With Everything (Elevation Remix) – by Hillsong United from Elevation Worship on Vimeo.

The quality of music coming out of Elevation Church is truly remarkable especially when you consider many of the risks they take regarding instrumentation. Check out their Vimeo page to see more.

Quoting the original article:

This unexpected, spontaneous, and scripted dance (aka Flash dance) was performed by over twenty thousand people. How did they do it?

1. Planners recruited 800 people using Facebook and Twitter
2. Choreographers taught a simple dance to these 800 “dancers”
3. Dancers were planted amongst the crowd, who then the dance to the people around them
4. Music started playing, people started dancing.

One person doing the dance is funny. 100 people in the front of the stage doing the dance is entertaining. Everybody doing the dance in unison is amazing.

The first few chapters are all about counting the people of Israel. This tribe has 60,000 people. That tribe has 40,000 people. With twelve tribes to go through, the lists of numbers and names of people can get tedious.

But once again, God proved himself faithful by showing me something I hadn’t thought of before. In chapter 2, God tells Moses to arrange all the people into their tribal camps around the Tabernacle. We are told which tribes should be on the east, west, north and south, but we are also told who the leaders should be and how many people there are.

Here’s an example:

On the east, toward the sunrise, the divisions of the camp of Judah are to encamp under their standard. The leader of the people of Judah is Nahshon son of Amminadab. His division numbers 74,600. — Numbers 2:3-4

The people are given position leadership and identity. That is, they are told where they should be, who will be their leader, and whom they should consider to be among them (the 74,600 people).

For some time, I have been laboring under the somewhat misguided notion that to be a “simple” church, we had to deemphasize organizational structure. The postmodern (and somewhat ADD) side of me doesn’t like rigid structures anyway, but in many respects, I have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I have allowed “simplicity” to be an excuse for failing to actually organize people with specific position, leadership, and identity.

The truth of the matter is that without those three things, there is no group at all.

This has been made more clear to me in the last few weeks. Up until this summer, we have basically been surviving as a church by the fact that one person was doing all the hospitality stuff, one person was doing all the sound stuff, we had a few teams loosely led, and we have a pretty well-organized children’s ministry, but as more people started coming and wanting to get involved, the hospitality team seemed like the most natural early fit, and the influx of new people has revealed a few gaps in our organizational structure.

So, I have been inspired recently to get more focused on organizational issues, and my reading today dovetails perfectly with that. If I can gain from what God showed me this morning, I will be developing greater clarity on the identity, position, and leadership of the different teams in the church.

Hold my feet to the fire; we gotta get this done!

In conflict situations, I like to ask a few questions:

• Describe all the sin in this conflict. Who has committed sin and what is the exact nature of each sin? (the goal is to seek reconciliation with God and forgiveness from each other over sins committed)

• Describe all the pain in this conflict NOT CAUSED BY SIN. What actions caused your pain and why were they so painful? (the goal is to get people to explore their own inner life not blame others or air dirty laundry. The WHY is powerful.)

• Describe the goals and desired outcomes on both sides. What is the bigger picture, the vision, and how do we get there now? (the goal is to establish a plan of action and guidelines for future relationship through listening to each other’s joys, hopes, needs, and dreams)

After all, as believers in Christ, we know the power of forgiveness, we have the presence of the Holy Spirit, and we have a purpose that goes far beyond our petty differences.

nanowrimo.org

Have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo? I hadn’t heard of it until last year during the middle of November and by then it was too late for me to get into it, but the basic idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in the span of 30 days.

Now, if you are like I was, you probably are initially thinking that such an effort would be simultaneously grueling and pointless.

However, as a public communicator, I have become fascinated in recent years at how powerful fiction is, and I want to learn it for myself.

So, I have been thinking for a while now that I should try to write some fiction, and now this opportunity comes along for me to pull on my naturally competitive bent to accomplish something I’ve wanted to do for a long time…

So, I’m going to give it a shot.

I’ll have to average 1,667 words per day for the next 30 days, and I have no idea if I will be able to make it all the way through. I rarely finish big projects that I start.

I’m going to need some encouragement, so if you want to read what I write, let me know and hold me accountable!

I’m uploading both brochures here for your use if you want.

• LCC Baptism Brochure
• LCC Information Brochure

CHOOSE WELL – Series Concept

• Title: Choose Well
• Subtitle: { four questions to guarantee good choices }
• Felt need: Whether it’s during the time of an election or not, people feel a sense of anxiety when it comes to making decisions. The larger the decisions, the more anxiety is felt. Everyone needs a framework for decision-making that gives confidence in the eventual choice that’s made.
• Topic Structure:
  • What is God’s Will (and how can I know it)? — The Most Important Question of All
  • What do wise people say (and who should I ask)? — Who can I trust for advice?
  • What does my heart say (and can I trust it)? — When can I do what I want?
  • Am I choosing on my own (and is that okay)? — When should I go out on a limb?
• Postcard:

Give me some feedback!

1. What is your greatest moral failure, and what is the greatest moral failure of the USA?
2. What current Supreme Court justice(s) would you not have appointed?

Watch it for yourself and then watch the commentary afterwards by the CNN reporters and see a new kind of political debate take shape prompted by the creativity and courage of Rick Warren and Saddleback Church.

PS. If the video below doesn’t work, try visiting the link below it.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/16/warren.forum/index.html

http://churchrelevance.com/resources/churches-to-watch/

On the printed front, we have been using Apple’s Pages for basic word processing and simple page design and Serif PagePlus 11 which is exponentially greater than anything else in its price range ($50 for features that easily surpass Microsoft Publisher and even rival PageMaker or Quark). However, that’s for another blog entry. On to what we do for video now and what our next steps are.

Video Presentation Hardware

• 15″ MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / 1GB RAM
• Draper Traveller portable projection screen with High Contrast Gray screen material.
• DLP Projector (I don’t remember the specs right now).

Software

• ProPresenter 3.3.8 by RenewedVision.
• Keynote 3

Description

ProPresenter is the best program we have found to display lyrics on the screen. It’s very easy to learn with only a few quirks that take getting used to. Together with the Mac, it is unbeatable in terms of visual quality of the text even with full motion high resolution video images in the background. On top of that, the programmers are very responsive to requests for improvements, and the software was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of touring worship bands like Chris Tomlin and David Crowder.

Keynote is the hands down winner in presentation software that understands the line between attention-getting and cheesy. Transitions, fades, and slide builds are unmatched in PowerPoint because Keynote does what it does with subtlety. It’s also much easier to work with once you learn a couple of its quirks.

Our current setup has us running ProPresenter and Keynote simultaneously on the MacBook Pro. ProPresenter takes over the projector screen and turns it black while waiting for us to begin. Navigation is done on the laptop screen, but lyrics and backgrounds are sent to the secondary display.

Just before my message, we hit F1 in ProPresenter to black out the projection screen, switch to Keynote without closing ProPresenter (the projection screen stays black during and after the switch), and hit “Play” on my sermon Keynote file. Keynote takes over the projection screen with my slides and also displays a “Presenter View” on the laptop screen. We turn the laptop to face me, so I can see my current slide and my next slide without ever needing to look over my shoulder.

Next Steps

Now that we are meeting in the Long Center (a larger venue), we want to make some changes to our setup so we stay on the excellent side of things.

1. Replace our screen with a larger rear projection screen. We’re looking at the Draper Cinefold and Draper Ultimate series of screens for this.
2. Consider upgrading our projector depending on its performance with the new screen. Most likely, we will just need to buy a new bulb.
3. Purchase a new Mac to put in the sound booth. It needs to have dual external monitor capability, and the only Macs to have that now are Mac Pro computers or Psystar Open Computer Macintosh clones.
4. Split the monitor signal from each monitor out to drive four displays (1). The monitor in the sound booth, (2). the projector on stage, (3) One monitor in front row pointing to stage duplicating what’s on the projector screen. (4) One monitor in front row pointing to the stage duplicating what’s on the screen in the sound booth. That way, the stage-facing monitors will show what’s on the screen and also show the “Presenter View” that Keynote can display.
5. Use VGA cables or a VGA over CAT5e system to get video signal to the stage from the booth.

