended to do), he always left samples of his experiment out for at least several days as an experiment to find something unintended that he obviously wasn’t looking for.

Another practice was to combine things just to see what happens. In 1921 he had a cold, and put some of his nasal mucous in a petri dish and saw that it dissolved the bacteria in the dish. He discovered a natural human antiseptic, lysozyme, which would have guaranteed his place in history even if he had never discovered penicillin!

Practices such as these made it possible for Fleming to be surprised by the unexpected. He was very intentional about creating opportunities for discoveries to be made. If this made his lab untidy or cluttered, so be it.

Furthermore, it wasn’t an accident that he just happened to notice something unusual in a sample. He always inspected the samples very carefully, and this time he noticed a clear spot on the slide where the bacteria that he was experimenting on should have been. The organism had been killed by something on this one part of the slide, and the killer agent turned out to be a mould that he first called mould juice and (wisely) later called penicillin!

The real story is that the discovery of penicillin was not so accidental. Fleming deliberately left the cultures out to allow time for something unexpected to happen. He deliberately inspected the samples to see what, if anything, had developed. He deliberately followed up an unexpected observation to find an explanation for it. And he deliberately invested time to think about the implications of what he had discovered. Anyone who does what Fleming did is likely to discover something sooner or later.

In summary, Fleming’s method was:

1. Create opportunity to be surprised.
2. Be on the lookout for surprising things.
3. Be curious about the surprises you find.
4. Look for ways to take advantage of the surprises.

My Discovery Using Fleming’s Methods

Although I did not realize I was using Fleming’s methods at the time, I discovered the idea for this post following the same principles as Fleming. It was no accident that I stumbled upon the lab that led to the story that inspired this post. Here’s an example of Fleming’s method at work:

Create Opportunity to Be Surprised

• I was on a layover in London while returning home from Zürich on the last leg of my round-the-world sabbatical trip. I had not intended to visit the lab, but I had made the decision to make the most of my time on this once-in-a-lifetime trip by taking every opportunity to explore. So when I had two extra hours available before I needed to leave for Heathrow airport, instead of killing time at the airport or the hotel I got out my GPS and looked to see what tourist attractions were nearby. Fleming’s lab was the closest attraction and it was only a mile a way. Using the GPS as my guide, I walked to St. Mary’s Hospital and found the museum.

Be on the Lookout for Surprising Things

• As the guide told the story of Fleming’s discovery, he made it clear that Fleming had deliberately left the cultures out after he finished his experiments with them. He said it was not a case of being messy, but that this was his usual practice. That I found surprising.

Be Curious about the Surprises You Find

• I had never heard this aspect of the story before, so I asked why he would do that. That’s when I heard about his looking for the unexpected. This was a surprising idea because I thought scientists always had some concept of what they were looking for, an hypothesis to prove or disprove. Simply putting something ‘out there’ to see what happens is quite different from the scientific method I learned in high school.

Look For Ways to Take Advantage of the Surprises

• I was not expecting to find something to blog about in that two extra hours I had, but as I heard the true story behind the discovery of penicillin I realized I had accidentally discovered a great leadership practice just as Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin and I should share it on this blog.

My ‘Accidents’ at CCCC

When I arrived at CCCC in September 2003, I decided to provide leadership that was open to opportunity. In fact, we would search it out. I decided that we would be willing to shift priorities based on comparing new opportunities with our current action plan. To make this happen, the board and staff were told our action plans were simply default plans that we would follow as long as nothing better came up. Then staff performance review criteria were set based on exhibiting our team values rather than reaching pre-set goals. That way we could be flexible and nimble. Here are a few examples of how that has worked out:

• CCCC sponsors the Best Christian Workplace survey in Canada, and it all started because I just ‘happened’ to be attending a conference in the States where I saw the second annual presentation of awards for the American Best Christian Workplace survey. But I was at the conference because I was looking to see what’s new and different, so I set the stage for opportunity. I immediately connected what I saw with what I thought Canadian ministries needed because I was already on the alert for new ideas. Within a couple of weeks, we had an agreement to do it in Canada. I took action on an idea instead of just thinking, “That was interesting.”
• CCCC was a partner in the 35<35 program that recognized young Christian leaders because I just ‘happened’ to run into Carson Pue in a hotel hallway. But I attend EFC’s Presidents Day each year because it is the best place for me to meet a lot of ministry leaders at one time when I have no responsibilities of my own to attend to. I was open to some collaborative work and wanted to talk with as many people as I could about what they are doing. When Carson Pue and I crossed paths, we chatted a bit and when he asked what was on my mind, I told him we wanted to do something to recognize and encourage young Christian leaders at our next conference. Wouldn’t you know it, he was wanting to find some partners to promote young leaders too and he had the idea for the 35<35 recognition program. That turned out to be a great success for both of us (and Bridgeway Foundation and Christian Week—our other partners in that program).
• Jerry White, International President Emeritus of The Navigators, is probably the highest ranked speaker we’ve ever had at our conference. I ‘happened’ to have a personal connection with him that made me think of him as a speaker. But I didn’t just ‘happen’ to meet him. While writing my first doctoral research project in 2005 I was critiquing his 1983 book on my topic and I wondered if this author were still alive. I tracked him down, and since then we’ve met a couple of times and had some phone calls, and he ended up not only speaking at the CCCC conference but also writing the foreword for my new book, The Church at Work. Lots of good has come about because I didn’t just read and critique a book but took the additional step of contacting the author, not knowing at the time what was going to come of it. I had no expectations at the beginning that anything would develop. I just thought Jerry would be an interesting person to talk with and get to know. But that created the environment in which other good things could develop.
• Our horizons at CCCC are rapidly expanding as other staff members are also creating intentional opportunities for ‘accidental’ discoveries!

Creating Intentional Accidents at Your Ministry

How much do you leave out to see “what might happen?” In what ways do you create opportunity to be surprised? To find opportunity you did not know existed? Do you have an intentional plan to find the unexpected? Some things you could do are:

• Talk with people outside of your usual circles who might introduce a new idea from their sphere into your sphere.
• Investigate what beneficiaries or clients do outside of your programs that might affect your program design.
• Read a good book like The Eureka Effect, to stimulate your creativity.
• Encourage your team to experiment on their own and be willing to try a small-scale pilot project.
• Visit unrelated ministries doing a different part of the Christian mission and find out what’s new with them.
• Just tell everyone you meet what your ministry does. The more people who know about you, the more you are likely to hear about opportunities.
• If you have field staff, pay close attention to what they are actually doing. You’ll probably find a lot of good creativity on the front lines!
• And of course, pray hard that God would bring unexpected opportunities your way!

You can never know in advance, of course, what will be discovered by following a strategy of intentional accidental discoveries, but that’s the fun and amazing part of it! All you know at the start is that discoveries will be more likely because you have put yourself in a place that is conducive to discovery. You won’t believe what good things will happen once you set the ball in motion by stepping outside of your zone. Just watch what develops!

I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of how to make accidental discoveries more likely. Please add your own ideas.

The post The Strategy of Intentional Accidents appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

I wanted to practice being curious on this trip. To be more observant so I would maximize every moment. That meant that I had to really listen to the people I spoke with, and then ask good open-ended follow-up questions. It also meant keeping my senses alert as I was busy doing what I had planned to do. I had to be ready to go off schedule. In the end, I had a whole lot of unplanned but very welcome experiences. It made me think that practising curiosity in our teams could be a great way to bolster creativity in our ministries!

Here are the unplanned things I did just during my time in the U.K.

Abbotsford

After visiting Melrose Abbey I left the town and passed a sign for Abbotsford, the country home of Sir Walter Scott. I know very little of Scott, but I always enjoy seeing a house so I thought “Why not?” It was only a few minutes away so off I went. What a delight! He built it new but made it look quite old, like a sixteenth century manor house. It was a beautiful property.

Inverary Castle

I planned to drive from Edinburgh to Inverary, even though my destination was Paisley, because I wanted to get a bit further north and see, if not the Highlands, at least the semi-Highlands (or whatever this region is called). The road to Inverary zigged and zagged through the increasingly steeper and higher hills with lochs in-between them. It reminded me of the drive north from Vancouver to Whistler, except that these hills are not the Rockies of course. But the effect they have is similar.

