Ken Newton

My Blue Light

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A Passport Journey August 30, 2007

I have been out of the country for a few days.  My schedule and other diversions kept me away from writing.  I missed it, I thought about it several times a day, and I even felt guilty about not doing it.  So, I guess for the amount of time I spent processing what I wasn’t doing, I might just as well have done it.

But I’m back in my standing “routine”, and that includes taking a few moments each day to write something profound.  Or not.  Probably depends who’s reading.  Today is not going to be profound  -  more like a bit of non-descript noise.  But it will get me back into the groove and discipline.

I had to drive to Canada and back to get my new passport.  I had tried in the past by submitting all the required documents and photos, only to have the application fall into a 4-month queue, after which it then fell into the 47% denial stats.  Seems my jaw line was classified as a shadow.  (That’s what you get for having strong, confident features….).  Anyway  -  there was insufficient time to put a new application into play along with a 50/50 chance of success, so I drove to the closest Canada Passport office and got my new passport in 3 days.  Plus 26 hours of driving, and about $500 in total costs. 

And get this  -  Canada Passport accepted the picture that had been rejected in my first application as a “reasonable likeness” of me to validate a new photo. 

While I’m on the topic of my run to the border, unlike my last jaunt, I stayed within a reasonable tolerance of the speed limit.  And my position on truck drivers has not mellowed one bit from the last time I wrote about these 18-wheeler specialists (9-wheelers on hard curves).    I had thought of writing two articles, one on bottom feeders and one on highway transport drivers, but then I realized that there would be no need for two separate blogs.  I cannot bring myself to say anything good about someone who is defined by the urban dictionary as one who has zero and thinks he has one.  I’m sorry  -  I have absolutely no respect for people driving big machines who would kill someone just to get from one side of the continent to the other and save 15 minutes in the process.

And on the other topic of highway construction….  I have it all figured.  It is a conspiracy (by whom, I don’t really know) to reduce all major interstates to one lane.  At 10 mile intervals, bright orange pilons are laid out bringing all traffic into a single file (after a 30 minute wait 2 miles before the first pilon).  At some point several miles distant, the pilons run out and everyone scrambles to get back into the passing lane -  only to have it happen all over again just a few miles later.  Add a few manequins dressed in hard hats, leaning on shovels and with some unmanned cruisers with lights flashing,  you have the whole look and feel of your highway dollars at work…

But it’s now just a memory.  I’m back.  Freshly stressed out of mind.  Suffering from too many chips and Arby’s 5-for-5 sandwiches.  Oh yes  -  and I actually got to “hear” the first season of Lost while Lynda watched it on the DVD player as I drove.  I was too busy avoiding killer trucks to even cast a sideways glance at the screen.  But thirteen hours can easily get you through an entire season.  I can’t wait to actually “see” the characters as we move to watching season two. 

Great to be back.

GSTQ

Report August 21, 2007

I think I would rather make a fool out of myself by blogging about bizarre schemes of a demented mind and radical applications, than report on my journey backwards to 200 pounds.  I even tried to confuse readers by metric reporting.  Maybe it’s because I can’t tolerate failure on strategy.  I am  comfortable in thinking that wholesale corporate revision can happen amongst complex systems and mammoth resources.  But then I am as easily demoralized that execution on a plan to shed un-needed pounds can meet with so many obstructions (the biggest being the joy of eating!)

On a positive note, I made a bit of headway a few weeks ago, stalled, but did not slide all the way back.  Now I am motivated once again, not necessarily a right motivation, but if downsizing in preparation for a Caribbean cruise is what works, then it is a defendable effort.  I started this morning, and so far so good. 

I’ll report back in one week.  Arghhh…..

GSTQ

Brainwashed August 21, 2007

Time got by on me.  Can’t believe I haven’t posted anything in 5 days.  Surely I haven’t expired the decades of knowledge and experience within 6 months of beginning to blog….

I was thinking about a time when I worked in the real world.  A time where senior management was all but blind-folded and taken to an undisclosed cloistered destination to be deprogramed and reprogramed.  All within a 2-week period, no contact with the outside world, minimal amenities, little sleep, and grinding mind games and work sessions.  Just writing about it makes me think I am describing a movie of espionage and covert operations.

But this is true  -  it was a strategically crafted exercise that was meant to shake us of our complacency and lethargy.  It was to force out old practices and philosophy and bring us forward to present means and culture.  If not, we would be outdone by the competition.  We would be left behind because we were not in sync with the customer and related needs requirements.  And there were two steps.  One to discount, and the other to reconstitute.

Where I work, we are about to promote a theme of “unlearning” church.  We did consider a softer descriptive, like “rethinking” church, but decided in favor of unlearning. It is more targeted and intentional to identify the permanent disconnects than to simply ponder the possibilities.  It is as important to deprogram as to build strategy, otherwise the outcome will bend towards the comfortable and become no more than a variation. 