Final thoughts

If anyone is reading this post thinking that technology will save your bad presentations, think again. Websites like http://presentationzen.com are a great resource to help you rethink the how and the why of your presentations. Technology can make your presentations more effective, but it isn’t guaranteed to do so.

I have never known the man to deliver a riveting speech, but the text of this address is profound nonetheless. He of course reports on the various successes that his programs and policies have brought about over the past 7 years and he encourages Congress to simply continue all they have been doing. He proposes one or two new concepts, but by and large, it’s all about continuing to do what has already been done.

However, there was an obviously strong theme running through the entire speech: Trust.

Here’s the key paragraph:

In the work ahead, we must be guided by the philosophy that made our nation great. As Americans, we believe in the power of individuals to determine their destiny and shape the course of history. We believe that the most reliable guide for our country is the collective wisdom of ordinary citizens. So in all we do, we must trust in the ability of free people to make wise decisions, and empower them to improve their lives and their futures.

The beginning of every following theme was a statement on what we should trust.

• …trust the people with their own money…
• …earn their trust by spending tax dollars wisely… (with a clear challenge to congressional earmarks)
• …trust patients and doctors to make medical decisions…
• …trust students to learn if given the chance…

One of my favorite parts was in his discussion of making the tax relief permanent.

We have other work to do on taxes. Unless the Congress acts, most of the tax relief we have delivered over the past 7 years will be taken away. Some in Washington argue that letting tax relief expire is not a tax increase. Try explaining that to 116 million American taxpayers who would see their taxes rise by an average of $1,800. Others have said they would personally be happy to pay higher taxes. I welcome their enthusiasm, and I am pleased to report that the IRS accepts both checks and money orders.

He had a pretty good “I told you so” moment when talking about scientific research over stem cells.

On matters of science and life, we must trust in the innovative spirit of medical researchers and empower them to discover new treatments while respecting moral boundaries. In November, we witnessed a landmark achievement when scientists discovered a way to reprogram adult skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells. This breakthrough has the potential to move us beyond the divisive debates of the past by extending the frontiers of medicine without the destruction of human life. So we are expanding funding for this type of ethical medical research. And as we explore promising avenues of research, we must also ensure that all life is treated with the dignity it deserves. So I call on the Congress to pass legislation that bans unethical practices such as the buying, selling, patenting, or cloning of human life.

Whom should we trust?

Of course, as a pastor, I am always thinking of the deeper implications of our culture and our words, and I’m thinking especially about the philosophy quoted at the beginning of the speech.

We believe that the most reliable guide for our country is the collective wisdom of ordinary citizens.

There is no doubt that this philosophy has been the most powerfully successful governmental philosophy of the last 1000 years, economically speaking. But the question I have is whether this has been the best philosophy morally and spiritually. Don’t get me wrong! I’m glad this is the philosophy of our country. This very thought gives me the freedom to follow God fully with my life, and I would not change it for the world.

Nevertheless, this philosophy is based upon the notion that collective humanity is inherently good and wise, and we should remember that humans are still deeply scarred with sin. I am grateful to God that He has given us his grace enough so that despite the ravaging effects of sin, our reason and our conscience remain relatively able to deal with issues of governance.

But what about the moral issues? I find it interesting that were it not for a single individual at the top level of our government, the concept of using human embryos for stem cells would have been considered a “no-brainer” “done-deal” issue. However, the moral fiber of a single man put a ban on that kind of research which forced new kinds of research and the discovery of new ways to develop stem cells. That’s just an example.

So here’s the $64,000 question. Concerning which issues can the collective wisdom of the people be trusted? As a sideline question, who gets to determine which issues are “collective” issues and which issues are “moral leader” issues?

If you have 20 minutes, I encourage you to read through it all and leave your comments here on what you think.