As I rounded the head of the last loch before Inverary, I caught a glimpse off to my right of a castle. I thought, “Whoa, I should check this out.” The driveway into the park was just around the corner and the sign said the castle was open. So I went and saw Inverary Castle, which is owned by the thirteenth Duke of Argyle, a man about forty years old who inherited the castle, £40 million and a whole lot more. He married a daughter of the famous Cadbury family, so they’re not wanting for anything, yet they each have day jobs in London, which is where they live. They stay at the castle a few times a year. The central room in the castle is the armoury, which has a very impressive display of pikes, swords, rifles and the like, all beautifully arranged. But this room is impressive for another reason. It has the highest ceiling of any residence in Scotland for sure, and I think in Britain as well. The ceiling is an astounding 30 metres over your head! Not only that, but somehow the family’s coat-of-arms is painted on it too.

Wesley’s Chapel

While in London, walking several blocks to see Peter Gentle’s house (an ancestor of mine), I saw the back of what looked like a very interesting church. I decided that on my return walk I would walk back one block further over to see the front of it when I returned. It turned out to be the church that Wesley built once it was clear that the break with the Church of England was permanent. He continued itinerant preaching most of the year, but during the winters preached here. It is a beautiful church. It has the widest unsupported roof span of any Georgian building (no posts). Very impressive. The posts that hold up the balcony were originally all ships masts. King George III gave used masts from old Royal Navy ships to Wesley for this purpose. One original post still exists in the narthex.

Famous Graves

I saw a lot of graves of famous people mostly because their locations were mentioned in guidebooks that I purchased. These graves were not at the sites I was visiting, but nearby, so I went to see them.

While at Blenheim, I went to Winston Churchill’s grave.

While in Oxford, I went to two nearby towns to see the graves of Tolkien and Lewis.

While visiting John Wesley’s church, I talked with a person who mentioned as I was leaving, “Would you like to see Wesley’s grave?” It was right there in the churchyard. This conversation only happened because I originally approached her with a question, and I would have kicked myself later to discover it had been so close and yet to have missed it. An office building has been built on most of what used to be the burial ground with the result that Wesley’s grave is surrounded on three sides by offices. I thought this was strangely appropriate, given his desire in life to go to where the people are. When I mentioned this to the lady, she said just the other day someone from one of the offices came to see the church because he had been looking down at it from his office window for several years and thought he should finally see what the church is all about. The secular and sacred come together at Wesley’s final resting place.

I saw Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery by looking around while walking to yet another ancestor’s grave. You can’t miss Marx because a huge bust of his head sits atop his tombstone. It is so oversized I don’t know how it has stayed on.

While looking for Tolkien’s grave I found the saddest monument I think I’ve ever seen. This very touching tombstone is a heart broken in two. One half is blank, and the other half says:

In loving memory of Andrew Dunsmuir, a loving husband and devoted dad taken from us 16.7.2002 aged 41.

Glasgow Cathedral, Necropolis, and Knox Monument

While in Paisley, I was chatting with the host at the bed & breakfast when he suggested that I go see downtown Glasgow. I hadn’t planned to, but I did. As a result, I discovered the cathedral, which was impressive on its own, but then from there I heard about the Necropolis, so I walked over to see that, and at the top I discovered a monument to John Knox that actually pre-existed the Necropolis. If what I read online is correct, John Knox is buried at St. Gile’s Cathedral, which I visited, but the burial ground is covered now by a parking lot, and he is buried under spot #23. This monument in the Necropolis is probably the best memorial you will find for him.

Royal Wedding

I was listening to the early morning lead up to the Royal Wedding on the radio while driving to Renfrew and Tollcross (in Scotland) and decided to pop back to my room to watch it on TV. I thought “Future king, don’t have to get up early, I like pageantry, I’m in the U.K., I should see it.” Because I was spontaneous I had the surprise delight of saying, “Hey, I know that man!” when I saw who was leading the service. It was the Bishop of London, who had given me Communion just the week before at St. Paul’s. Well, I don’t really know know him, and he certainly doesn’t know me, but I had a legitimate connection to him. So I felt part of the wedding service. Okay, smile. I have my tongue firmly in my cheek!

