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? 

Production leadership…in some ways it is an oxymoron.  You know, like jumbo shrimp and the tech person’s favorite passive aggressive.  Let me explain.

"jumbo shirmp"

Most people in the world of production, whether it is in the church or not, like to be behind the scenes.  Most of our jobs revolve around not being in the spotlight.  Even the function of our jobs is to be transparent.  Flying under the radar is something we do.  We are successful when nobody notices anything.

If you are a part of a larger organization, there comes a time when someone needs to stand up and become a leader of this group.  Leadership requires being out front.  Flying above the radar is necessary.  Learning to communicate to tech people and non-tech people alike is a must.

I was reminded of this concept last night while recording a podcast with the guys from the Tech Arts Network (check out the podcast here.)  We were talking about the idea of leading up, the concept of leading our leaders in what our teams need.

Because I am used to just doing my job without anyone noticing, I realized last night that I withhold the good news and the bad news from what is happening in my ministry from my leaders.  I don’t do this on purpose, it just falls into the “under the radar category”.  So many times I only interact with my leaders when I need something or when they need something.  There are very few instances when we have a conversation about the everyday stuff that is going on in the production ministry.

I think a big part of leading up is to engage with our pastors on a regular basis.  Not necessarily in a meeting or some kind of one on one time, but as we go.  A quick email about a volunteer who is going through a tough time, or when passing in the hall, mentioning that we had a volunteer appreciation night and how well it went.  As Mike Sessler mentioned in the podcast, going to a ministry directors meeting and not wanting to share the “pedestrian” details of what is happening in production, has got to end.

For the production ministry to thrive, it will require something outside of your comfort zone.  If you are in production in the local church, you are obviously passionate about what you do, otherwise there are better options for employment elsewhere.  That passion needs to come out in ways that help your leadership understand what is going on in your ministry.

We need to step out from behind our consoles and black shirts and learn how to be an advocate for our team.

God moves in all areas of ministry.  He can move and does move on our teams in unique ways. 

Our leaders want and need to hear about it…often.

My dad was an engineer at GM for 32 years.  He is one of the smartest people I know, a brilliant engineer, and when I was a kid, I thought what my dad got to do was the coolest.  I remember we used to start every family vacation with picking him up from work and taking one loop around the test track with our van loaded to the roof with stuff.  I always thought we would tip over as we went around those crazy banked turns.  It was awesome!

I don’t recall much about his actual job, but I do remember him complaining about designers a lot.  They were all so worried about what the car looked like, that they didn’t care about whether it would run or not.  When I stop and think about it, without a beautiful design, no one would probably be attracted to the car enough to buy it in the first place.  But on the flip side, if the car doesn’t run well, the word will get out and nobody will buy the car, regardless of how good it looks.

As a result, there are have been many cars that nobody remembers.

There is a values tug of war at play here.

I would argue that these forgettable cars were so altered by immovable values of each department that they end up with a car that nobody wants.  “I need this much space to make the transmission work.”  “I HAVE to have this space for my air duct design.”  “The headlight has to be shaped this exact way.”

When you have so many people demanding that their thing is the most important, you end up making decisions along the way that compromise the big idea.

Let’s translate all this into the local church service context that most of us are dealing with:  “I have to have the band as close together as possible.”  “I have to know the order of lyrics, exactly.”  “This service won’t work without a particular amount of time for the message.”

It is so important for each area to care deeply about what matters most to them.  If you are a lighting designer, you care most about lighting angles.  You don’t really care about message length, as long as the person giving the message is standing in exactly the right spot.  If you are an audio engineer, the lyrics don’t matter to you, as long as the vocalists know their part so that you can get the perfect mix.  If you are the video director, who cares about how long the message is, just give me the frickin’ graphics on time!

These are all extremes, but how can we all work together to create the best service possible?  How can we care deeply about our thing, but hold it loosely enough to make the most amazing experience?

I realize that so much of this depends on a vision.  Just like there needs to be a person who know what a car needs to become, someone has to own where this thing is going.  There has to be some sense of “we are all this together”, or else your loose grip will mean that the thing you care deeply about will be ripped from your grasp.

Let’s just say you have a clear idea of what the goal is.  Let’s pretend that you know exactly what the finished product is supposed to look like…just for a moment.

How tightly are you holding onto the thing that you care most deeply about?

How can you fight fiercely for the thing you care most deeply about, then let it go for the sake of the whole?