Anyway, because I have such high dreams for the WHY campaign, I’m really motivated to get a lot accomplished this week. Here are the big things I want to accomplish:

Church Goals

• Get my sermon outlines for the next two weeks done by Wednesday
• Get my sermon for this week completed by Friday.
• Create a script for the entire morning.
• Recruit some people for a small group at my house
• Recruit some people for a small group at the Skylight
• Make phone calls to 50 households
• Mail promotional post cards
• Get an ad in Saturday’s paper.
• Meet with Greg, Kyle and Josh to continue our triad discipleship group.
• Pray, pray, pray.

Personal Goals

• Apply for server job at 4 restaurants.
• Spend fun time each day with family.
• Have Saturday 100% off!!
• Post a blog entry of some kind every day
• Have my neighbors over for dinner.
• Get all the family financial records up to date.
• Re-Install Windows on the kids’ computer. (Is that really necessary?)
• Set up a home asterisk server to save us on phone charges (all true geeks will know what asterisk is).

What do you think?

So how much of this do you think I can accomplish in one week? Am I shooting too high? Do you think it’s even possible to get this much done? I don’t think I’ve ever done EVERYTHING on my to do list in one week, but it will be interesting to see if I can.

Let me hear what you think. What do you accomplish on your most productive weeks?

Here’s my productivity list for last Wednesday (July 24):

• Read about internet marketing — 60 mins.
• Blogged my Monday productivity — 15 mins.
• Devotion and Prayer — 10 mins.
• fix look of blog and add comments — 10 mins.
• Completed survey for research project on church planters — 40 mins.
• Lunch and playing with Charlie — 1.25 hrs.
• Processing voicemail and cleaning out email Inbox (finally) — 3 hrs.
• Phone calls throughout the afternoon — 30 mins.
• Evening phone calls — 60 mins.

(I didn’t even get a list done for Thursday.)

Analysis of the week

At the end of last week and throughout the week, I determined that productivity for me isn’t something I can just willpower my way into. I’m generally a very active person mentally, and my tendency to be distracted means that I’m regularly failing to finish projects all the way. I didn’t even get all my daily blog entries written last week (and it’s already Wednesday of this week!)

All in all, I think it was a good experiment, and I hope that some of the more obvious things I’ve learned will help me be more productive.

Things I Learned

As a result, here are some of the things I’ve learned:

1. Productivity for me will not happen without a list of daily goals. More specifically, as I looked at the list of things I actually did each day, I realized that though many of them were beneficial to my overall ministry, not many of them were essential or high priority items.

2. Productivity for me will not happen in a “distractable” environment. My tendencies toward ADD make it very easy for me to follow mental rabbit trails. For example, reading my email through Gmail leads to me seeing news clips that interest me. Thinking that I can read the story in only a few seconds, I click on the link, but that story will have other links to more information, and before I know it, I’m deeply embedded in open Firefox tabs with a sense that I have to read them all before I can get back to answering that email.

3. The mundane, mindless, routine tasks of ministry are the most dangerous for time-wasting because during those tasks, my brain is allowed to work overtime on discovering rabbit trails. For example, while my weekly sermon is being encoded and uploaded to the Internet Archive, I can do other things with the computer and that usually means frittering.

4. The biggest thing I learned is that the most important tasks on my todo list create a kind of paralyzing guilt that hampers my productivity.

Let me explain that last point. I need to write a sermon every week for church on Sunday. I know that the process of writing a really good sermon takes me about 20 hours, but that I can create a pretty good sermon in only 8 hours. As a result, something very strange happens in my mind as the week moves on.

If I don’t get an early start on my message, I face a daily increasing level of stress as the week moves on. Because I feel so much pressure to get my message done, I feel guilty doing any other ministry. I don’t want to meet with people, I don’t want to make phone calls, and I don’t want to have any meetings because to do any of those things feels like I’m stealing from sermon prep time. If I do some ministry that isn’t sermon prep, I actually feel guilty and unproductive. However, if I put in a 4 hour block of time on my sermon, I feel the logistical pressure of needing to make phone calls, meet with people, and call meetings. So working on my sermon feels like stealing from other ministry.