I’m not sure yet of what needs to be unlearned.  I’m tired of hearing about the usual castoffs.  It seems we haven’t progressed over the past 15 years much beyond the thrill of wearing jeans to church.  Surely there is more to unlearn than that, given the rate of change in the prevailing culture.  How about stale systems; programs;  motivation; philosophy; terms.  What are the hard elements due overhaul? 

I think I know.  I think I have a plan, but I’m not ready to play it out yet.  Nor do I think I have deprogramed enough yet  -  it will take an outside influence to warp my thinking far enought to the right state of rebuild.  I already have that catalyst in mind by name and right of influence.  And, it will then only take 4 unique specialists to build out of the detonation. 

Hah  -  I’ve got you.  You don’t quite know what I am talking about.  Trust me, I do.  And when I have it all together, you’ll be the first to know.

GSTQ 

Unpredictable but Meaningless August 15, 2007

I’m going to put a spin on this black swan thing.  For two reasons.  Firstly, something has really got me p.o.’d today and playing it out under this caption keeps it obscure.  Sorry Tom for taking excessive license on the topic.  Secondly, not because it adds value to the concept, but more because it is at least the peculiarity of its application in a church context.  The whole idea is around the impact of the unpredictable event.  I’m thinking that the unplanned influence on strategic operations of a church happens to come in minor shapes and sizes, yet with disastrous consequence.  At least in terms of standard measures of church health.

Setting color aside, black swans being the anomaly, swans are also big birds.  They land on you and your knees buckle.  In the corporate business world (other than most church corporations), it’s the big hit that messes the plan.  It takes a pretty good punch to drive a strategy off its rails.  And, as I think about it more, it is usually tied to the unplanned significant event.  And it takes the extreme effort and off-standard approach to adjust to a new direction or means.

I work in a church operation.  I hold a fair bit of strategic influence.  I’m good on execution of a thoroughly crafted plan.  But the momentum of every change is continually broken, not by the big birds, but by little annoying fly-by things.  They may even be dragonflys.  What should be the norm is considered the exception.  Poor performance and insubordinate behavior at a staff level can bend an operation because we extend tolerances of compassion and care that have roots in a different product.  We allow the minimal complaint within a broadbased community to cripple the course of growth because of who it is, not what it is.  We shortchange the right to manage and to discount uninformed, naive opinion, because of the politics of influence, financial or network.  We grind to a halt over moral behavior. 

To a church, these are some of the unpredictable events, even though we know of them and history says they are likely to occur.  Yet, because we do not build them into our plan (for if we did, we could never execute), when they do happen, they have consequence.  The remedy is to incorporate their liklihood of occurrence, and assign a value or order of response.  Otherwise, it happens again and again, and each time we jump back in surprise and throw our full effort against an accommodating offset. 

People are going to fail.  People will hold to a different philosophy  and try to raise opposing public opinion.  People will be offended over an incident and expect the world to stop and caring hands come around them over the better interest of the enterprise.  People will try to leverage the system by their financial influence.  Don’t let these conditions be the black swans.  They’re probably just big, oversize insects, and while not embedded in the plan, should be expected and managed accordingly.  They have no weight in the context of the broader effort.

Factoring the Unpredictable August 14, 2007

Tom Peters weblog is part of my Google reader which pulls on my favorite sites and blogs for new content.  Tom Peters is on the top of the heap for me.  He absolutely stretches my thinking just about any time I read his stuff.  It amazes me that he can continue to come up with each new post that he claims is the unique “creation and exposure of something that will be measured by an incredibly diverse crowd”.

At times I think I should just be a conduit to his site and save the effort of my words.  But then I forfeit the opportunity to influence by my thinking and any of my (limited) original thoughts.  So, I continue.

But today, I will come back to Tom Peters.  Lately he has been referencing a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, called The Black Swan.  The author examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact.  As I looked at some write-ups of Taleb’s other books, he obviously has wrapped his thinking around words like improbable, randomness, volatility, hedging.  I suspect that Amazon.com is about to get their next book order from me.

Back to The Black Swan.  Peters refers to it (and I laughed when I read it because it was so visual) as the nuttier outlier dropping down for a landing.  While most of our efforts, particularly in the areas of strategic planning and change initiatives, are about explainable influences, they can be annhilated by a single exception to the predictable.  Initially, I get depressed just thinking about that.  All the work of recent in transitioning a church operation to be systemically aligned with the impact of growth.  All the blood and fencing as the objectives are reconstituted in today’s terms and applications, to the chagrin of the settled.  To even think that the calculated order of confidence can be shattered by a single, unplanned event and unravel months and months of work makes me slump in my chair.

