I’m guessing that Colin Powell had to deal with Rule #12 quite a bit over the years.  Between being in the military and then in government work, there are no shortages of things to afraid of or people telling you that you are doing it all wrong.

In the world of church production, there can be a constant barrage of fears and naysayers.  It is a large contributor to the fact that most tech people I know if isolated and alone, overworked and overburdened.

FEARS

I make so many decisions everyday that are based on my fears.  Fear of letting the team down.  Fear of screwing up.  Fear of wrecking the service because of a mistake.

I agree to too many things, because I want to be a team player.  I say “no” to too many things because, what if it doesn’t work?  I don’t take risks because I just want to play it safe.

Following after my fears can make for a horrible life.  I am overworked; I am that guy that says “no” all the time; and I am stuck in a rut, because that is how we always do it.

I just heard someone today say that the only way to get over your fears is to face them, to sit in the middle of them.  When you do that, you can see there isn’t nearly as much to be afraid of’; or you start getting used to the feeling of saying “no” appropriately, or saying “yes” appropriately; or you begin to take calculated risks and they pay off.

Ignoring my fears is one thing.  Don’t get me started with the naysayers.  I’ll save that for the next post.

Colin Powell’s rule #11.

I am privileged to work with some pretty amazing people.  When I stop and think about it, I can’t believe that I am counted among them.  A couple of these people, we’ll call them Scarren and Dott, produce, direct and lead an all volunteer live video team and they embody rule each week.

have a vision.

When we talk about the role of production, one of the key phrases they use for live video is transparent.  This guides every decision they make.  They stick to it with tenacity.  In our church auditorium, they know that most people are experiencing our service through the video screens, and so transparency is key.

This single word has defined how our congregation has participated in our services for years, almost beyond number.  I guarantee that nobody has any idea that a vision born twenty-some years ago, and dealt out every day from a room hidden below our auditorium has played such a significant role in their lives.

be demanding.

Being transparent with video doesn’t just happen magically.  These guys work tirelessly with their teams and with each other to keep coming up with ways to be invisible.

One of the key ways they do this is by working continually on the fundamentals.  There isn’t a moment that goes by when they aren’t gently reminding their crew about headroom and lead room.  When they aren’t coaching the graphics operator on how to follow the worship leader instead of just following the script.  When they aren’t encouraging artistic camera shots while discouraging ones that might get in the way of transparency.

As a production manager, anytime I feel like there is something not quite right with a video shot, I’ll pick up the phone to call down to video control, and I already hear them working on it.  They are tenacious with the vision of transparency.

As a result, their teams know what is expected of them.  They know where the bar is, because they are reminded constantly.  Because much is demanded of them, they perform the vision of transparency like no other video team I have seen.  Volunteer or otherwise.

Check out this clip from Delirious? – Live at Willow Creek.  This is what can happen when a volunteer crew has a vision of transparency demanded of them.

Thank you Scarren and Dott for being an example to the rest of us.

Colin Powel’s rule #8:  Check the small things.

At a certain point, I assumed that someone else would do this.  Checking small things feels like something that eventually I wouldn’t have to deal with.  I have learned just the opposite, over and over again.

During the first building project I was ever a part of, I assumed that the professional building people would take care of the the things that mattered most to me.  I figured that surely I wasn’t the smartest person in the room on some of this stuff.  They do this for a living, I am just the end user.  What do I know?

The reality is that I am the most knowledgeable person on the thoughts that pop into my head.  If nobody is bringing something up, but I am thinking about it, I need to speak up.  I notice that this mostly happens around small things, and if I assume that someone else is going to take care of it, I am wrong.

Don’t assume that what is running through your head is registering to anyone else.  Don’t move onto the next thing without voicing your opinion, if it hasn’t been voiced then probably no one else is thinking of it.  Don’t sit passively wishing that someone would bring up your concern.  It might be a small thing, but you might be just the person to bring it up.

Many times, it is the small things that make the difference between something good and something amazing.  It can also be the difference between success and failure.

Checking the small things must be done by someone.  If you are thinking of them, you need to take care of them.

Next rule:  #9 Share Credit

Colin Powell’s Rule # 5 – Be careful what you choose. You may get it.

It seems like a “grass-is-always-greener” type of statement.  This rule also feels like a double edged sword to me.

Wishing for more

My first thought is that, generally speaking, most tech people are looking for a new piece of equipment that will solve all their problems.  Sometimes a new piece of gear is exactly what is needed to advance the ministry of your church.  Sometimes it only seems that way.

When Kensington met in a high school, I would often have set up and tear down volunteers say things like “I can’t wait until we have our own building, so we can leave all this stuff set up.”  I remember thinking that I agreed with them to a certain degree, since it would be nice to not have to wake up at 3:30am on Sunday any more.  However, I also remember thinking that when we have our own building we would suddenly have a space that people and ministries will want to use 24/7, 7 days a week.  At least right now, we only had one really long day.

From a ministry impact standpoint, Kensington was able to expand by having our own building.  From a production work load stand point, our workload just grew exponentially, and in some ways , the perceived need for volunteers diminished, making it more difficult to attract and retain volunteers to do all the work that had been added to our plate.