My problem is that I have no internal sense of process. For me, everything is right now and nothing that should be done should wait to be done. As a result, I simply can never determine emotionally which ministry I should do right now. Make phone calls or work on sermon. Whichever I choose, I end up feeling guilty that I didn’t do the other one. I’ve been this way for long enough that I’ve grown to expect it and anticipate the guilty feeling even before I’ve made the choice and quite often the end result is that I do neither. I escape into family time, reading time, web browsing, email or mindless routine items.

I just spent about 15 minutes browsing the ‘Net to see if there were any blogs that addressed procrastination, but I’m back now!

Strategy for Going Forward

To answer my four learning points above, I’m suggesting this to myself and to you as a possible strategy:

1. Set aside 4 hours each Monday for sermon prep without Internet access with a primary goal of getting draft sermon outlines done 2 weeks before the Sunday they are needed (I want to move this to 4 weeks before it’s needed).
2. Use Sunday afternoon to do sermon podcast stuff until I can recruit someone else to do that for me.
3. While the podcast is encoding/uploading on Sundays, I’ll make calls based on communication cards thus keeping me off the computer.
4. Each day, I’ll make a list of things to accomplish and identify which ones can happen on the computer and how long those will take.
5. BONUS: I don’t think I can make this happen because of the distractability thing, but I’d like to publish my daily todo list to the Internet so that I’ll be more accountable for how I spend my time.

• Devotional study of Psalm 116 (BI: Those who know God’s salvation respond with love.) — 30 minutes
• Prayer bike ride through a new neighborhood — 60 minutes
• Blog about my productivity experiment — 40 minutes
• Work on processing audio for Sunday’s sermon — 25 minutes
• Make lunch for kids and watch AFV with them — 60 minutes
• Finishing sermon audio process and upload — 30 minutes
• Reloaded home Email Server — 20 minutes
• Converted a Simpsons video for my Palm Pilot — 10 minutes
• Blogged my sermon — 10 minutes
• Made dinner for the kids and watched a movie with them — 2.5 hours
• Hanging out with Jen, working on miscellaneous household things for the rest of the evening.

Analysis

According to my productivity experiment, here’s how my day broke down.

Personal

• Prayer: 60 minutes
• Bible: 30 minutes
• Other Books: 0 minutes
• Total: 1.5 hours

Family

• Time with kids: 3.5 hours
• Time with Jen: 2 hours
• Total 5.5 hours

Mission

• Direct contact: 1 person (15 minutes)
• Spiritual conversation: 0
• Strategic planning : 0
• Total 15 minutes

Routine

• Managing home: 20 minutes (fixed email server)
• Managing church: 65 minutes (blogged Sunday’s sermon)
• Total 1.5 hours

Wow! As I look at this list, I’m thinking “That’s how I’m starting my week long productivity experiment?” It doesn’t look very productive to me. I’m going to have to do better.

Just yesterday, I preached a message on how we can actually find fulfillment in our pains and struggles, and I was thinking that something uncomfortable for me is the bearing down into a routine of productivity. Along those lines, I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about how much I’m really capable of and whether or not I’m really capable of more than I usually accomplish in a week.

Therefore, I’m embarking on a contest with myself to see just how productive I can be for only one week. (I like short sprints better than long races, so I’m telling myself that it will just be for this one week.)

My plan is simple. I intend to write one blog post every day detailing what I did that day according to a few key productivity markers. I’ve chosen these “markers” to be the measurables by which I can attempt to see daily improvement. However, these are in rough form right now, so I’m sure they will change over the course of this week or any other week I do this experiment.

Productivity Markers:

Personal

• How much time have I spent in prayer?
• How much time have I spent reading the Bible?
• How much time have I spent reading other books?

Family

• How much time have I spent with my kids?
• How much time have I spent with my wife?

Mission

• How many people have I had direct, personal contact with?
• How many people have I had a spiritual conversation with?
• How much time have I invested in strategic planning for the church?

Routine

• How much time have I invested in managing home details — and what did I accomplish?
• How much time have I invested in managing church details — and what do I have to show for it?

Suggestions? What are some of your suggestions for how I should be measuring my productivity?

1. Blog your city — Talk about upcoming city-wide events, upcoming service projects of your church, share photos of the city, neighborhoods. Use your blog to love on your city and her people. Click here for an example. 

