He is my talk outline for my session at Orange Conference 2013 called Steak, Potatoes and Change – Creating an Appetite for Change in Your Church.

Change happens to be one of my favourite subjects, and one of the things that was fun about this talk is that some of the ideas are ones I’m looking to include in my next two books on change (the sequels to Leading Change Without Losing It). So I’d love your comments and thoughts.

Anyway, here are the notes. And please leave questions in the comments.

Every church needs to change. Even church plants face change once they are outside the launch window-sometimes even earlier. But how do you get people to change? We’ll look at why people don’t change and what you need to do to as a leader to create a desire in the hearts of people for key change

Shift One: Understand Why People Resist Change

1. People crave what they already like.

2. Our cravings form behavioral patterns:

a.  The people who attend your church are there because they like your church the way it is.

b.  The people who don’t attend your church aren’t there don’t.

5. People change when the pain associated with the status quo is greater than the pain associated with change.

6. Leaders have a greater appetite for change than those who follow.

Shift Two: Plot Trajectory to Determine What’s at Stake

1. Unimplemented change eventually becomes relief or regret.

2. The top 5 career regrets of business people (according to Daniel Gulati of the Harvard Business Review):

-       I wish I hadn’t taken the job for the money.

-       I wish I had quit earlier.

-       I wish I had the confidence to start my own business.

-       I wish I had used my time at school more productively.

-       I wish I had acted on my career hunches.

3. Incremental change ushers in incremental results.

4. Radical change has the potential to usher in radical results.

5.  Plot out where you will be if you don’t change.

6.  Plot out where you could be if you do change.

Shift Three: Raise the Level of Discontent

1. Create discontent out of:

i.     The potential of your mission
ii.    The progress of your mission
iii.   The gap in your mission between what is and what should be (which is what change fills…change fills the gap between what is and what should be.)
iv.   The urgency of your mission.

2. Transfer the tension that comes with the appetite for change from the leader to the community.

3. When you cast vision, focus on why twice as much as you do on what and how.  Why unites, while what and how divide.

4. Communicate the need for change in concentric circles.

i.     Dialogue with the core

ii.     Input from the committed

iii.     Information to the congregation

iv.     Vision to the crowd

v.     Invitation to the community

5. Don’t look for consensus. Consensus kills courage. Change rarely happens when everyone has a say.

6. Reserve the decisions exclusively for the body that must make the decisions.

Shift Four: Prepare for Drama

1. We are attracted to the drama in other people’s lives but resist it in our own.

2. Most Christians would forbid their children from participating in the Bible stories they read to them.

3. Most Christians pray for a changed outcome and then pray against any drama necessary to bring the outcome about

4. To lead change effectively introduces a level of drama into the church that’s necessary for the outcome to change.

Shift Five: Never Arrive

1. Focus on where you’re going, not when you’ll arrive.

2. Value experimentation.

3. Embrace failure as a step toward progress.

4. Celebrate the progress you make

Over time, appetites actually change.

When you truly embrace your mission, change becomes the by-product, not the goal, and that creates a lasting appetite for change.

So that’s the outline. What are you learning about creating an appetite for change?

 

The following is my talk outline for my Casting the Vision Daily To Keep Your Team Aligned talk given at the 2013 Orange Conference.

If you have questions feel free to leave a comment. In the meantime, here’s my talk outline.

Alignment is such a key issue for leaders. More than almost anything else, misalignment can derail even the clearest and most compelling vision. We’ll look at how leaders get misaligned and what you can do to keep your team on the same page.

1. In a perfect world, alignment would be automatic.

2. A leader never has to work at getting a team unaligned – it happens all by itself.

3. Organizations naturally grow toward complexity, (inner) competition and confusion.

4. Over time, minor misalignments become major gaps and, as a result, the common mission is lost.

5.  Just because you start in the same place doesn’t mean you end up in the same place.

So how does misalignment happen?

1. Misalignment rarely happens in a church on the mission and vision level

2. Misalignment almost always happens on a strategy level.

3. In particular, strategically unaligned programs become divisive because what you’re involved in becomes the mission

4. Leaders forget to talk about why we do what we do.

Why unites

What and how divide

Five Ways to Build and Keep Alignment

1. Take personal ownership of the strategy as leaders by:

1. Creating clarity around strategy.

2. Eliminating all competing programming (less is more).

3. Creating a common language.

4. This greatly reduces personal agendas.

2. Empower people who are already onboard.

a. Some of them are on your team…some are not.

b. Look for like minded leaders…with a proven track record.

c. Focus on strategic alignment, not just missional alignment.

d. Use financial records if necessary…giving is evidence of where the heart truly is.

e. Prioritizing the “who” of team will reduce friction and speed alignment as you discuss the “what” of ministry.

3. