Month: October 2017

How to Build a Culture of Originality

Posted on October 30, 2017 by - Articles, Change Management, Collaboration, Complex Thinking, Culture, Leading Others, Supervising People

Adam Grant’s (GLS 2015) excellent article for Harvard Business Review dispels the myth that innovation only exists in Silicon Valley or with the entrepreneurial few. Instead, he explains how leaders can encourage original thinking in any organization.

If there’s one place on earth where originality goes to die, I’d managed to find it. I was charged with unleashing innovation and change in the ultimate bastion of bureaucracy. It was a place where people accepted defaults without question, followed rules without explanation, and clung to traditions and technologies long after they’d become obsolete: the U.S. Navy.

But in a matter of months, the navy was exploding with originality—and not because of anything I’d done. It launched a major innovation task force and helped to form a Department of Defense outpost in Silicon Valley to get up to speed on cutting-edge technology. Surprisingly, these changes didn’t come from the top of the navy’s command-and-control structure. They were initiated at the bottom, by a group of junior officers in their twenties and thirties.

When I started digging for more details, multiple insiders pointed to a young aviator named Ben Kohlmann. Officers called him a troublemaker, rabble-rouser, disrupter, heretic and radical. And in direct violation of the military ethos, these were terms of endearment.

Kohlmann lit the match by creating the navy’s first rapid-innovation cell—a network of original thinkers who would collaborate to question long-held assumptions and generate new ideas. To start assembling the group, he searched for black sheep: people with a history of nonconformity. One recruit had been fired from a nuclear submarine for disobeying a commander’s order. Another had flat-out refused to go to basic training. Others had yelled at senior flag officers and flouted chains of command by writing public blog posts to express their iconoclastic views. “They were lone wolves,” Kohlmann says. “Most of them had a track record of insubordination.”

Kohlmann realized, however, that to fuel and sustain innovation throughout the navy, he needed more than a few lone wolves. So while working as an instructor and director of flight operations, he set about building a culture of nonconformity.

He talked to senior leaders about expanding his network and got their buy-in. He recruited sailors who had never shown a desire to challenge the status quo and exposed them to new ways of thinking. They visited centers of innovation excellence outside the military, from Google to the Rocky Mountain Institute. They devoured a monthly syllabus of readings on innovation and debated ideas during regular happy hours and robust online discussions.

Soon they pioneered the use of 3-D printers on ships and a robotic fish for stealth underwater missions—and other rapid-innovation cells began springing up around the military. “Culture is king,” Kohlmann says. “When people discovered their voice, they became unstoppable.”

Empowering the rank and file to innovate is where most leaders fall short. Instead, they try to recruit brash entrepreneurial types to bring fresh ideas and energy into their organizations—and then leave it at that. It’s a wrongheaded approach, because it assumes that the best innovators are rare creatures with special gifts.

Research shows that entrepreneurs who succeed over the long haul are actually more risk-averse than their peers. The hotshots burn bright for a while but tend to fizzle out. So relying on a few exceptional folks who fit a romanticized creative profile is a short-term move that underestimates everyone else.

Most people are in fact quite capable of novel thinking and problem solving, if only their organizations would stop pounding them into conformity.

When everyone thinks in similar ways and sticks to dominant norms, businesses are doomed to stagnate. To fight that inertia and drive innovation and change effectively, leaders need sustained original thinking in their organizations. They get it by building a culture of nonconformity, as Kohlmann did in the navy. I’ve been studying this for the better part of a decade, and it turns out to be less difficult than I expected.

Click here to read the rest of Adam Grant’s Harvard Business Review article.

How the Summit Changed… Everything

Posted on October 30, 2017 by - Because of the GLS, Calling, City Movement, Family, North America, Stories, Wellness

After 18 years serving in the local church, Dave Bushnell is now a regional director for Willow Creek Association. He’s in charge of growing The Global Leadership Summit across 13 Western states. Dave traces his most impactful Summit moment back to the prompting he and his wife Karen received to expand their family from two children to five through international adoption. 

In a way, the Summit is the same for everyone. We all hear the same speakers. We all see the same words on the screen. But the Summit experience is also distinctly unique for each person who participates.

I’ve been a student of leadership for decades. I’ve been going to the Leadership Summit since the year 2000. Ultimately, it is responsible for how I lead today.

The Summit changed me, my local church, my family, others’ families, and now I’m watching the Summit change entire cities throughout the US.

The Summit raises the temperature at my local church

I was a local church pastor for 18 years before moving to Willow Creek Association. I started attending the Summit during my tenure in Pittsburgh. When we moved out west to Bellingham, Washington, the church we served was already a host site. But nobody had really taken it on as their pet project. It was kind of floundering.

Of course, I was already an absolute Summit fanatic, so it became a huge passion of mine to use content from the Summit year-round as I did leadership development within the church. We embedded it into our discipleship process, and whenever I got leaders together, I showed a snippet of video to support what we were trying to impart.

We had some challenges in the church, and at some point we decided to take the spiritual temperature of the congregation. Using a very measured spiritual-growth survey, we wanted to see if our emphasis on the Summit and use of the content year-round was having any impact.

What we saw was that the spiritual fervor of the congregation actually increased by 17 percent. Now, it went from “terrible” to “really bad,” but it was up and to the right, so that was very good to see! The temperature was rising.

The Summit starts exploding in Bellingham, WA

That spiritual fervor manifested itself in a new willingness for members to sacrifice their time, talent and treasure. And not just for the church. We saw people who were not yet in a serving role or a Kingdom-building role finding their way into serving roles within the community and within their family. The entire staff ended up rallying around the Summit as a recruitment tool. It became our strategy for recruiting—and retaining—leaders.

The Summit wound up just exploding in Bellingham. One in four of our weekend attenders came to the Summit and our church became one of the top GLS sites in the country.

Around that time, Willow Creek Association called me and said, “We’re expanding big time, and we’d love somebody to serve sites in the Western United States. Would you consider joining our team?” It was an exciting new vocational opportunity, and it was good for our family from the standpoint that we didn’t have to uproot them.

The Summit transforms my family

Of course, family is a key part of my Summit story. Before we had children, my wife, Karen and I dreamed of what our family would look like: two boys, two years apart. After our first son, Trevor, was born, our second pregnancy was timed just right to fulfill the family we had envisioned.

But it ended in grief. Tragically, we lost that child in pregnancy.

That caused us to incline our ears to God and say, “How do you want us to expand our family?” What we heard was, “Adopt.” So, we brought home our son Easton from Russia. He was one. And there we were. Two boys two years apart. Mission accomplished.

We went along that way for a number of years with our little family of four. Then Karen and I were at the Leadership Summit in 2006 in a session with Richard Curtis, the British filmmaker.

He had created a 90-second candid video clip of a little girl in a yellow dress. She was probably five years old. She was in India, and she was all alone on the street. The sun was setting. There were pedestrians and street traffic going by. And this tiny little girl took her tattered blanket and carefully set it down on the sidewalk. She crawled into it as the sun set, and that’s her bed for the night. There’s no family; she’s all alone as a child of the street.

Well, God used that video to convict and prompt us. “I’m not done with you bringing justice to unjust parts of the world via adoption.” So, we set out to bring home an infant girl. During our “paperwork pregnancy,” we started wondering, “Well, maybe we should bring home a boy our son’s age.”

By the time we were done with the paperwork, the adoption agency told us they had an infant girl and her brother—a boy our son’s age. Would we consider bringing them both home?

We knew that was way beyond our capacity—which is exactly where we believe God wanted us to be. So, we brought that little girl and her brother home. In the process, we learned that older children are much, much harder to place. Learning this, we were prompted to adopt an older child. So, we brought home our oldest, who was 12. She’s 19 now.

By this point, we’re done. This is not the family we pictured, but it’s the family that God had for us. And He delivered that knowledge through the Summit. Today, we are parenting five children, four of whom have had significant trauma. That trauma presents itself every single day in different ways for each one of those kids. Our biological child has Asperger’s and is borderline autistic. So, the parenting load is so, so challenging.

Sometimes Karen and I look at each other and just say, “Man, some people have two normal kids. What on earth would we do with our emotional energy and our time if that’s what we had?” I’ll be honest, it’s some heavy parenting. We’re constantly on. It really is the hardest leadership challenge of my life.

The Summit transforms more families

What’s amazing is that there were other people at that same Summit who had that same “yellow-dress” moment. Two other families in the exact same auditorium had exactly the same prompting to adopt. We later learned that there were hundreds of other families at the Summit who also had that prompting. In fact, I came to find that there are a whole bunch of kids who are now in the United States and have a shot at life as a result of that moment of the Summit.

So, that’s my Summit story. The life that I’m leading right now is not the life that I pictured, but it is certainly the life that God pictured. There is a grander vision story for every single person, and the Summit is a great deliverer of that.

But my story doesn’t end there.

The Summit transforms entire cities

I get to see the same power that transformed my family now transforming entire cities and towns. What I’m seeing is that the churches in those communities are using the Summit to start conversations they would not have been able to start otherwise. The Summit is giving them entry into relationships with business and community leaders.

Together, they are asking, “What is the core problem or need in our community—and how can the church be a resource to meet that need?”

These might be social service conversations. Like, “Hey, we’ve got a constituency of at-risk students. So, man, we would just love to have them meet with tutors.” Then it becomes, “Let’s get after that … together.”

One of my favorite sites that I get to serve is the Las Vegas Police Department. It’s huge. They are a Summit host site, and they are using it to train their teams. They envision a Summit for all of their first-responders. They are also expanding the Summit to their two jails using inmate-generated funds.

