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ideas

10 Ways Your Church Can Be Good News to Public Schools

September 7, 2010

I have a fervent belief that if we want to reach a post-Christian society, we have to be Good News before someone will listen to Good News.

I asked some teachers, “How could a local church be Good News to your public school?” Here are 10 of their ideas.

  1. Create a team that participates at every school board meeting. Your presence at meetings, without bringing forward issues, will communicate to the decision makers that your church cares.
  2. Sponsor a community-wide clean-up day during the Fall and Spring semester. If you lead the charge, other churches and community organizations will join forces.
  3. Ask teachers to post individual classroom needs on Donors Choose, and then ask church members to help fund things that will go directly to the classroom.
  4. Set-up a tutoring program that meets in your building after school. (Example) You don’t have to be a certified teacher to help kids with math, science, and reading homework.
  5. Ask your congregation to strategically send their children to public schools. Resist the temptation to home school or send children to a private school. Instead, ask the congregation to invest that time and money into their children’s individual classrooms.
  6. Schools are often lacking volunteers for events. Meet with the principal early in the Fall and find out which events need help.
  7. Have the church cover any expenses for background checks or medical tests related to volunteering in schools. Sometimes the smallest obstacle becomes the biggest excuse!
  8. Once a month, provide treats to the school staff. Every school has a teachers lounge and every employee of the school will appreciate if you provide a bagels or a healthy lunch snack. (Don’t just bless the teachers, bring enough for everyone!) Trust me, this will make even the most hardcore staff smile.
  9. Many districts have cut spending on arts and music. Have your worship leader work with local administrators to set-up workshops, after school, or any opportunity for children to get exposure to art and music.
  10. Find out what projects are important at a school and help provide the supplies. If they have a garden, make sure they have tools. If they are allowing children to paint murals, make sure they have the paint they want.

Want to get started? Pick one and let me know how it goes!

These are my ideas. What are yours?

Many of these ideas came from classroom teachers. Special thanks to Erin, Annie, and Paul for speaking into this post.

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5 Ways to Make Soccer More Exciting for Television

August 12, 2010

Photo by adem80 via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Yada. Yada. Yada. There are those who think that soccer is an amazing game for watching on television. But for the other 95.7% of Americans I have five ideas for making it more palatable to the American market.

  1. Make goals worth 7 points. We get that. A game that ends in 1-0 seems pointless. But a game that is 7-0 seems like a defensive battle. But not nearly as good as a 42-35 throw down.
  2. Every time a team scores a goal, they lose a player. With fewer players on the better teams that gives the poorer teams the chance to score more often. That means that the more goals that are scored, the fewer players on the field, and more opportunities to score. Another alternative would be to substitute a small child for a player each time a team scores a goal. About 6 years old seems right.
  3. Add a little hill near the middle line and get rid of the offsides rule. Make the hill reasonable… but it’s important that there is a sightline issue so that a hidden forward can lay low enough to cherry pick for an easy shot on goal.
  4. If a game goes to overtime add an additional ball every five minutes. I don’t mind the idea of playing an extra period. I just don’t want to watch a bunch of tired guys pass it around and wait for a shootout. If it’s still tied inside of 5 minutes in overtime, both managers get to play too.
  5. Eliminate the red card and substitute in a penalty box. All of the weenie flopping is hard to stomach. If there’s a hard foul, give the offender a 5 minute timeout. Americans love the aggressiveness of hockey. But the acting on display at the World Cup reminded us of a soap opera.

These are my ideas for making soccer more interesting.

What are yours?

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Innovating with an established ecosystem

June 30, 2010

Photo by fmgbain via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Starting a new organization is an entirely different task than innovating to change an existing organization.

Both are hard. But changing and existing organization is way harder.

For most of my career I’ve been in turnaround roles. Kristen and I have a little joke… My entire adult work life has seemed like one roller coaster ride after another.

Click, click, click, click… up we climb.

Click, click, click, click. My heart races.

Wait for it. Wait for it… Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Arms up. Screaming bloody murder. Thinking of the Tom Petty song, Free Falling.

Down the big hill we go.

Over and over again I’m left to help try to innovate our way out of the mess.

And, so far, I’ve been pretty successful at it by most people’s judgement.

How does one innovate within an existing ecosystem?

  1. Become Switzerland. There are political factions within any organization. If you want to get stuff done you need to be neither and empathetic both sides at the same time.
  2. Spike the football. When you do something that everyone is happy with its OK to just look into the camera and say, “Thank you very much. Woohoo! Hi mom!” I’ve seen a lot of people fail in an organization because they were afraid to take the credit for their own ideas doing well. Don’t be an idiot. It’s OK to be the guy to do good stuff. Spike the football.
  3. Own the data. Existing organizations are horrible at owning their data. I like to look at the results of a long-standing program that has had no results and say, “30 years of VBS and not a single new family? Why didn’t we just light that $300,000 on fire? At least we would have had a good BBQ.” When people are tied to tradition or the way they’ve always done things, sometimes you need to be the person with the frying pan who hits them in the head. Helping people in leadership own the data is the catalyst to getting stuff done in an existing organization.
  4. Be creative. Face it. A fist full of money and a fat belly has never created a single good idea. Have you seen Bing? No budget, no time, no research, shot in the dark… that’s when good stuff happens. That’s when the best ideas pop into your head. Creativity and innovation come out of suffering and frustration. These are your friends and allies, not your enemies.
  5. Opportunistic eyes. I keep a list of ideas I’ve got on ice. Then, when I’m in a meeting and everyone is scratching their heads looking for something new, bam… I’m pull out my concept. If I ran around screaming about every idea I had all the time I’d look like a mad scientist.

What are some ways you’ve learned to innovate within an existing ecosystem?

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Possessed

June 17, 2010

Clay High School, 1992 | Welcome to the wayback machine

When someone pitches an idea my mind is running through a matrix of questions. Is this really a good idea? Is the idea even possible? Is this the right person to turn this idea into a reality? Will enough people buy into the idea that it’ll take off? Is this the right time for this idea?

But the overarching question on my mind is simply, “Has this idea possessed this person to the point that they won’t rest– they will just be driven by this idea for as long as it takes?”

90% of the time the answer to that question is no.

“I can teach anyone enough about music to sing in the  choir.”

This was the philosophy of my high school choir teacher. The woman was possessed. I’m living proof of this truism. I have no musical ability or talent at all and I was taught enough to perform at hundreds of shows, concerts, and competitions during high school.

This woman was possessed in her belief that anyone could sing and sing well. She convinced more than 50 students per year to take a choir class at 6:30 AM. On top of that she convinced about 25 of us to take an additional music class in the afternoon. Get this, for three of my four years of high school I had two music classes every day. And after school in the Spring almost all of us were also part of a musical.

It wasn’t unusual for me to leave for school before 6:00 AM and not return home from school until after 9:00 PM.

How did she do it? She was possessed by her idea. “I can teach anyone to sing.”

She had that one magical ingredient that most purveyors of ideas don’t have.

Do you?

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