Facts Are Facts...

...Stories are how we learn.

So claims Alan Webber in his great book "Rules of Thumb." Webber, co-founder of Fast Company magazine, has compiled a list of rules for the new game we're in today - a complex, fast-changing, and confusing world. Here are some excerpts from the chapter on "story."

Facts are facts, but stories are who we are, how we learn, and what it all means.

Why are stories so much more powerful than plain old facts or boring PowerPoint presentations?

• Stories are about people
• Stories are about people doing things
• Stories create meaning
• Stories are how we learn
• Stories have always been at the heart of starting and leading organizations
• Organizations celebrate their great successes and even their heroic failures through stories

The work of leading a great organization is the work of telling stories.

What story will you tell today?

Good Design Gets You in the Game...

...great design is the game winner.

Welcome to the world where design is king.

In the old days, designers were an afterthought, the people at the end of the production process. Engineers would hand over something that was functionally effective and have the designers make it look good. Those days are over.

Today, design is about experiences as well as products. It's about services as much as it is hard goods.

Design is now differentiation.

Alan Webber, founder of Fast Company magazine and author of "Rules of Thumb," puts it this way: Today companies use design to:

• create distinctive products and services that capture their customers' imaginations
• restructure their corporate operations
• unveil new logos and uniforms that express a fresh corporate identity
• develop new communications tools that connect with customers and shareholders
• build corporate offices that encourage and enable collaboration
• collect and share information across a global platform

Design is a way to solve deep-seated social problems. And design is a money saver, a way to simplify products and make them easier and less expensive to manufacture and sell. Across the board designers have defines a way of seeing that adds to the delight of customers and the profitability of companies.

Application to ChurchWorld

You probably already understand this on some level. You understand that the design of your website says more about you and provides a quick glimpse of your "brand". You know that the little - and not so little - things like the design of your logo and your letterhead, the print pieces you use, the "flow" of your worship experience all communicate instantly what your church is all about.

But if you are still a design novice, and want to learn more, here are Webber's three ways to begin to crack the design code:

• Reading - you may be a word person and you want to try to learn about seeing. Dan Pink's "A Whole New Mind," Tim Brown's "Design Thinking," Tom Kelley's "The Art of Innovation" and "The Ten Faces of Innovation," and Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" are required reading. Get one of them today; read it tonight, and put it into action tomorrow.
• Viewing - You need to practice seeing. Go to an art museum; browse a furniture showroom gallery; check out the latest model cars. The more you look at objects like these, the more you appreciate great design. You're not buying, so don't worry about price. Look carefully at the lines, interior detailing and design, and the small things that make a big difference. "Seeing" is a critical skill for aspiring diagnosticians - like you.
• Shopping - Go out and find an assortment of small objects that go in your home or office. Look at OXO products; visit an IKEA store. When you pick up one of these objects, you will immediately understand what "consumer-centered design" means. Go to an office supply store and sit in an Aeron chair. Look at the latest products from Apple: iPhone, iPad, the latest MacBook Air. Go to an antique store and see what great design looked like in the past. Take a virtual shopping trip to your heart's content. When you have collected these objects (or examined them enough), what do these products have in common? Are they as good to look at as they are fun to use? Is there an emotional content to their design?

You don't have to buy anything to get the idea. But you do have to buy into the idea:

Design is everywhere, and increasingly, design is everything.

2 Questions for Your Consideration...

Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company magazine and author of the book "Rules of Thumb", thinks every leader needs to keep 2 lists:

• What gets you up in the morning?
• What keeps you up at night?

There is a lot for leaders to think about in those two sentences. Here is a summary of  Webber's challenges:

Some people just have jobs. Others have something they really work at.
Some people are just occupied. Others have something that preoccupies them.

It makes all the difference in the world.

Consider this: you spend at least eight hours a day working, five days a week. A minimum of forty hours a week for at least forty-eight to fifty weeks a year. That's a minimum of 1,920 hours a year. For how many years? You do the math.

What gets you up in the morning?
The level of energy put out by an organization's people is one of the things that you are aware of as soon as you enter their space. There's a buzz in the air (sometimes literally) created by people who are working  hard and working together. They want to be there - they came in ready to go.

What keeps you up at night?
This is a chance to be honest with yourself. Many times leaders rarely get a chance to reflect on the things that really matter to the organization's goals. Most of the time, day-to-day urgent concerns crowd out broader issues that are the really important ones. The things that often keep leaders up are the things that never seem to find the time or place for serious engagement in the course of an ordinary workday. 

We all want to do work that excites us. We want to care about things that concern us. So, about that list...

Take out a stack of three-by-five cards. Use one to write down the answer to the question "What gets you up in the morning?" Keep it to one sentence. If you don't like your answer, throw away the card and start over - it's only a card. Keep doing it until you've got an answer you can live with.

Now repeat the exercise for the question "What keeps you up at night?" Work at it until you've got an honest answer.

Now read your answers out loud to yourself. If you like them - if they give you a sense of purpose and direction - congratulations! Use them as a compass, checking from time to time to see if they're still true.

If you don't like one or both of your answers, you have a new question to consider: What are you going to do about it?