We got what we were asking for; I didn’t wake up 3:30 on Sunday morning any more, and we didn’t but now I was working on some kind of production most every day of the week.

When asking for more, are you being honest with yourself about the true costs involved?

Not even trying

Because I have seen some of the downsides of getting what you ask for, I have noticed that I am hesitant to dream about what could be, because I start imagining the downsides.  Suddenly, the negative outcomes become my first thought.

I don’t know what it is about my personality, but I am pretty wary of the color of grass other places.   As a real life example, the grass in my yard looks pretty good from across the street.  Once you start walking on it, the dead spots and the weeds are hard to miss.

I know that things aren’t always as they appear and I like the problems I already have, simply because I know what they are.  Who knows what kind of problems exist elsewhere?

To be paralyzed with the question of what might happen, isn’t a great place to live in either.

How can I balance out dreaming for the new with being more “realistic”?

This leads right into rule #6 for next time:  Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.

Colin Powell’s rule #4:  It can be done!

This past weekend, one of the producers would ask me if we could change something technically.  Each time they asked, I hesitated.  I then gave a very lukewarm, middle of the road, “maybe” kind of answer.

At one point in the day, this producer remarked that I kept saying “no” to their requests.  Afterwards, we had a conversation about how I didn’t feel like I was saying “no”, but that I was processing out loud while I was trying to get the answer out.  The producer understood my point and said we were all good.

Later on, the production team was debriefing the service and I had a change to give the stage manager.  I could tell he was slightly hesitant with how to answer, but what came out of his mouth was like music to my ears:  “Yep.  Got it.  No problem.”

As a leader, his get it done attitude was exactly what I needed from him.  I realized that he had some figuring out to do, but he had a great first response.

This was so eye opening to me.  This is the kind of response my producer needed from me.  This doesn’t mean that I say “yes” to everything, or “no” to everything with a quick answer.  It means that I respond with confidence and with something immediate.  The vague answers I was providing didn’t instill confidence in me or my team and weren’t a great way to get to a solution.

Colin Powell’s rule:  “It can be done!” slapped me in the face this week.

How are you responding to requests?  How can you look at life through a “It can be done!” lens? 

Next rule:  # 5 – Be careful what you choose. You may get it.

This is part 2 in the series of blog posts about Colin Powell’s 13 rules.

In the last post, we talked about Colin Powell’s rule #1, which was “It ain’t as bad as you think.”  The title of this post is rule #2:  “Get mad, then get over it.”

For those of you who know me, it is difficult to imagine me getting mad.  (Maybe you should talk to my kids about this, though.)  But like many technical artists, my “mad” manifests itself in more of a passive way.

When working on a production, there are so many opportunities to get angry about something that isn’t going my way.  For the Leadership Summit a few years ago, we had created a set that made it very difficult for the audio team to do their job to the best of their ability.  Fortunately for me (sarcasm), the team didn’t hesitate to get mad about it to me.  Unfortunately (not sarcasm), by that time it was too late to change it, and we needed to just push through.

Once the event was done, we talked about it some more, and we were able to build trust that we would keep the audio team in the loop better next time.  The other thing that I communicated was that the needs of audio aren’t always the most important, and that the specific event is always going to cause us to compromise in some way.  There needed to be trust that I would fight for what they needed, and trust that I would take the heat if audio failed because of a decision I was making.

Don’t let anger build up.

This story is probably a backwards way of talking about this value of getting mad then getting over it, but what I loved was that someone did get mad about this situation and now we have gotten over it.  So often, tech people hang onto their anger and let it build up.  That build up get then cause us to get mad way more than is normal.

Express your anger at an appropriate time.

The other great part about this story is that they got mad at an appropriate time.  There weren’t any blow-ups in a rehearsal, in front of the whole team.  They didn’t show their anger to all the volunteers.  They talked directly with me, the leader.  We were able to talk about this on the side and figure out how to move on without dragging the whole team down.

Getting mad can help create momentum

There is nothing wrong with getting mad.  There are many times that getting mad helps move me from my complacency.  Sometimes getting mad helps me take a good risk that I might be too afraid to take.  Sometimes getting mad helps me stand up for what I need instead of just taking another one for the team.

The trick for us technical artists is getting mad, working it out, then getting over it. 

Staying mad about something that happened months or years ago, doesn’t help anyone.

It is what makes so many tech people cynical and bitter. 

For those of us doing technical arts in the local church, this is not what Christ had in mind when he designed you, or what he wanted His church to look and feel like.

Read Matthew 18.  It’s a great framework of how to get mad, then get over it.

The next post is about Colin Powell’s #3 rule:

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

I’ve been listening to Colin Powell’s new book, “It Worked for Me”.  There is quite a bit of great stuff in there.  Besides the fact that I love it when the author reads their own book, General Powell’s 13 rules are amazing.  He has written about them before, and he even did a Leadership Summit session about them.

As I listened to him talk about them this time, I was reminded of how useful they would be in my own life.  And since this blog is mostly a chance for me to work out my own issues, I’m going to break these down for myself, starting with rule #1:

It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.