And yes, this is a government institution and there is taxpayer money involved. So, I sat down with the sheriff and I asked him, “Everybody wants to know, how do you get away with it?” He said, “You know what? I just do what works, and the Summit works, so we’re going to keep doing it.”

Another one I brag about is a large tech company. They’re surrounded by techies and business folks, and they’re using the Summit to start spiritual conversations with business people about values-based leadership development.

Their primary point person this year runs a Ford dealership, and he borrowed sales managers from the surrounding dealerships to staff his business so his entire team could go to the Summit. They invited 400 of their best customers to join them and offered to pay a discount for those customers who wanted to attend.

The Summit is for everyone

Ultimately, every church and every community use the Summit a little bit differently. Willow Creek Association is not some seminar-behemoth trying to steamroll everyone with our view of what works. Rather, we focus on community level buy-in and impact. Local leaders own it and contextualize the content for the needs of their community.

Instead of trying to “own” the gift of leadership, we are opening our arms wide and releasing it to the body of Christ to be used, adapted and contextualized where and how it will have the most impact.

And it does have impact. When a leader gets better, what they lead gets better. When that happens enough times in a specific city, the entire city gets better. Leadership becomes the tide that lifts all boats.

 

Podiums, Pedestals, and Platforms

Posted on October 26, 2017 by - Articles, Character, Confidence, Conflict Management, Leading Yourself, Relational Intelligence, Servant Leadership

They say that Hitler was a small man. He used to stand on a box to look taller at the podium for Nazi rallies. He insisted that images of Him be taken from an upward angle to make him appear larger. You can check out the propaganda posters—it’s fascinating.

A few years back, I went on a backstage tour of Universal and saw the facades of the famous western movies that John Wayne starred in. He was also small in stature and the movie production studios were ordered to make all the doorframes on the set smaller so John would look bigger. It was an illusion.

Tom Cruise wears platform shoes because he’s short and it embarrasses him. He doesn’t like being or feeling small. Neither did Napoleon and neither do I.

It begs the question: What do you use to prop yourself up?

I use image, accolades and past victories as props to stand on. They help make me appear better/larger/greater than I really am. To look even better than physically possible, I usually rely on a whole range of Instagram filters, not to mention the filters on my mouth that regularly block out the confessions of my own doubt, hurt, fear and insecurities.

“I’m smaller than I appear” should be written on the rearview mirror of my life. The temptation to prop ourselves up on a podium, pedestal or platform is a big one.

I read the biography of Jim Bakker (the TV evangelist who crashed and burned in a bitter, public scandal in the early 90s). It was entitled “I Was Wrong.” I figured that any man who had the nerve to write that in large block letters on a biography earned a hearing. So, I read his book. It was enlightening.

I think I learned more about me than him.

I learned that I was judgmental and critical and harsh and that he was simply crushed by the box he stood on to appear better than he was, which inevitably led to him presenting himself as worse than he really was.

But the best part of the book by far was the story of a surprise visit he got in prison. He was in solitary confinement (for his own protection). He was the most hated man in America, the despised TV evangelist crook, his wife had divorced him and married his best friend; his kids didn’t want to see him and his ministry had been split up and divided among bidders. He was at rock bottom.

A guard collected him to meet an unexpected visitor and Jim assumed it was his lawyer, since that was the only person who ever visited. When he entered the visitation room what he saw took his breath away. Sitting there in the prisoners’ visitation room, waiting for him, was Billy Graham.

Jim was speechless and ashamed and described the feeling he had as ‘dirty’ and he desperately wanted to tell Billy to run away from him as fast as he could. The cleanest, finest, evangelist America has ever seen was spoiling his reputation on the likes of me is something like what Jim described.

But Billy broke the silence and said simply, “I’ve come to see how you are doing, Jim. Ruth and I are praying for you every day and we wondered if when you get out of here, you’d like to come for dinner.”

Billy talked to Jim like he was NORMAL. The nerve.

I guess Billy knew a thing or two about podiums, pedestals and platforms. The temptation to not only appear better than you are, but to believe it are some of the oldest ego tricks in the book. Think fig leaves.

Billy had this habit of stepping off the pedestal on purpose. Exposing it for the ego, pride-based, temptation that it is. He traded in the money, power and fame trap for a real life on a farm with a family. He kept his head in the Bible, his ambition in his prayers and his feet on the ground. So, he wasn’t so impressed with Jim’s fame, or his demise for that matter. He saw Jim like few else did at the time—as a human.

I guess the truth is that there are no-larger-than life monsters hiding in human bodies, nor are there saints immune to the realities of life. There are only humans, often desperate to appear larger than we are—uncomfortable in our own skin. The way to confront this is to accept your own humanity as a great gift.

My smallness is an invitation into God’s bigness. My need to prop myself up is in fact, a deep need to let God in. My ego can be right-sized and my humility can grow if I choose truth over image, faith over fear and doorways that make me appear exactly the size I am. Just for the record, I still love the Instagram filters!