Greenwich Observatory

Because an out-of-town appointment was moved to London, I had some extra time. I was tempted to stay at my bed & breakfast and catch up on my blogging, but then I thought I should make hay while the sun is shining, so I went to Greenwich and looked around. The observatory was interesting even though there really isn’t much there to see. There is the Prime Meridian line of course, so you can stand in two hemispheres, East and West, at the same time.

I hadn’t realized how supportive King George III was of science. He provided the telescopes for the second Royal Astronomer after the first took his own personal telescopes with him when he retired. The scientific purpose of King George’s gift was for the Royal Astronomer to find a better way for ships to know where they are. They could figure out the latitude easily enough, but had no way to know, when away from the shoreline, what their longitude was. The invention of a way to find one’s exact longitude is the legacy of the observatory.

I’ve forgotten the connection, if any, between General Wolfe and Greenwich, but Canada erected a statue in Wolfe’s honour that has a prominent place near the observatory.

Country Estates

After a meeting in Oxford, curiosity led me to check for tourist attractions near the route home. I found a house called Grey’s Court and went to see it. It offered a look at how a mid-twentieth century upper-class family lived in a very old country house. The house was quite plain and simple (although large and with a lot of land), but since it was frozen in time in the 1920s or so, it was quite interesting.

There was some sheet music on the piano of a WWI musical revue called The Bing Boys Are Here, one of the most successful musical hits on the London stage during the war. This was a great find because it was this revue that inspired the Canadians on the battlefields of WWI to call themselves Byng’s Boys in honour of their commander, General Sir Julian Byng (later a Governor-General of Canada).

While at Grey’s Court, I saw a brochure for Hughenden, a much larger estate and the home of Benjamin Disraeli. It wasn’t too far away either, and it was open long enough that I had time to tour it too. So off I went. And of course, I discovered that he is buried at the nearby church, so I saw his grave too.

Disraeli appears to be quite an interesting fellow. He was a Liberal politician, and his great political nemesis was William Gladstone, a Conservative. They went at it tooth and nail for over fifty years I believe. I bought a book about their relationship after reading this quip from Disraeli:

The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.

Concluding Thought

So, being curious gave me many very good memories. Now, let’s practise being curious at work and see what develops.

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My Left Brain Post

In 1983 a book was published that still has a huge influence on me today: A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative. I was in my first job after graduating in 1980, working at the Canadian Industrial Innovation Centre at the University of Waterloo. I think that I had a reasonably good mind at the time, but this book helped me realize that it worked in a thoroughly logical and linear manner. I was dealing with people who were highly creative and who came up with things that involved what we call today lateral thinking. Somehow they could break out of the paradigms in which logic and natural progression reign and which normally produce incrementalism rather than breakthroughs.

Incrementalism is great. In fact, in the absence of a breakthrough, there is nothing better! Incrementalism is a low risk way of moving forward. But it definitely limits opportunity to just a miniscule part of what it could be. The full range of opportunity goes instead to those who think differently, because the way they think creates opportunity rather than waiting for opportunity to present itself. They use imagination as the spark to ignite creative thinking, open up new opportunities, and expand their potential.

What happens more or less naturally for right-brain thinkers can be developed systematically by left-brain thinkers. Here are some core strategies for stimulating imagination and creative thinking:

• Ask “Why?” Answer the question and then ask why again. Repeat seven times and you’ll finally get to the depth of thought that can lead to breakthrough thinking.
• Get far away from your own area of expertise. If you are in ministry, get to know some engineers. If you are a management type, befriend some artists (and don’t forget to feed them!). If you live somewhere (anywhere), get on a plane and go somewhere else for a weekend that requires a passport and see what’s different there (thanks to Richard Adair, my second boss, for this one). Read a book or subscribe to a magazine that is way outside your field. The best advise I ever got from a business professor (Dr. Cosmo Marchant at WLU) was to always subscribe to a general science magazine just because it’s not business-related.
• When you think you know how to do something, ask “What’s the second best way to do it?”
• Tackle the opposite problem. Instead of wondering how to grow bigger, think about how you could shrink your ministry into oblivion. Then do the opposite! How would you put yourself out of business?
• Reframe the issue. Cast it from a different perspective. Is it a fundraising issue or is it about developing a movement to accomplish a mission? Who else has addressed that issue? At CCCC, for example, we want to help (among others) volunteer church treasurers. Is this primarily an education issue? Or is the real issue how to communicate with them? How do you address the problem of people who may not know enough to know they need to know more than they do? Who else has dealt with similar problems? Ask someone from outside your sector (who has different assumptions) how they would frame the issue. I wonder how development ministries educated Third World community leaders about changing community practices related to health issues, such as clean water or HIV/AIDS? Can CCCC learn something new from their experience? I’m sure it could.

What these strategies have in common is that they are all designed to get your imagination working.

• Just thinking about the future does not require imagination. After all, forecasting is simply describing the future based upon a careful, logical analysis of the past and present. It is incremental at best and requires little imagination.
• Imagination describes the future based upon a willingness to break the boundaries and shatter your assumptions. Imagination creates opportunity based upon the what-ifs and why-nots.
• Peter Drucker, in one of his many books, described a middle-way which involved an analysis that looks for the futurity of factors developing in the present. In other words, finding the seeds of discontinuity that exist today and extrapolating their potential future impact. If you can get that far, you have described a future scenario. The next step is to imagine how you can fulfill your mission in that scenario.

Perhaps the easiest way to kick-start your imagination is to complete the sentence that starts with the simple words, “I wish…”

My Right-Brain Post

This is from the book of poems I am reading called Leading from Within: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead.

Spring Azures by Mary Oliver

In spring the blue azures bow down
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the
fields.

Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows–
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking–

don’t seem enough to carry me through this
world
and I think: how I would like

to have wings–
blue ones–
ribbons of flame.

How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.

And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and
sweat of London–a boy
staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.

Of course, he screamed,
seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.

Well, who knows.
Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.

Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up
and turned away from the sooty sill and the
dark city–
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,

to a life of the imagination.

Synthesis for Whole-Brain Thinking

Well, let me try my hand at a left-brain summary of this post expressed in a right-brain manner.

Opportunity’s Genesis by John Pellowe

This is the way.
Let’s do more of it.
We’ll tinker just a little bit.

Why aren’t we there yet?

Imagination.
It’s good.
Stimulate it.
Use it.

What if?
Why not?
I wish…

Bonus Factoid

For those confused as to who Blake is, he is William Blake the English poet, who as a four-year-old boy thought he saw God’s face outside a window. It terrified him. I don’t know his poetry, thought or life beyond a cursory review of Wikipedia, but suffice to say he is a complicated person! Anyhow, the point is… no, I won’t give the point. He was referred to in the right-brain post, and you should be able to figure that out for yourself.

Blessings!

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I remember that as the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony orchestra¹ took their seats in the pit, my wife expressed surprise at how small it was (about 30 people I think, a lot fewer than the number in the YouTube performance I linked to above). She imagined that unmic’d orchestras must have a lot more people to get the rich sound that was on the record. And then, only a few bars into the overture, she whispered in amazement “That sounds just like the record!!!”  Yes, a small group of people produced a very large sound. In fact, they sounded just like a ‘real’ orchestra!

Size and Impact

It’s amazing what a small group can do that is out of all proportion to its size. Think about the dozen apostles. About Paul and his missionary team. A small group can change the world! One of my staff members said that at CCCC “we are a small team doing big things.” I love that thought!

The dream of many small ministries, while often not stated, is to become a big ministry. At CCCC, we have close to 10% of all Christian ministries as members, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be 100%! Thinking like this, though, focuses your attention on how small you are now. And then you run the risk of wondering if you are really accomplishing anything as a small ministry. This angst could become an impediment to your current success. I’d like to say a few encouraging words to the smaller ministries of Canada (next post I’ll say something to the larger ministries). What I’m going to say could apply to larger ministries too, but they have to work a lot harder than smaller ministries to get these advantages.

