CP’s Rule #7 – You can’t make someone else’s choices.  You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.

This is an interesting one for me.  I have been a production person for most of my life now,  and much of that time has been about responding to other people’s ideas and then making them awesome.  In some ways this feels like someone is making my choices for me.  I am not getting to choose what I make awesome, just to make whatever it is awesome.

Part of this is great perspective.  I am not the one who is filling the blank page with ideas.  I am not the one who is figuring out the direction for our whole organization.  In many ways my job is to facilitate these ideas.

On the downside, as a Type 9 on the Enneagram (peacemaker), I have noticed that I defer to most everyone.  So not only am I a tech person that pulls off other people’s ideas, I tend to let everyone else’s ideas and opinions matter more than mine.  In some cases, I don’t even bother to have an opinion because life is easier to not formulate one.

So on one hand, I am in need of some serious counseling.

On the other hand, there are some helpful ways to deal with being in a position of helping pull off other people’s choices while still being responsible for your own.

Understand your boundaries

When you are engaging with other people’s ideas, make sure you are aware of what your boundaries should be.  How much time can you devote to a new idea this week?  What prior commitments have you already made for your team?  What is your daughter’s middle school girl’s volleyball game schedule?

Sometimes work can/should override some of these considerations, but it shouldn’t always take precedent.  You should be in the habit of regulating your boundaries enough that there is a good balance between having your job (or your volunteering) run your life, or you running it.  You should be weighing out the situation on a continual basis.

As Jack Welch would say,

“Your boss wants you to have a balanced life.  Your boss also wants you to figure it out for yourself.”

Embrace other’s ideas as your own

Once you have agreed to making someone’s idea awesome, pretend like it is your own.  Don’t wait around for someone to make the decisions that you are designed to make.  How can you put your fingerprints on an idea?

Nobody understands your expertise like you do.

Bring your ideas to the table.

Speak up.

Make it happen.

Once you have said yes, jump in with your whole self.

Rule #8 is next:  Check small things.

I have just started listening to the book Imagine.  It talks about how creativity works.  I’m pretty sure I would recommend it to everyone I know to read, but I only just started.

The author, Jonah Lehrer talks about how helpful constraints are to creativity.  Actually not just helpful, but essential.  The road blocks help our brain get past what is obvious (left brain thinking) and start to look at the problem from other vantage points (right brain thinking).

This feels so counterintuitive.  Shouldn’t creativity be endless without any limitations put on us?  I hate constraints.  It could be a constraint of time, or manpower, or budget, or ideas.  You name it, I don’t love them.  In fact, if I am honest, I spend quite a bit of time wishing I didn’t have constraints, or complaining about the limitations placed on me.

It is easy to look around to other departments, or production teams at other churches and think there aren’t any limitations to what they can do.  I know this sound ironic coming from the Technical Arts Director at Willow Creek.  From the outside, it can appear there isn’t anything holding us back from doing whatever we feel like.  Believe me, we have our own set of limitations.

After reading this section of the book, and staring at my own constraints, I am starting to look at them in a different light.  If the research is right, the really creative solutions are right around the corner.

If I have an equipment constraint, how can I figure out how to do something with what I already have?

If it is a time constraint, how could we alter an idea that helps to multiply the time we have?

If it is a budget constraint, is there another way to accomplish the same effect for less money?

These are all great questions to ask when confronted with limitations.  I know it is a generalization, but most tech people are known for just saying “no” when confronted with road blocks.

How can we move past the road blocks to come up with more creative solutions?

Writing a blog has been good for me…for a few reasons.  Probably even a few I don’t know about yet.

It causes me to sit down and focus on putting into words, all the things that are floating around in my head.  Writing down what I think, feel and believe helps remind me of what I think, feel and believe.

For me personally, this has been like free counseling.  On some level, I don’t care who reads this blog, since it is really just a vehicle for my own process.  I figure if you are reading this, and can benefit from it, then that is a huge bonus.

As a technical artist in the local church, writing has put my in touch with how difficult it is to be creative.  And writing is a brutal art.  When I am reading or critiquing someone else’s writings, it all seems so simple.  One person is brilliant and another person can’t write to save their lives.  To the brilliant one, just keep cranking out the great content, and to the non-brilliant person, stop writing.

This shines a light on the fact that so much of doing production is about execution:  taking someone’s idea and turning it into a thing.  While there is technical creativity to make something as good as it can be, I am typically sitting behind a console executing.  If it is good or bad, the person who created it takes the glory or the heat.

