Tim Casteel

Thoughts on Leadership and College Ministry

Catalyst Dallas

Scott Belsky — Most ideas never happen

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Scott Belsky was the speaker I was most looking forward to at Catalyst Dallas. I don’t know anything about his spiritual inclinations, but I love his 99% blog and tweets. Great, great insights on making ideas happen – systems, leadership, etc.

 

And Scott did not disappoint. Best talk, by far, at Catalyst Dallas on Day 1. I only wish he had twice the allotted time because he breezed through about 100 brilliant points that he could have camped out on for hours.

My favorite takeaway (among the MANY):

  • Creativity x Organization = Impact

5 x 0 = 0
100 x 0 = 0
5 x 20 = 100

[So basically – you could be insanely creative, but without organization you’re result is zero. And additionally, a little creativity with great organization can outperform amazing creativity without organization.]

Here’s my best attempt at notes from his talk:

Why do most ideas never happen?

  • When a new idea strikes, energy and excitement are really high
  • Then we call meetings and we have discussions, and our inbox piles up with emails
  • Over time energy/excitement dissipates
  • To return to the high of a new idea, we just scrap the old idea and start a new idea
  • Ideas don’t happen just because they’re great (there is no meritocracy of ideas where the best ideas always win out)
  • There are other forces at play

 

Here’s why they don’t happen:

  • The gravitational force of day to day operations
  • You get back to your desk and get overwhelmed
  • Lack of Feeling Organized
  • Lack of Accountability
  • Never tell anyone about our idea and no one ever benefits from it
  • Lack of Feedback exchange — you see the fatal flaws in others ideas but never tell them
  • Lack of Leadership Capability
  • When you do exit interviews, why are people leaving - Often they feel like they are not being fully utilized

How do we defy the odds and make ideas happen?

Creativity/Ideas + Organization/Execution + Communal Forces + Leadership Capability = Making ideas happen

Organization/Execution

  • We are bombarded An endless stream of stuff (emails, texts, tweets, voicemail, mail, facebook messages)
  • We are all pecking away at all the inboxes of our life
  • We are living someone else’s to-do list
  • We lose the sacred space of deep thinking — the shower is our last refuge
  • We need to force ourselves to be proactive and have deep thinking
  • Create Windows of non-Stimulation in your day — 2-3 hours of unplugging
  • Working on long-term plans
  • Unplugging is the competitive advantage of the digital age
  • Creativity x Organization = Impact

5 x 0 = 0
100 x 0 = 0
5 x 20 = 100

  • What company was recognized for the world’s best supply chain management? Apple
  • COO Tim Cook could be just as important in that company as Steve Jobs
  • The key to success in their study of the best creators in the world: Organize with a bias to action
  • Have an intolerance for unactionable meetings
  • Have a culture of capturing action steps — End your meeting with capturing actions

“I’m going to email this guy”

“I’m going to redraft this”

 

  • What ends up happening is you catch misses and duplication:

“Oh, I thought you were going to also do this”
“Oh, I thought I was going to do that”

  • It provides immediate accountability
  • Write actions down when they happen
  • Reduce your amount of insecurity work - Twitter, facebook, blog
  • Stuff we’re just doing to assure ourselves that everything is OK (people are still reading my blog, still following me on Twitter)
  • Find those things that don’t move the ball forward and cut it out or delegate it or reduce it
  • Never stop optimizing
  • We don’t want to fix something if it isn’t broken
  • Do experiments — cancel the weekly staff meeting; have a stand up meeting; see how it goes


Communal Forces

  • There are three types of people: Dreamers, Doers, Incrementalists
  • Dreamers — going to bed thinking about what new they can put in the system
  • Doers — wait a second we have a budget, a timeline; go to bed happy when there is nothing new in the pipeline
  • Incrementalists — rotates between the two; problem — create too many things that never scale
  • We need to recognize what roles people play
  • Share ideas liberally

Every time Chris Anderson has an idea — he throws it up on his blog
His community starts to nag him about his ideas
He relies on this constant pressure to follow up on ideas
Aren’t you scared people are going to steal your ideas and throw out ideas too soon? The benefits outweigh the risks

  • Share ownership of ideas

Doing things your way strips people of ownership. If you step in to correct what they are doing (to tweak it, to make it 100% instead of 95% good) — that person is now unlikely to stay up late at night working on the project

  • Seek Competition

We pace ourselves with other folks
Tuning in to what other people are doing helps us take the next step

  • Overcome the stigma of self-marketing

Respect based self-marketing
Curators in what’s interesting to them
Blogs, twitter
People can tune in and follow us
Then when we have something we want people to know about, we don’t have to spam, we just let our followers know

  • Innovation by tolerating failure
  • Innovation happens thru rapid failure
  • But what do we usually monitor and keep stats on? Success
  • How do we in organizations encourage innovation? Free up some staff for a short time to try new things without success criteria
  • Push People into their intersection; people operate best at the intersection of these three:

Interests — what keeps them up at night
Skills —
Opportunities (around them)

  • All of the remarkably successful people — at some point someone told them they were crazy
  • When people tell you are crazy — you’re either crazy or you’re really on to something


Nothing extraordinary is ever achieved thru ordinary means

What was the biggest takeaway for you? What has helped you make your ideas actionable?




Catalyst Dallas – Andy Stanley

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Andy Stanley kicked off Catalyst Dallas. I’m a big fan of his stuff on leadership – brilliant thinker on ministry leadership and systems. It’s my first time to hear him speak.

