Here is a 2-minute coaching video from the interactive leadership experience: Breaking Through Imaginative Gridlock. The experience features interactive links, coaching video clips like this one, and nearly 10,000 words of text–all in an effort to enhance your capacity for vision. At present, Breaking Through Imaginative Gridlock is available on iOS devices. Simply download the free Leadia app, and then you can purchase the experience for five dollars. It’s a terrific value for the price. In the mean time, enjoy the free video clip below.
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I’m pleased to announce the release of a new leadership experience I’ve authored, Breaking Through Imaginative Gridlock: Asking Better/Different Questions to Get Breakthrough Ideas, in partnership with Leadership Network through the app Leadia.
Leadia is a mobile app from Leadership Network that combines concise innovative ideas, dynamic embedded media, and integrated social networking. It includes nearly 10,000 words of text, several short teaching videos, and the ability to interact with other readers via social media. Learn more about Leadia by clicking here.
I created this Leadia experience to help those suffering the ministry equivalent of “writer’s block.” I believe some ideas with the greatest potential to help the Kingdom advance can come from those who don’t consider themselves very imaginative, but even the most “creative” among us will need to break through imaginative gridlock at some point. My hope is this leadership experience can be a step forward in that process.
Here are some excerpts:
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Imaginative gridlock is a term Edwin Friedman uses to describe the thinking processes of systems that are “stuck.” In trying to solve a particular problem, stuck systems (like churches) try harder to provide the right or better answer to the same questions. Unstuck systems are able to ask new questions.
A stuck system might ask, “What can we do this time to really draw people to our mid-week service?” An unstuck system will at least consider the questions, “Why do we have a mid-week service?” and “Is there a better way to meet the same objective?” A stuck church with 30 attenders and a track-record of decline will ask only, “How can we grow again?” An unstuck, declining church with 30 attenders might ask, “If God isn’t calling us to revival, could He be calling us to pass the torch to another church or join with another body of believers?”
At New Vintage Church, we’ve been trying to figure out our new office situation. No matter how hard we’ve tried, we simply haven’t been able to find good office spaces in our facility. We thought of every possible combination of offices we could think of. Then, someone asked, “What if we all shared one large space?” This led to us designing one large, more collaborative workspace. I’ll blog on it when it’s finished here in the next week or two. We didn’t need to think about it harder or bring in an architect. To solve the problem, we needed someone to ask a new question.
When a church is imaginatively gridlocked–they limit the scope of their ideas by the questions they ask. This imaginative gridlock is usually not a symptom of unintelligence or inherent lack of creativity. It’s more likely a symptom of the emotional processes at work in leadership that cause limited perspective.
What we often need to solve certain ministry problems often isn’t better techniques or stronger effort–though those are fine. We need God to give us new vision. We need God to give us a new question or ten. How does a church get unstuck? Usually, God unsticks someone. He spurs someone to ask the new question first and to keep asking it until it’s considered rather than summarily dismissed.
We need some new questions. So do our churches. So do our fellowships and denominations. We don’t need to ask them for the sake of asking–or to be quarrelsome. We ask new questions in service to God and His people.