[Side note: check out my conversation with Blaine Hogan from the Gurus of Tech Conference, where we talk about the dynamic between content and execution]

As a technical artist, I generally don’t live under that kind of pressure.  I have my own kind, but I can completely discount the weight that content creators are under.  Whether it is a new song, or a message, or a video, the people generating that content go through pains that I would never understand had I not decided to start writing on a regular basis.

Not only is the creative process excruciating and lonely, but then you have to lay your ideas out for everyone to see…and judge.  You open up your innermost self to the critique of perfect strangers, and to people who know you really well.  Just with these 2 things, it is amazing that anything gets created at all.

As production people, we are designed to figure out how to make something work better.  As a result it is easy for us to point out what isn’t working in someone’s idea before we ever get to what is working about an idea.  If I think about it, I tend to assume that people know about the parts that are working, so I skip over them.

Generally speaking, as a group, we need to be better at empathizing with our counterparts who are creating week in and week out.  Theirs is not an easy task.

How could we encourage the content creators that we work with each week?

When you huddle up after the first service this weekend, start with something encouraging. 

Whether it is the worship leader, the actor in a drama or the senior pastor, everyone needs to be encouraged to keep creating.  And without a steady stream of great content, those of us in production won’t have anything to support.

I have been absent for so long from blogging, I hardly know where to pick it up again.  Not only have I forgotten how to be disciplined and just write, but I have lost the spark, or my brain is empty, or I am not sure what I think at the moment.

For a few months now, I just assumed it was because I was devoting all my brain space to Gurus of Tech, a gathering of technical artists from local churches around the world.  I figured that once it was over, my brain would fill back up with ideas.  It hasn’t, but maybe I also haven’t given it enough time.

Which leads me to the idea that is starting to form in my brain.  I was privileged to interview Blaine Hogan, a very talented creative director at Willow Creek, whom I get to work with each week.  During the interview, we talked about how many tech people think that creatives just sit around and the ideas just happen, usually while drinking a latte at Starbucks and listening to Spotify.  The reality is that starring at a blank page is scary.  Especially when you are out of practice.  And creativity isn’t necessarily automatic.

This isn’t first time that I have wanted to post a blog, but it is the first time I have actually gotten any words to appear.

Creativity is hard.  I also got to interview my senior pastor, Bill Hybels and he talked about how precious an idea is…they don’t just happen, but one idea also has the power to change the world.  It takes discipline to be creative and to get the ideas out.  Plus there are so many ways that an idea can die, or be buried by stuff that doesn’t matter.

Writing this blog and pouring myself into Gurus of Tech have helped me to understand the world that people who have to constantly generate ideas live in.  It has helped me to understand what it feels like when one of your ideas doesn’t go over with an audience.  I understand how difficult it is to transition from one idea to another while standing in front of a room full  of people.  It is not easy to stare at a blank page, knowing that, in 5 minutes you need to come up with something that seems amazing…no pressure.

How can you empathize with your senior pastor this weekend?  Your worship leader?  Your creative director?  Creativity is difficult, and these people need grace and encouragement from us.

As a technical artist, I sit in a lot of meetings where seemingly impossible ideas are flying all over the place.  In those situations, I have to work at letting the sky be the limit for as long as possible.  This isn’t easy.  I immediately start going into “figure it out” mode, and since many ideas can fall outside the realm of doability, I can tend to squash the brainstorming process.

I have noticed over the years, that because I don’t generally carry the burden of whether an  idea is a good one or not, or whether it will actually make a service better or not, it has been easier for me to list all the reasons why an idea won’t work, and not offer up any suggestions myself.  In my mind, I had thought to myself:  “Its your job to come up with the ideas, and its my job to execute.  So just come up with another idea.”

Somewhere along the way, probably “when I was at Kensington”, I realized that I wasn’t really interested in simply executing someone else’s idea, but I wanted to be a part of creating something together; to bring the best of all the art forms together and make something amazing.  Now the goal was collaboration, and just sitting back and waiting for workable ideas to come my way wouldn’t work any more.  Just saying “No.  What else have you got?” became obviously unacceptable.

Now, when I am in the sky’s the limit situations, the goal is to take the ideas and make them work.  To not just say something can’t be done, but to help figure out other options for creating the same idea.  To be a part of the creating it, instead of killing it.

As a tech person in brainstorming situations, how do you think you are viewed?  Do people expect you to shoot down their idea?  Or can’t they wait to share their idea with you because you’ll figure out way a way to do it, or to tweak the idea into something workable, or to make the idea better?

At the end of the process, maybe the answer is no; maybe the idea isn’t possible.  However, along the way, have you fostered the idea that you are a “no” tech person, or have you been a problem solving team player working hard to make the service the best it can be?

 photo credit: Lynn Friedman

I was talking with a co-worker  yesterday, and I was reflecting on how easy it is to be negative about what’s going on in my church.  Negative about leadership decisions.  Negative about direction.  Negative about people.  As a tech person, I think it is easy to be less than positive because things are always changing, or things are last minute, or I’m reacting  in fire drill fashion quite a bit.  It is easy to get cynical.