2. Blog the news, pop culture, issues — Weigh in on these things with a biblical perspective (and, a loving one). Click here for an example. 

3. Blog on money and personal finance — That’s what this “anonymous” guy does on his blogs. He blogs on something dear to his heart — money — and his company — Moose Tracks Ice Cream — gets great publicity.

4. Blog on marriage, family, and parenting — Give tips, offer links to relevant news and reports, and, of course, your sermon series on those topics.

5. Blog devotional comments throughout week — Invariably you will come across golden nuggets of truth in your sermon preparation time that will not make it to the pulpit on Sunday. Use these chips of gold to take your people deeper into the Word.

Daniel Pink has written a very interesting book about the coming shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. He makes an interesting claim that the Information Age is already over and a new way of doing business has begun. The book is mostly about business principles, but it has a lot to say to churches and church leaders (something I’ll tackle in an upcoming post).

The Claim

The basic thesis of the book is that for the last century or so we have been developing a corporate society that is based on and dominated by what Pink calls “L-Directed Thinking” or a mindset that is predominately associated with the Left Hemisphere of the brain, the side that deals mostly with logic, language, math, structure, and that kind of rationality.

Nevertheless, Pink argues that key forces are working to necessitate a shift in American business from “L-Directed Thinking” to “R-Directed Thinking” or a kind of thinking that involves the creative, playful side of life.

Abundance, Asia, and Automation

The three forces at work in the world today are Abundance, Asia, and Automation.

Abundance refers to the fact that people in America pretty much have everything they need and most people have just about everything they want. Abundance, though, isn’t really about what you posess. It’s about what is available to you. No matter what you might want, here in America, you have an abundance of choices. There isn’t just one mp3 player, there are hundreds. There isn’t just one type of shampoo, there are thousands.

In the midst of all this abundance, consumers are looking for something that stands out. Particularly, consumers are no longer looking to buy a product. They are looking for an experience. From the store they shop in to the color of the product, they are looking for an experience that gives meaning and significance. At the core, people make purchases based on the meaning or significance they perceive when they make the choice. That’s why companies like Target are having such great success with their practice of getting high-level designers and architects (like Michael Graves) to design their toilet brushes!

Though Pink separates the two, Asia and Automation seem to me to be two sides of the same coin. Basically, the point is that through outsourcing jobs to Asia and through the increasing sophistication of computer automation, routine, by-the-numbers kinds of tasks are moving away from America. Manufacturing, computer programming, customer service, and many other kinds of industries are taking jobs away from America and handing them to Asian workers or automated systems.

Therefore, the end result of these three factors is that work in America needs to shift from making products (or computer programs, or in fact, any other kind of deliverable) into making meaning and to do so, Pink argues, requires “a whole new mind” or one that can employ six core “right-brain” skills or, as he calls them, “senses.”

The Six Senses

The most beneficial part of the book comes in part two where Pink addresses the practical skills we need to develop to flourish in this new world of ours. He mentions six skills, calling them “senses” and then, after describing each one, he lists some resources, tools, and examples of how a person can improve their capacity for that particular sense.

These lists alone are perhaps worth the cost of the book, and though I got my copy from the library, I’m considering purchasing it just to have these hard-copy lists at hand. For the time being, though, I’m just writing them down here for myself and anyone else who might be interested to pursue these things further.

Incidentally, the six senses are as follows: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning.

Design

One of the more important claims of Pinks book is that the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree is taking over the MBA in terms of significance in our world. He notices that design is becoming the most important aspect of products and stores these days. In fact, you can see the truth of this claim by noticing how successful stores like Target (for selling designer products at low prices), Best Buy (for creatively designing their stores), and Apple (for the outrageous success of their iPod and other well-designed products.

You can also see the impacts of bad design by considering the poorly designed ballots in Florida that caused so much confusion during the Presidential election of 2000.