Here’s my abridged notes:

  • A single act of courage is often the tipping point for something extraordinary
  • A handful of young people in Egypt set off revolutions around the world
  • The story you’re going to tell your grandkids is: Opportunities came along and you were scared to death but you took a step of faith
  • When you tell your story — there will be moments where an extraordinary act of obedience will be a tipping point for an extraordinary thing that God will do in your life
  • When you come to these moments there will be fear involved
  • Most of us in ministry have plenty to eat, roof over our head, but I think of three things we face

Three faces of courage:

1) The courage to stay, when it would be easier to go

  • It would have been a lot easier if God would have told me the future success I would see if I had stayed
  • You never know what hangs in the balance, what’s coming when God whispers stay
  • If your ministry is hard, it just means you’re in ministry. It’s hard
  • It takes courage to stay when everything says go
  • You gotta decide — am I going to trust God, am I going to obey? Do I have the courage to stay when everything says go

2) Courage to leave, when it would be easier to stay

  • Tale of 3 Kings — “Beginning empty handed and alone, frightens the best of men. It also speaks volumes of just how sure they are that God is with them”

3) Courage to ask for help, when it would be easier to pretend that everything’s okay

  • Secrets are dangerous
  • Secrets in the life of leaders are extraordinarily dangerous
  • Because you haven’t invited others into your life
  • Most of the people in your church think they can do your job with one hand tied behind their back
  • They think our jobs are easy
  • They don’t understand what you live with, the pressure
  • Andy to Businessmen (to help them understand how difficult ministry is): Think for a minute about the hardest thing you do in your job. Now imagine doing that on a stage in front of all your friends, all your family, and everyone has your email address
  • The pressure we’re under, our accessibility, we just wear down
  • We need more help than the average person, but we are less likely to ask for help than the average person
  • If we’re afraid of anything, we should be afraid of missing out on what God is doing


  • Here’s what I ask myself: what story am I going to tell?
  • Every decision we make is going to be a story that we tell
  • Do you really want to tell the story that God wanted you to go but I really was afraid and I stayed?
  • You want to tell the story: God told me what I was supposed to do and I was scared to death and I decided to say Yes to God and do it
  • We step into the unknown even though we don’t know what will happen
  • The tipping point for all of us in our life is a single act of courage

Are we a Post-Christian Culture?

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There are three things that will define ministry over the next decade:

  1. Unprecedented Access — to products, services, ideas, and worldviews

  2. Alienation — New levels of isolation from family, from community, from each other

  3. Authority — New questions about who to believe and why — what has claim on our lives?

I’m at Catalyst Dallas this week. Honestly, I was a little underwhelmed today by the content at the Labs. I’m sure it will improve as the real conference starts tomorrow.

Here’s my notes from what I thought was the most insightful Speaker today: Dave Kinnaman, President of The Barna Group (author of unChristian).

His main question: Are we a Post-Christian Culture?

  • 83% self-identify themselves as Christians in America
  • 8% of Americans are evangelical (based on correct answers to 8 theological questions)
  • Most Americans have a broadly Christian perspective
  • 75% have made a personal commitment to Christ
  • 3 out of 4 Americans believe the resurrection is literally true
  • We are a very Christianized culture but not a Christ-following ones
  • Are we post-Christian — yes and no

Our role in ministry: to introduce them to the God they think they know


1. Unprecedented Access to products, services, ideas, and worldviews

  • His 6 year old son doesn’t even know how to spell but yet knows that Google has all the answers to any question (I wonder if. . . — we go right to the internet)
  • Does your church feel in tune with the times when it comes to access?
  • Have students twitter or text in questions and answer them in the service
  • You Lost Me — new book. Young people feel that science is very accessible but the church is not
  • University of Phoenix is largest University in the U.S. — around 500,000 students
  • Whether it’s legit or not, online is where people are going

2. Alienation — New levels of isolation from family, from community, from each other

  • % of people born with unwed mothers:

1960 — 5%
Today — 42%

  • % who have completed major life transitions by 30 (leaving home, finishing school, financially independent, getting married, and having a child)

1960
77% of men
65% of women
Today
46% of women
31% of men

  • It’s a different cultural reality today than it was 50 years ago
  • Who’s working with these people who are starting “adulthood” later?

 

3. Authority — New questions about who to believe and why — what has claim on our lives?

  • Confidence in Leaders 1966 vs 2007

Congress — 42% vs 10%
Major Companies — 55% vs 16%

  • How can we as a church thrive as an authority-centered institution in an anti-authority culture?

 

Three Takeaways:

1)    Authority — The response to that is one of revelation

  • Do we really have a sense of God speaking to us?
  • The Bible is more than a textbook, or an owner’s manual
  • It’s a living breathing document, a revelation from the Living God instructing us in how to be on Mission with Him

2)    Access — response is one of vocation

  • Young people are leaving the church because they don’t feel that the church is giving them a calling
  • They never connected how the Bible applies to their major, their vocation
  • Reconnecting the idea of our vocation to the bible
  • Our faith matters outside of Sunday AM

3)    Alienation — the response is our presence

  • Presence can be facilitated via technology (not always being physically present) — twitter, email, etc
  • We can respond to their questions quickly and be more accessible

 

What do you think about those three: Unprecedented Access, Authority, and Alienation?

What will it look like for us to minister to college students in light of these three?