Peters says that you cannot specifically prepare for a Black Swan.  I can’t argue with that, even in the face of a fully rationalized comprehensive course of action.  Certainly the surety of an initiative is a function of the number of alternatives and variations that have been factored or simulated.  After reading Peters, even that approach in isolation has to be somewhat flawed.  When I think of it, there may be too much dependency on present place and time.  That stands up to any argument in favor of a change from past practice and old methods, but it falters when extended forward.  Peters best summarizes it by saying that you can, at minimum, consider the degree to which your actions and procedures concerning damn near everything, and likewise those of your organizations, rest on assumptions of continuity.

Agreed. But you can’t sit handcuffed while looking at the sky for the nutty outlier.  You make sure your assumptions are solid.  You have isolated out the best alternatives.  You have researched and taken the time to observe concepts already tested and in play.  And, as a church, you have come to believe God honors the faith and effort that undergirds the direction and the investment.  And Goethe keeps telling us to commit.  And so we do. 

And maybe I’m now just a little less arrogant when thinking that a black swan could mess up my best laid plans simply by dropping in uninvited…..

Don’t be Handed a Lemon August 9, 2007

I picked up on the heading of an article this morning, although it didn’t catch me enough to even start to read the piece.  It read, “When Life Hands You Lemons”.  My immediate thought was that you don’t get handed lemons, rather, you probably pick them yourself.  So why pick a lemon?

Maybe:

• you picked them in the dark and thought they were oranges
• you don’t know the difference between an orange and a lemon even in the light
• you like yellow better than orange
• someone threw one at you and you didn’t know enough not to catch it
• it was the last piece of fruit in the produce section and you were told to bring home some fruit
• it wasn’t ripe, and that’s when oranges and lemons are both green
• because everyone else prefers lemons, you figured that was the official fruit of the day

There are probably another 100 reasons for holding a lemon.  Maybe it was the closest, hardest object you could find to throw at someone.  Then it’s not a lemon.  It’s a missile.  Then it might have value.  But given lemons exist, what are the lemons we find parked in the vegetable cooler of church leadership? (OK  -  I am certain that nowhere in the existence of published articles or casual conversation has church leadership ever been represented as a vegetable cooler…)

How about reconstituting the lemon reasons in the same order:

• you hired a person into a staff position that had not been sufficiently defined and rationalized
• your strategy has been built around a preferred alternative instead of a decision statement (Kepner Tregoe)
• on a surface level, something looks better, but may not be well suited to the application or integration of the component parts
• you engaged a process that was reactionary instead of letting it pass by in favor of a better, longer-term option
• you had to make good on the expectation in spite of the real need, regardless of the value associated with a better time and a more comprehensive strategy
• you implemented a plan without bringing it to a full measure of development and quality testing
• you extended the status quo rather than bearing down under the heat and pressure of change

They’re all lemons.  You picked them.  They weren’t handed to you.  As a leader and change agent, you have to make good on the best alternative, regardless of predetermined outcome or lesser or greater effort.  You have to do the research, make the educated choices, think bigger and further, let go of what has no continuing relevance, avoid the facsimiles, and be willing to commit to and defend the right product.  Don’t deliver on the expected outcome, but deliver on the the purpose.
 
Being handed it is too easy.  Picking it up is a bad decision and don’t be blaming circumstance or prevailing influences.  Make the right systems choices.  They won’t be lemons.

Report August 9, 2007

Dang.  I shouldn’t have used the word “thin” in my blog yesterday.  Seems I inadvertantly drew attention to a commitment I made eons ago to keep readers informed on the progress of my effort to get in better condition.  Just so happens that the person who made the observation also knows my email addy.

OK  -  I made an independent decision to discontinue reporting.  I had locked up on losing and didn’t think you should know.  Broke commitment.  I’m sorry.  I guess the point should be made that good news is easier to convey than bad news.  So to try and salvage some credibility, I will come back to reporting.  Once a week.  Beginning next week. Or so I have every good intention.  Unless I should fail on commitment again…. 

I’m only human you know.  But I did use the word “commitment” three times in this blog.  Surely that gets me some points.

GSTQ

Thin & Powerful August 8, 2007

In my morning email lineup was one from insideapple.com that featured the new iMac.  It was described as “Super sleek.  Super fast.  Super simple to share and enjoy…”  The main caption read, “You can’t be too thin, or too powerful”.

Once again, there’s that simple thing again.  And do you notice the separation of form from achievement?  The operating efficiencies are noteworthy, but sharing and enjoying is what Apple is marketing.

Churches need to embrace that concept.  The correlation of strength and simplicity.  I continue to suggest that churches will grow, not out of micro ministries, but out of huge, project driven streams.  A short list of high correlation units that easily converge on the same marketing descriptive.  One that can be communicated in simple words like share and enjoy.

