Momentum Part II - Worth the extra work

I'm working at a pace right now that probably can't be sustained over the long term. But like other jobs, Campus Crusade staff means seasons where you hold down the B-button and sprint. The beginning of a school year is certainly one of those times, and even though I'm not primarily on campus in my new role, it feels especially heightened this year.

There are several pretty big projects to move forward right now. Perhaps the most significant, in that it lays a foundation for the rest of the year, is our office reorganization. We need to continue to transform our office in to a place that not only has greater physical capacity, but also an environment that will attract gifted students and staff to come use their leadership and/or operational strengths to build the capacity of our region. This means moving people physically in the office, but also changing how we work, collaborate, and communicate

There are a lot things that could bring this process to a halt, but I keep reminding myself of these three things:

1. Keep things moving forward: Whether big or small, take ground each day. Whether it's building a new cabinet from Ikea or deciding on a regional budget, getting things done is paramount.

2. Manage the fear: As there are no perfect people, there are no perfect offices. We'll have issues, and I'll make mistakes, but the biggest mistake I could make right now is not to make changes.

3. People need to see and believe things are changing...for the better: I have people leading me, and nothing puts wind in my sails like a vision and direction for a better future. As we start to experience some "wins" together, we'll start to feel momentum.

There is something about momentum. You can feel it even if you might not be able to put your finger on it. People are more motivated, enthusiastic, and creative. Isn't it worth the extra effort to generate momentum?

I'm dreaming of a day where our whole region has a collective sense of momentum, as campus movements are growing, lives are being changed, and the gospel is going out from the NW to the ends of the earth.

What about you? Where would you like to get some momentum going?

Momentum Part I - Five things to move every day

I just read an article called The Art of Momentum: Why Your Ideas Need Speed. It recounts the story of a musician who suffered brain trauma that almost eliminated his short-term memory. But, for some reason, if he begin to play a piano piece, it was like it returned.

As long as his fingers and his mind were in motion, he could play beautifully. Clive’s wife writes, “The momentum of the music carried Clive from bar to bar… He knew exactly where he was because in every phrase there is context implied, by rhythm, key, melody… When the music stopped, Clive fell through to the lost place. But for those moments he was playing he seemed normal.”

I'd been thinking about along similar lines tonight as I was looking over what I had to work on before bed. There are a variety of projects and tasks that need to be moved forward, and each one seems to be in danger of grinding to a halt if I don't move it forward. Not just halting in reality, but in my mind. It seems to be more and more true: if I stay in motion, it's very easy to stay in motion. But when time goes by and the momentum has been lost, it's very hard to get back. Perhaps brain trauma only exaggerates what is already true of us!

The article offers three suggestions to generate momentum, the third one of "work on your project every day" striking me as key. Perhaps we are all inertial beings, but I feel especially so. I have a difficult time stopping once I get started, but an even more difficult time restarting once I've stopped. Accordingly, which project or projects need work every day in order for me to generate, and preserve, momentum?

1. Time with the Lord: I've seen time and again that stringing a few days together generates momentum in my devotional life, and stringing several weeks together brings a freedom and vitality that makes walking in the Spirit a whole lot easier. Miss a few days? Suddenly it's been a couple weeks and I wonder why I feel disconnected from God.

2. Exercise: The more I run, the more I want to run. The more I get to the gym, the more I want to keep pushing ahead and go harder. There were days in college when I was training for road races where to miss a day was an actual fear. I knew that if I missed one, it would be easy to miss another.

3. Support: For my ten years on staff, raising support to fund my/our ministry has been done in bursts that have varying levels of fruitfulness. Ramping up to think about raising support takes time, and often times when the momentum was finally coming, it was time to get back to campus. Is this the right paradigm for me? Could it be that working every day, whether for 5 minutes or a couple hours, might be the better approach?

4. Work (whatever is the most challenging project of the moment): Right now, for me it might just be getting our office reorganization done. We're going from 9 full-time (and several other part-time) to 17 full-time with even more part-times. Making minor changes would be safe and easy, but ultimately would miss the opportunity to capture the momentum of a new year, new people, and new hope. More on that in my next post...

5. This blog: It so quickly goes from "I have too many ideas to get down" to "where do I even think about restarting? None of these post ideas seem like the right one to restart with." Thus, today's post!