In order to improve our sense of design, Pink makes the following suggestions:

• Keep a design notebook.
• Think of something that annoys you, and send the manufacturer of that product a well-thought-out solution to the problem.
• Read design magazines:
  • Dwell — http://www.dwellmag.com
  • How — http://www.howdesign.com
  • iD — http://www.idonline.com
  • Metropolis — http://www.metropolismag.com
  • Nest — http://www.nestmagazine.com
  • O Magazine — http://www.oprah.com/magazine
  • Print — http://www.printmag.com
  • Real Simple — http://www.realsimple.com
• Consider Karim Rashid — http://www.karimrashid.com
• Design Something, Your own Nike shoe, your own Vans shoe, or your own handwriting font.
• Go to a Design Museum
• Evaluate objects in your life for the emotions you have associated with them. See Design Continuum.
• Be choosy (select things because they delight you not because they impress others, but never let things be more important than people.) See Animatrix.

Story

The second sense is the sense of story. Good stories instantly connect with people on a heart level and last in both our conscious mind and our subconscious for far longer than pure facts and figures ever will. We think in stories, we live in stories, and we love stories.

Some suggestions for improving our ability to appreciate story and create our own are as follows:

• Write a mini-saga, a very short story of exactly 50 words. Some examples can be found here.
• Preserve someone’s story through StoryCorps.
• Interview someone about his or her life and record the conversation.
• Visit a storytelling festival: National Storytelling Festival, Yukon International Storytelling Festival, Bay Area Storytelling Festival, Australia National Storytelling Confest, Digital Storytelling Festival, Cape Clear Island International Storytelling Festival, Sharing the Fire, New England Storytelling Conference.
• Subscribe to One Story, a magazine that delivers one good story to your house a little more often than once a month.
• Learn Digital Storytelling — Center for Digital Storytelling, the Fray, City Stories Project, and I Used to Believe.
• Read these books:
  • Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee.
  • Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud.
  • The Hero with a Thousand faces by Joseph Campbell (covers the hero motif throughout history). For other Campbell works, see the Joseph Campbell Foundation.

Symphony

Symphony is the art of seeing things as they really are in relation to the other things around them. Pink’s primary illustration is the groundbreaking work done by Betty Edwards in her book Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain.

Her claim is that we tend to see the world through symbols, and this is especially evident when we attempt to draw anything. Try it yourself, and draw a self-portrait. You’ll quickly see that most people don’t draw their nose and lips and eyes. Instead they draw symbols of their eyes, a symbol for their lips and a symbol for their nose. Her drawing method trains people to see relationships between objects and not to abstract those objects into symbols. Her method is remarkably successful at helping non-drawers become at least capable of drawing a self-portrait. Mr. Pink even shows us the progress he made when he took a seminar based on her techniques.

Basically, the skill of symphony is in seeing the whole as a whole, seeing pieces in relationship to each other, and not seeing the pieces all by themselves. Next time you look at the FedEx logo, try to find the forward facing arrow hiding in the negative space.

Here are suggestions for improving your skill of symphony:

• Listen to great symphonies
  • Beethoven’s 9th
  • Mozart’s Symphony No. 35
  • Mahler’s 4th Symphony in G Major
  • Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (with real cannons and church bells)
  • Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 in G Major “Surprise”
• Visit a newsstand and grab 10 publications that you would otherwise never read. Skim them and look for connections with your own life.
• Learn how to draw — http://www.drawright.com or http://www.the5line.com
• Keep a Metaphor Log (write down metaphors you encounter throughout your day)
• Create an Inspiration Board: “When you’re working on a project, empty your bulletin board and turn it into an inspiration board. Each time you see something that you find compelling… tack it to the board.”
• Books:
  • Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture by William Benzon
  • Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames
  • Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
  • No Waste by Laboratorio De Creacion Maldeojo is a project of photos of “ingeniously repurposed items from the streets of Cuba.”
  • How to See: A Guide to Reading Our Man-made Environment by George Nelson
• Do something you can’t do and experience the beauty of making a mistake
• Look for Negative Spaces (in logos, designs and all around you)

Empathy

Empathy is basically the skill of being able to stand in another person’s skin and experience the world from their perspective. It is the part of us that wants to yawn when we see another person yawn. It’s the part of us that winces when we watch someone get whacked with a stick on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Empathy is necessary in this new “Conceptual Age” because people are looking for products and services that truly connect with them, and that means businesses must be able to experience life from the perspective of their customers (empathy) in order to provide the products and services those customers are looking for.