Many tech people I talk to call it being a realist.  That may be true, since we tend to look at things from a “how can this be accomplished” perspective.  However, in my earlier years, and sometimes even now, I would lead with “this can’t be done”, or “this is stupid” or “I don’t have time for your creative ideas”.

A different co-worker, later on the same day was talking about Tina Fey’s book “Bossy Pants” and her rules of improv and how they apply to everyday life.  I like them because they speak toward a more positive way handle situations that could really help us tech people, not just in how we approach life, but how we are then perceived by others.

 Start with Yes. –  So often the answer to someone’s idea can be no, simply because there aren’t enough resources of money or time to pull it off.  This shuts things down pretty quick and then forces the person with the idea to come up with something else.

Say yes, and… – If we are able to say yes, then offer a few solutions to pulling off the idea, often times a new, creative and more importantly, a doable idea comes to the surface.

Make statements, don’t ask questions all the time – If we are good tech people, our job is to ask questions to get to the root of what needs to happen.  However, working with non-tech people means that we need help them understand what can and can’t be done, not just assume they know that an idea is crazy difficult.

 There are no mistakes, only opportunities – This sounds pretty cliche, but I really believe that for us to improve and get better as tech people, we need to push ourselves.  This means mistakes will happen.  What we do with the mistakes is what matters.  Will you repeat the same mistakes over and over or will you make adjustments to make sure you learn from mistakes.

How can you apply them to situations you face every day?  How could the rules of improv help how you work with others?  

 photo credit: Gage Skidmore

A couple of weeks ago I was in a few all day meetings.  After the  first half of the first day, I was totally engaged.  By the time we were in the 2nd half of that day, I was realizing that there was a lot of original thought flying around the room, and that none of it was coming from me, or at least none that I was saying out loud.

From there, it was just a series of introspective thoughts on why I felt totally engaged, but wasn’t outwardly engaged.  For the moment, I have boiled it down to the tension .I feel between being reactive and being proactive.  As a production person, so much (OK, most) of what I am responsible for is a reaction to someone else’s ideas.  You tell me the idea, and I’ll react to it and as we say around here, enhance it.

The problem for me, is that for production to become the most effective, I need to learn how to be proactive as well.  Instead of being in reactive mode, I need start thinking beyond just how to get things done and onto what could be done.

Here are a few thoughts based on my journey over the last couple of weeks:

Being reactive keeps me in my production box.  If all I do is react to people’s ideas, the only questions people will ask me is about how I can get things done for them.  “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”

Thinking proactively expands my influence in my environment.  If I am imagining what could be, and sharing my ideas about things other than production, my opinion could help to influence more than just my immediate ministry, but possibly the larger church.

Being reactive keeps me in a “WHAT?!?!” mindset.  When I react to ideas, I can tend to poke holes in them, and talk about reasons why it can’t work.  And for some non-production type people, my reaction can be interpreted as reactionary and negative, perhaps even an overreaction.

Thinking proactively puts me in a “What if” mindset.  If I take the limits off of my responses, now I am imagining possibilities.  They might all stink, but asking “What if…” helps to expand the discussion, looking for solutions.  For the non-production person, this feels more like we are in this together.

As technical artists in the church, how can we move from reaction to proaction?  How could things be, instead of how they shouldn’t?

photo credit: jimmywayne

I was just at an event where I observed people interacting with each other on a 50/50 basis, and it was fascinating how some people wanted to do their half, but more importantly wanting the other person to do their half first.

What I’ve noticed in my own life, is that waiting for someone to meet me halfway never really works out.  Trying to be fair, doing my half, putting in just enough effort to make a relationship work…all these things have led to me being discontent.

In the middle of all this, that verse about Christ and him not considering equality with God something to be grasped came into my head.  I looked it up (Philippians 2) and was amazed:

⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

⁶ Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
⁷ rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
⁸ And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!

Christ didn’t wait for God the Father to meet him halfway, he gave himself up fully, way past any relational requirements I have to worry about.

Whether it is with your spouse, a co-worker, a tech volunteer, a worship leader, or your senior pastor, working for halfway will never satisfy.  Waiting for someone else to do their half will leave you disappointed.

If you and I were standing in opposite endzones of a football field, the 50 yards closest to me seems way more than yours.  Knowing where halfway is, from my perspective is nearly impossible.

Go the full distance.  Be the one who meets people where they are.  Serve the other person without wanting there to be a halfway mark or someone keeping score.