Innovative Concepts

When?
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The calendar is full of events hosted by other organizations.  Their fundraisers are painted across the coming months in broad strokes.  The charitable golf tournaments are ubiquitous.  Speakers are scheduled every week.  The running schedule has the biggest race of the year on the weekend you selected for your neighborhood 5K.


If you require everyone to participate in your activity then this is a problem.  If you need those who believe what you believe then coordinate the event’s schedule with only a few other like-minded enterprises.  There is always an excuse to postpone but so often it is driven by fear and rationalized by pointing at what could go wrong.


If you have found shared purpose then the event is not just yours but it is ours and I am putting it on the calendar.

Now

There is an app for that…


I have the spreadsheet…


Let me get my laptop…


I will set a date for a conference call…


Can you meet tomorrow…


I will take it to the committee…


These are all places where great ideas go to be stripped down from their natural state.


Pick-up pen and paper.  Jot down the brillant idea.  Sketch madly to detail your interpretation.  The thought is elusive.  The act of embracing it is an artform.  The idea opens itself to you for a brief moment and then rides the breezes of time to land again in unknown destinations.  You have a few precious seconds together, so celebrate!

Flog or Golf?

Forbes had a fun article titled, Go for It Golfing, outlining ways to make golf more entertaining for the masses.  For context, consider that golf lost 4 million participants over the last five years and a million last year alone.  Between the green fees, equipment, and rules the game is focused on serving the limited few who can perform an awkward athletic skill repeatedly over a couple hours.  Just 0.7% of all golfers with a USGA handicap are ‘scratch’ (zero), meaning they should shoot par over 18 holes.  That means 99% of us need to supplement our score card to even come close to shooting par.  Basically we are playing a sport that scores based on failure and one big failure during a round can be catastrophic (no chance to get an Advance to Go card).  The authors outline six innovations that would dramatically change the way golf is scored and played, many of which I intend to implement if I take out my clubs that have not seen a fairway for a year or so.


All this makes me think about other areas that could use a re-write of the rules to make it more enjoyable.  What if education capitalized on gaming and had levels of achievement awards instead of grades, and SAT’s were replaced by the opportunities that show case a student’s talents (critical thinking list of interview questions for job applicants, none of these would appear on the SATs)?  What if a parent had to sign their name to the report that they had helped their child write/create?  Acknowledge that the project was a team effort and revel in the parent-child bonding experience, teamwork, and on-going education for both child and parent.  What if students who presented a different point-of-view in class were asked to teach the next class to fully articulate their perspective – with the teacher sitting at the student’s desk taking part in the learning?  What if a teacher asked the parent to bring their unique talent to the classroom to benefit the class (or even mentor a student, team, division)?  What if teachers did not feel pressure to know all the ideas but were treasured for being the facilitators and curators of great thinking?  What if we focused on original authorship, a student’s own perspective on a topic that one could not find online in a series of YouTube videos, Google searches, and Wikipedia articles?  What if we really got to know the students instead of the students getting to know all the details of what has already been discovered and catalogued?  


Now that is a presentation and a classroom I want to visit!  

Marketing the Weird
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Frequently Asked Questions are often an organization’s attempt to justify how normal they are and how their service and programs are just like everyone else.  It is an attempt to minimize the weirdness.  These talking points to rationalize our decisions and put them in context.  It allows for buy-in.  Enterprise’s spend hours crafting FAQs and few focus on the organization’s purpose and why their beliefs allow them to take action.


FAQ are the facts that let us justify our decisions.  It confirms what we already believe.  We know in advance that the decision is right or wrong based on our beliefs and where they intersects a cause’s purpose.  If the organization has made a choice that is consistent with its purpose and values then the facts are the supporting details.


Every organizations should embrace their weirdness.  Be the cause that everyone knows because it is authentic and is willing to embrace its eccentric side.  Do not use marketing and messaging to move further to the middle but rather create the dip that separates us from everyone else.


Being normal is equivalent to trying to standout as a blade of grass in the middle of a soccer pitch.  Being weird is about being a flower growing in a field of snow.

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Great Stories for the Side of the Mountain
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Our best stories come when we are less than perfect but our purpose shines through despite our flaws.  Our best memories are the ones where we challenged ourselves to go beyond our perceived limits.  So often we reach the greatest heights when we steady our focus on the next step and not just on the summit that looms too far above to comprehend.


A couple years ago I camped at a popular lake in the Idaho wilderness.  The area is very popular with backpackers and selection of camping sites is a fierce competition.  Except I arrived in the first week of October and the only other car at the trailhead belonged to a couple that had walked a mile to the end of the first lake.  My destination was six miles further up the trail.  I made great time hiking, set-up camp, and even scampered another mile to a pass above the alpine amphitheater before returning to my tent as darkness descended.  