Does that seem like to much to think about every day? Maybe. But as the article points out, it is not the duration of time that we give each project, but the frequency. Five minutes every day just might be better than trying to do two hours every other week. Keep pushing things forward and don't allow them to come to a stop.

Update: New National Director's training this week

I'll be in Orlando the rest of this week at a training for those new in their roles as Regional National Director's. (The nomenclature is still new and unfamiliar organizationally. I'm a National Director of Operations that shapes the US Campus Ministry as a whole but focuses within a particular region.) It came on the calendar relatively recently, but I'm looking forward to getting time with our national leadership in the USCM as well as other new regional/national leaders. There will only be eight of us, so probably won't be able to hide in back during meetings. ;)

Hopefully I'll be able to share some of the content and insight from our time during the event via twitter and this blog. The schedule is above.

Anything on here you want me to make sure and take good notes on?

New job: 3 areas of focus

Four months ago I moved in to a new role (Director of Operations - Greater Northwest) with the ministry I work for (Campus Crusade for Christ), a role which for the last two years has been unfilled. As I've gotten a read on the "current reality", it seems there are three main things I need to be about for the next year on the job:

1. Clean up the messes - Last night, my wife and I were running errands while our kids were with the grandparents. As we were out until after the kids bedtime, upon arriving home we quickly put the kids to bed and retired upstairs for the night. What got missed in our evening ritual was cleaning up the kitchen, starting the dishwasher, and making sure everything was ready to go in the morning. Result? This morning we not only had to make breakfast for us and the kids (the usual), we also had to clean up the kitchen from the night before while doing so (not usual). Not a big deal, but it did create more stress to start the day and delayed getting to work this morning.

It's kind of similar with the job. Directing Operations for the region requires plenty, but even just a short period of neglect (which can partly be explained by number 2 below) creates a lot of additional work that needs to be done to even start getting after the main things. It could be financial decisions that need to be revisited, web and technologies that are withering on the vine, people that haven't had a leader to care for them the way they should, or just a lack of clarity in direction for the operations effort in our region.

2. Change the culture - By this, I mean how operations is viewed by staff and students within the northwest. The reason there are messes to clean up is the difficulty in finding people that are a) called to ministry, b) operationally capable/savvy, and c) are willing to focus on leading operationally. Most people that join staff do so to change lives by getting face to face with students and sharing with them from the Word. The word "Operations" seems to connote the opposite of ministry: mechanical, unrelational, distant (as opposed to organic, relational, and intimate). At least it did for me.

Fortunately, I don't think that characterization of operations need be true (though it certainly could). My desire is to help our staff, students, volunteers, and donors connect the dots between operations leadership/effectiveness and lives being changed and ministry capacity being expanded. Operations touches nearly everything we do in ministry (and that goes for churches, too) and has potential for tremendous innovation and impact all the way down to the life-on-life level. If we don't do it well, we'll find ourselves hamstrung, unable to grow to the point where we can realistically give every student a chance to know God through Jesus Christ. More about that in the future.

3. Increase communication - If you've played team sports, you know a warning sign for a team is when they stop communicating. Whether it's a baseball outfielder calling for a fly ball or a basketball defender calling out a screen, when there is great communication the team is going to perform at it's optimum level and be able to respond to emerging circumstances very quickly. Ministry may not be a team sport, but it is certainly a team effort.

While communication is just one area of operations, it seems like it has the most potential to provide huge, immediate wins. Social media/new technologies will certainly play a role here, but it is more philosophical. Few things build trust and a shared vision between people like good communication. And so much of ministry is communication. 

In a region that spans seven states and thousands of miles (from Alaska to Nevada), communication is going to be an issue. But you can just as easily not communicate with someone that's your next door neighbor. We need to learn how to communicate professionally in ways that help us all. Sharing and collaboration are buzz words right now, but I think it's for a reason. You can get a lot better at whatever you're doing a lot faster when you are not consistently reinventing the wheel. As a microcosm, I remember being in our staff meetings at WSU and having someone share about something they had been doing in ministry which was really getting results. "Why didn't you say anything?" was my thought. But then I realized: I'd never asked, and for them to volunteer and share could seem boastful. Those are two things we've got to overcome, but when we do cool things can happen. As my friend and operations co-laborer Matt McComas has said, "Get over yourself."

So those are the three things I've put my finger on so far. What do you think? Seem like they are in the ballpark?