The fact is that Christian ministries in Canada are very small. Based on the 22,000 T3010’s for Christian ministries that we have in our database at CCCC (and assuming they are correctly filled out):

• 80% have less than $300,000 in total revenue, and about half have less than $100,000.
• 80% have four or fewer employees, and about half have exactly one staff member.
  • 105 report no employees at all (just volunteers).
  • 16% say they have two employees.
  • 93.5% have nine or fewer paid staff.

Encouragement for Small Ministries

Given our small size, here are some things to remember:

• God delights in working through the unlikely, which means he likes to work with the small group that the world might not pay attention to. In Deut. 7:7-8 Moses says to Israel, “The LORD did not set his love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you….” God did not take the larger nations of Egypt, Assyria or Babylon as his people; he took a people and made them his people, not because of their might, their size, or their importance in the world, but just because he loved them. You don’t have to be big for God to work through you. Work at your ministry with all you’ve got, knowing that God works through underdogs like a young shepherd boy, a group of country-bumpkin Galileans (at least according to the priests of Jerusalem), and a timid young pastor named Timothy.
• God likes to work in ways that make it clear it is him who is the source of success, not humans. The best example of this is in Judges 7, where the LORD says to Gideon, “The people who are with you are too many for me to give Midian into their hands, for Israel would become boastful, saying, ‘My own power has delivered me.'” The group of 22,000 men gets whittled down to 300, an appropriately small number to prove that they are fighting under the power of God and not under their own strength. Although a small ministry, and maybe because you are a small ministry, God may use you to demonstrate his activity in our world. When the job is so big that you can’t do it, then you know that your accomplishments are God’s. So work hard, knowing that God is working beside you and around you in ways you may not even know, but be assured he will accomplish his purposes for calling you into ministry.
• Being a small ministry, you are much more likely to think carefully about which programs and services to continue offering. You can’t afford to carry anything forward just because it’s part of your routine. You can’t throw money or people at your opportunities, since you don’t have the capacity to do that, so you must choose carefully how to use the precious resources you have, pruning old programs to make way for new programs. By always focusing on the best use of your limited resources, you will likely have a very effective and efficient ministry.
• You are more likely to find creative ways to stretch your influence, by partnering with others or drawing on volunteers, because you have to. My first boss, Richard Adair, believed the secret to success as a small entrepreneur is to ride the coat-tails of a larger company. They do the heavy work of acquiring the customer, for example, and you simply provide the add-on to the sale. As a small ministry, your calling might be to serve specialized, small niches that the larger organizations have missed while focusing on the more general and broader needs. You might be a specialty add-on to the services provided by larger organizations.
• Small ministries don’t have the resources to develop a bureaucracy, so it is easier to have a creative entrepreneurial environment. Small ministries can be the ‘skunk works’ of Christian ministry, the testing ground for new ideas. Encourage innovation.
• As a small organization, you will probably be able to respond quicker to issues or changes in the environment. You can be fast on your feet and quick to exploit new opportunities. Create an organizational culture that supports change.
• In a flat organization, you can communicate more easily with your staff than a large organization can, and you can also involve them in decisions and planning that they might not experience in a large ministry. Staff will likely have greater variety in their work because the jobs have to be broader in scope to make up for the limited number of employees. In addition, you will likely empower your team more and delegate more to them (out of necessity), thus giving you an advantage in hiring people because they will be able to use more of their talents and have more influence over their work than elsewhere.
• The environment of a small ministry is very motivational in and of itself for your team members because all of them are very close to the ministry’s results and they can see the fruit of their labour for themselves. There is nothing like appreciative feedback to spur you on. It is astonishing how many compliments the CCCC gets, and I make sure that all the staff share the compliments with the team so that we can all be encouraged by them.

As with any ministry, don’t measure your success in terms of growth or size, but in terms of how well you are fulfilling your mission. God created your ministry to assist with his mission, so progressively fulfilling the specific part of his mission that you are called to serve is the way you should assess your success.

Finally, when you feel you are small and struggling along by yourself, remember God’s promise that is so important that it appears not once, but four times in scripture (Deut 31:6, 31:8, Josh 1:5 and Heb 13:5): “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

May God richly bless your ministry!

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