So often, my first reaction to a situation is to imagine the worst.  The bad thing that could happen, or trying to figure out how to do something within my current constraints or if I have that tough conversation, it will go bad.  There is usually a great idea waiting just outside of the obvious, things will generally not turn out as bad as I can imagine, if I will just let my brain go there first.

What I love about this rule, is that letting some time pass is a great exercise.  Jonah Lehrer’s book “Imagine” talks about letting an idea marinate in your brain helps to connect the dots to a solution…(even though the book has been removed from the shelves, it still has some good ideas in it.)

Fear and despair are so easy to give in to.  Allowing yourself time to examine every angle can help push these first reactions to the side.  I have tried to discipline my own thinking, to start positive, to think first about how something could be done, before I start figuring out why it can’t be done.

As a tech person, I am all about solutions and figuring out how get something done.  Instead of waiting for tomorrow to calm down and look at something in a new light, I have been trying to start there.  Instead of shooting holes in an idea right off the bat, I am trying to embrace the idea and run with it as we figure out how it can be done.

How can we start with “It ain’t as bad as you think” instead of jumping to crisis mode?  Let’s stop waiting until the morning to realize that we can figure it out.

Check back for the next post about rule #2:  Get mad, then get over it.

I can tell the Global Leadership Summit is about to happen.  The nightmares have started.  Anytime a big event rolls around, I start having trouble sleeping and my dreams take some pretty interesting twists.

One of the bigger names at this year’s Summit is former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  I just read her book, and it turns out she is an accomplished pianist.  With that little bit of information tucked back in the recesses of my brain, it made for an interesting Summit session during my REM.

My good friend Condi was playing some Brahms for the Summit, that just happened to be taking place in an old high school auditorium, crewed by a bunch of very novice high school techies.  Needless to say, mayhem ensued.  The funny thing, it wasn’t like crazy weird dream mayhem, it was mostly just normal production mayhem that comes from an inexperienced crew.  It reminded me of a few keys to a successful production:

Test everything beforehand.  This might see elementary, but is so key.  Making sure stuff works before the service or performance helps to minimize potential distractions.  At Willow, we do a line check, we test each mic, we walk through all the graphics, we test every video (and watch the whole thing), we walk through lighting cues.  This makes sure that we have done everything within our power to make the service go smoothly.

In the case of Ms. Rice’s performance, we didn’t have the correct piano, it wasn’t tuned and we had put it in the wrong spot on the stage so the lights weren’t aimed properly.

Don’t assume everyone knows what the production values should be.  In my dream, I spent quite a bit of time pulling my hair out over things like people not having their com headsets on during the performance, eating food in the green room during the performance instead of being backstage, and it seemed like one of the crew members was like the phantom of the opera and lived in the depths of the basement.  That guy was not helpful at all.  All of this was a good reminder that just because I have production values that I hold to, doesn’t mean that everybody has the same ones, or even knows what they should be.

In the dream, I spent a lot of time talking with the crew about production values after it was too late, and the session was over.  In the dream I remember thinking that there is so much I take for granted with the team I have now.  The staff and volunteers are so amazing at what they do, that we very rarely talk about the basics of production, they nail it most every time.  (Way to go Willow Production!)

Having production values that the whole team follows matters, and if you are a leader in the technical arts at your church, make sure you are telling your team about them before Condoleezza Rice takes the stage.

After months of putting Tina Fey’s book “Bossypants” on hold at the library, and forgetting to pick it up, I finally got around to reading it.  Hilarious and insightful and if you can handle a few F-bombs, I would recommend it.  Anyway, I was reminded of the rules of improv and how much I thought they could be applied to life as a technical artists.  I wrote about them earlier, so here’s a re-post.

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

After writing my last post, I had to cut some content out, simply because there are too many facets involved with leading up, so I thought I’d turn it into two posts.

(insert lame pun here)

Going back to the podcast I recorded with the gents from Tech Arts Weekly, Duke DeJong pointed out that it is so easy for us technical people to talk about gear, but the real news is life change.

Leading up means I am putting my successes and failures in the context of ministry impact, which is something that pastors care about.  They care less about replacing projector lamps or getting a new sound system.  They care deeply about spending the church’s resources on things that will reach more people or help the people that are already there become more like Christ.

How is the work you are doing contributing to life change?  That’s what your leaders want/need to know about.

Van Metschke, the TD for South Hills Church was talking to us about one of his key volunteers and how their life had been changed through his involvement on the production team.  He really didn’t fit in anywhere else, and he has thrived using his gifts for the body of Christ.  He is now continuing his education to learn more about the technical arts, and while we were talking, Van received a text from him mentioning how his fellow students are commenting on how Christ shows through him.

The trouble for many of us is that we spend so much time with gear and dreaming about equipment upgrades, that it is easy to lose sight of what we should be spending time on:  developing people.  Pushing our teams to be more Christ-like.  Pushing them to accomplish things that they didn’t think were possible.  Showing them what production looks like in the context of the local church.

If we are only ever working on the gear side, that’s all we know how to communicate.

How much time are we spending focused on what really matters, so that we can communicate it to our leaders?