Whatever your answers are, you're spending almost two thousand hours a year of your life doing it.

That makes it worthwhile to come up with answers you can not only live with but also live for.

Real Leaders Get Real About Leadership

Alan Webber, cofounder of Wired magazine and former editor at Harvard Business Review, published a great book last year: "Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self." Since this week's posts are about leadership, here is Webber's Rule # 41:

If you want to be a real leader, get real about leadership.

Leadership isn't attached to any single job title. It doesn't come with a diploma, a degree, or a program. Leadership is a way of thinking and acting, a way of being and doing.

If you want to get real about leadership, you can boil it down to four things:

• How leaders are - confident and modest, authentic, and good listeners
• What leaders do - attract and grow talent, lead by example, and challenge others to do their best
• How leaders act - give others guidance, not answers
• What leaders leave behind them - passion, a great team, and most importantly, more leaders

How are you doing at the real work of leadership?

The Geometry of Choice

Take a look at almost any decision-making reference in a book or magazine and what do you see? Most likely a matrix with one desirable feature across the top and another down the side. Conventional wisdom says you read the matrix in straight lines - you have to choose which feature you're going to favor.

What if you chose both?

I first came across this idea in Jim Collins' book "Good to Great." Since then, many writers have used the phrase "both/and" to refer to decision making that references both issues in a choice. Alan Webber, writing in "Rules of Thumb" states it this way:

We've moved from an either/or past to a both/and future.

One of the skills that defines an entrepreneur and an innovator is the capacity to generate new lines of sight. That mean looking at problems along a new dimension. It means rejecting old either/or choices and finding new both/and combinations.

It's like the game of chess. Most of the plays involve moving pieces forward or backward or sideways. But the bishop? It's a game changer because it moves on the diagonal. Now you have the ability to move across and up on the board at the same time. You have changed the geometry of choice with one move.

How are you going to put into practice the skill of making "both/and" decisions in your organization today?

Collect the Dots so you can Connect the Dots

This past weekend I led a team in a ministry planning weekend for a church client. Our purpose, over one and a half days, was to look at their past, take a snapshot of their present, and project possible futures. Having previously reviewed their vision work of the past few years, our team was able to focus on their physical campus and expansion opportunities.

Preparation for the weekend event included hours of research, interviews, and conversations with church leaders and local officials. Our team sifted though all this information, prepared an agenda reflecting the assignment given to us by the church, and proceeded with the weekend.

As we went through the first several hours, thought kept popping into my head: Collect the dots so you can connect the dots. After jotting it down, I forgot about it until the weekend was over and I began reviewing my notes. As luck would have it, I was also revisiting a great book from 2009, Alan Webber's "Rules of Thumb." Once again, while looking for something else, I came across the phrase above. It was an appropriate footnote to the past weekend's events, and I wanted to highlight some of Webber's thoughts on "Context":

Information is a commodity but context creates value.

What we’re looking for from others – and what we should hone as our own capability – is a convincing, compelling vision of how the world works.

What’s valuable is having your own point of view and having the confidence to express it. Anything else is available 24/7 on the Web and everywhere else – which makes it worthless.

Context is how we all add value. But how do you develop the practice to know what you know, to see how you see the world?

The answer is that context comes to those who develop their way of seeing and making sense of the world.

Context only comes with practice.

• If you don’t watch the news regularly and get into a shouting match with the TV set, you’re not practicing. They’re not telling you the news; they’re telling you how they see the news. You’re entitled to tell them back.
• If you don’t check multiple web sites for news and analysis daily and register your profound disagreement with their takes on the events of the day, you’re not developing your own context. Your job is to use their reports as a whetstone to sharpen your own analyses.
• If you don’t clip one or more newspapers – either the paper or electronic versions – and then work at assembling the clips into your own take on how the world works, you’re not building your mental muscles.

The point of the exercise is to collect the dots so you can connect the dots.

Become a context creator – someone who can connect the dots in ways that make sense, provide insight, deliver meaning, and produce ways of seeing the world that leads to new solutions that work.

No matter how many raw facts you know, they’re only as valuable as the context within which you put them. That’s why context is more important than content and always will be.

Our team succeeded in creating context this weekend. Yes, there was a lot of information. But God honored the process, and the result was excitement about potential - not contentment with the status quo.

Everyone's at the Center of Their Map of the World

Alan Webber, founder of Fast Company magazine and author of the recently released book entitled “Rules of Thumb”, made an observation 20 years ago on a Japan Air Lines flight: the center of the world on the map you are reading depends on its maker. In his worldview, the U.S. was the center of the world; on JAL, Japan was. His newly discovered rule of thumb? We’re all simultaneously living at the center of the world.

And it’s getting smaller every minute.

Talent, technology, and power are reshaping the “maps” of the world. Talented people no longer have to go to the center of their industry to get noticed. Technology connects people wherever they choose to work and live. Power, in terms of business, has been diluted so much that “indie” describes where the most creative work is being done and where the most dynamic people are working.

It’s a big world getting smaller all the time. Yes, the world is “flat” – but more than that, it’s that we’re all connected. That makes you right in the middle of your map; but so is everyone else.