In the tent and settled for a cold evening with a couple inches of snow ready to shuffle the landscape’s palate by dawn, I absorbed the isolation of my geographic coordinates.  For a few minutes the scenarios of possible (and unlikely) events played on the main screen of my mind.  I prepared for a Man vs Nature shocking sequence to unfold.  I listened for the approaching danger, uncertain of its form.  After a few shallow breaths, I managed to regain focus.  I had dreamed of solitude such as this the night before.  I lived in the intermountain west because I believed wilderness was the incubator to many of our best ideas.  Revitalized with my sense of purpose, I zipped open the door to my lightweight shelter and took in the evening sky with its gleaming stars.  I revelled in the crack of twigs not far from the tent, found humor in the mysterious thuds from far off ridges, and listened intently to the high symphony of the pine trees singing the tune of approaching weather.  I embraced the fear, the beauty, the silence, the unknown, the remoteness.  It was the imperfection of the moment that made it perfect.  And only by laying in the middle of this vast glacier carved bowl of rocks could I come to appreciate the power of being somewhere else on the mountain other than the safety of the trailhead or in celebration on the summit.


Where on the mountain have your best stories found their genisus?  I would guess many start far before we reach the top of any peak.

The Ember
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A couple times each winter I cross paths with a woman at our local cross-country ski center.  I smile at her and sometimes offer a verbal greeting.  She never outwardly acknowledges my presence.  I assume that we have different agendas during out skiing time (that is the more positive rationalization I have told myself).  This weekend, we ran into each other at the trailhead on the final day of ski season.  With skis coming off and destine for the corner of the garage, she said, ‘knowing that I will see you out here every couple weeks keeps me motived.’  Trying to overcome the seismic paradigm shift challenging my entrenched belief about this woman, I muttered, ‘thank you, always good to see you out skiing.’  


This interaction reminded me of a talk given by the rector of a local Episcopal Church.  He spoke about the interconnectedness of a community of worshipers.  What motivates people to rise on Sunday morning and spend a portion of their day indoors in prayer?  A deep spiritual connection helps but he acknowledged that knowing other members of the church will be present to greet one another and notice our absence (not in judgement) builds a higher certainty of attendance.  By being present we increased the probability of others attending yet not always knowing who.


Some interactions are visible.  Students rise and have a high degree of certainty that their teacher will be in the classroom to greet them every morning.  Others are far more subtle.  What appears peripheral in our daily life may provide the most gentle of breezes that allows another person’s dream to continue to glow or even ignite into flame.  Who’s ember do you allow to glow?  Who keeps the glow of your dreams ready to ignite?  Actions that appears to be pedestrian in our own lives may be the point of ignition for someone we barely know.  Someone is counting on the vortex of your presence today.

The Discipline Slip
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In elementary and middle school each teacher was rumored to have three small notepads in their desk.  One was pink, another yellow, and lastly a blue pad of paper.  The pink slips were for discipline issues, the yellow covered academic deficiencies, and the blue awarded for commendation.  As a sixth grader, these colors were as important as green, yellow, and red to a teenager testing for their driver’s license.  The thought of handing over a pink or yellow slip to a parent was mortifying, actually terrifying.  The rare blue slips of commendation found their way into my hands a few times and I think I placed them in a file hoping they would contain long term value.  If you handed any of these slips of paper with their carbon copy duplicate attached to a stranger they may get a curious glance but nothing more.  Within the confines of elementary and middle school they carried the weight of a court-martial or medal of honor.


I laughed out loud today when I recalled these slips of paper.  They are relics from a scrapbook.  But they have been replaced in adult life by speeding tickets, being served legal papers, and awards of honor.  Each tribe has their own tokens for appreciation and reprimand.  The items themselves are merely placeholders for intentions.  If we value the tribe we hold these tokens with high regard.


What tokens does your community celebrate or fear?     



Timing
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You can achieve the same strategic goals of planting a forest during a 15-year strategic plan by taking action in year one or year fourteen.  The only difference is the impact of the goal.  The action taken in year one has fourteen years to mature and become viable.  The seedlings planted in the last year of the plan are juvenile and yet to take root.  Their impact is yet to be discovered.

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The importance of sequencing and timing makes me wonder about educational funding.  We can invest heavily in early start and preschool initiatives that provide young children with plenty of support when they are in the most formative phase of development (seedlings) and then shape their educational growth as they reach the high school grade level (pruning phase).  But if we wait to add the greatest support (richest soils and nutrients) until a students has reached the upper grades then we have essentially missed the chance to grow a forest.  Timing and prioritization effect some strategies more than other.  I would suggest that leaving our best cultivation efforts and deepest investments for the later stages of the educational timeline results in the ultimate dustbowl.  

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