To develop the skill of empathy, here are some tools:

• Take an empathy test.
  • Test your EQ (empathy quotient) or your SQ (systematizing quotient).
  • Test your E-IQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient) prepared by Daniel Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame.
  • Spot the Fake Smile to see if you can spot the difference between a fake smile and a real one.
  • Mind in the Eyes Test to see if you can identify an emotion from only the eyes.
  • Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test which is the best test, but it costs money.
• Study Paul Ekman — http://www.paulekman.com. Pink mentions these Ekman books: Emotions Revealed, Telling Lies.
• Play “Whose Life?” a game developed by IDEO which is basically rooting through another person’s stuff to try to figure out what that person is like.
• Take an Acting Class
• Get the Mind Reading CD-ROM training materials.
• Volunteer and serve someone.

Play

Corporate life used to be all about stodgy seriousness, but now playful work environments are becoming not just more prevalent, but also more necessary. What with the increasing demands on work and home life, and the attendant stress, we need playfulness to keep us productive.

Pink claims, however, that play is more than a tool to be used to increase productivity. Instead, play itself is a primary industry. Games of all sorts are a major business, and the Army has turned to using video games as a recruitment tool.

Even more than all that, playfulness, humor, and joyfulness are the cornerstones of a creative life. To develop the skill of play in your own life, Pink recommends these things:

• Join a Laughter Club — http://www.laughteryoga.com
• Play the Cartoon Captions Game. Find a bunch of cartoons from publications like the New Yorker, remove the captions or punch lines, and then come up with some of your own. Preferably, do this with friends.
• Test your humor on the Humor Scale.
• Check out the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling “Invention at Play” exhibit — http://www.inventionatplay.org.
• Learn about video games and play some.
  • Game Spot
  • Game Talk
  • Game Zone
  • Newsgaming
  • Open Directory on Games
  • Visit There (I say perhaps Second Life).
  • Wireless Gaming Review
  • Women Gamers
  • Yahoo! Games
• Play Right-Brain Games or Right Brain Paradise

Meaning

Viktor Frankl wrote his seminal work, Man’s Search for Meaning after being released from a Nazi concentration camp where he saw people survive against incredible odds because they had a strong sense of meaning and purpose. Pink addresses the significance of having meaning in our lives, whether by religion or otherwise. More than that, he talks about how we need to look at life from the perspective of a higher meaning and how to do so enriches our lives including extending our actual lifespan.

To help us develop a sense of meaning, purpose and spirituality, he recommends these exercises:

• Write a gratitude letter or go on a gratitude visit or find some other way to develop a habit of gratitude.
• Take the 20-10 test. If you had $20 million in the bank or only 10 more years to live, would you continue doing what you do now?
• Measure your spirit with tests. Spiritual Transcendence Test, or the Index of Core Spiritual Experience.
• Books:
  • Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  • Authentic Happiness by Martin E. P. Seligman.
  • Flow by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi.
  • What Should I Do with My Life? by Po Bronson
  • Mindfulness by Ellen Langer.
  • The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D.
• Visit a labyrinth (a maze-like pathway for meditation purposes).
  • The Worldwide Labyrinth Locator
  • The Labyrinth Society
  • Labyrinthos
  • Read Walking a Sacred Path by Lauren Artress or Labyrinths and Mazes by Jurgen Hohmuth.
  • http://www.labyrinthcompany.com or http://www.relax4life.com
• Picture yourself at 90. Imagine yourself as a ninety-year-old you. What has your life been like?

Conclusion

I think there are a lot of great points in here for leaders of any sort, but in my next post, I will try to examine what value this book has for Christian leaders in particular.

If you have the time to watch it, post a comment about what you think about “creating and monetizing” a community.

Not long ago, the author of the site posted a list of significant books in the form of a Christmas buying guide. After reading it, I went to the library to pick up as many as I could find. I’ve only made it through one so far (and my library only had a couple of them). My next post will be a summary of the lessons I’ve learned from reading that book.