Or environments. Or connection.  Understanding and caring.  Growing.  Hey  -  maybe we can even ask Apple if it would be OK for us to use the word enjoy.  Not that there are a lot of churches I can immediately think of that give themselves much to that descriptive, but assuming some can, how great would that be!

Meanwhile, got to keep on unraveling the complexity while moving towards thin and powerful.

OK to be Rude August 7, 2007

Tom Peters in his book Re-Imagine spends a fair bit of time talking about branding.  He suggests that focus is a critical influence in achieving a unique identity.  How simple is that, yet how significant.  If your effort is distributed across a diverse agenda, the accumulative effort can only at best yield a diluted identity. 

Which brings us back again to the whole discussion on Big Idea, simplify in the face of complexity, unlearn church. You can’t brand and tend to diversification at the same time.  Peters calls it a “trust mark”, a “sorting device”.  Where I work we do the environments thing.  I guess it’s as close to our brand as one can describe or as anyone would experience.  We’re a church of a specific distinction.  That’s strategic, and it is for a finely-crafted purpose about a highly targeted market.

So  -  how do you keep from being drawn into the diversions of a greater number of issues given the greater order and nodes of operation?  Prioritize.  Easy to say and hard to do.  It requires thinking at a different level.  What were previously significant within a lesser context now become secondary.  Sometimes they can be distributed across new organizational levels, but even that flies in the face of corporate downsizing and reduction in layers of management. 

Here’s what Peters suggests:

• isolate out the major initiatives by weeding out any tasks that do not build brand
• forget tasks and embrace projects
• work the hell out of the big projects
• be obsessive about your time
• weed out the B.S.
• always obsess on your portfolio of accumulating project work

And last, for this list anyway, is the one I like the best.  Practice “strategic rudeness”.  Find the way to eliminate those tasks that don’t fit the category.  For me, the big categories include change, image, creative application of systems, ultra-efficiency, simplification, cultural adaptation.  Being rude does not have to be obnoxious or arrogant.   But it can offend by its priority and in contrast to a limited outlook and a rigid position.  It is the reason why change in church form or brand is such a challenge.  It is personal.  It is rude that we are always pushing a new reformation.  It’s not fair to cut and replace. 

Sorry to be rude, but fair or not, discarding the filler and honing in on the one or two things we want to be distinct for, is what will make us count as a church.

Transparency and Reputation August 6, 2007

I was recently reading an article in one of my favorite publications (Wired) wherein was stated that “reputation and transparency will warp every corner of life in years to come, for good and ill”.  The context was blogging, and the inescapable reality that the reputation economy of the internet requires you to be more open, not less.

I agree.  Certainly, the blogosphere has the power by which reputation can be positively or negatively influenced.  And it seems that being open is what drives a positive reputation, even if it includes publicizing failings.  In fact, the observations of large corporations show that they grow stronger for being transparent about their faults and deficiencies.

Churches need to blog.  We know that the days of influencing reputation by signage, newspaper and broadcast media are gone.  Critical church leaders need to blog about the good and the bad.  Big ideas need to be published, not guarded so as not to be stolen by another church.  There’s a correlation  -  check out the fastest growing most influential churches, and I bet you will find they are fearless to represent everything good and bad, ahead and behind, for what they absolutely want to accomplish.

Blogging is what it’s all about now.  It’s just the device.  Who knows what will come next.  Regardless, the greater lesson of this discussion is the importance of being transparent.  Secrecy is a thing of the past.  The value is in disclosure.  People become more interested in a church that is comprised of “normal humans”, not an institution of perfect harmony and righteous behavior.  And once people are interested in a church for its commitment to try and fail and try again, they are even more interested in helping.

As leaders, stop just trying to make the church look so good.  So perfect in its operations and its righteous grooming.  Cut the “PR puffery” and the criticisms of the other guy (church), because where once having softer pews or shorter services or better everything played as a positive sales tactic, the rules of how and what we communicate today have changed.  People will ignore, moreso, they will discount such relative ploys, simply for the lack of honest, transparent representation.  The church institution is in a continuing state of imperfection and the better we get at saying so, people will take a greater interest in connecting with that reputation.

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• Bio

  I think I can finally declare myself retired. Probably for the wrong reasons - I have simply quit the self-deception of believing systems are the solution to the large church success. Not that I have been wrong, rather, I am in limited company for my belief, and it may be that the force of religious tradition still rallies too strong against conventional corporate process and re-invention. No regrets, no faulting, no resentment - just personal enlightenment. So now, I am quitting life in its bucking, controversial, compelling form, and finding greater meaning amidst simple needs, and amongst great minds who have already figured out what I am going to learn. What it means to be humanitarian, and how we are called to care. Life will be a mix of detoxification and renewed understanding of humility and gentle effort. And, for this season, Panama is the place to be....

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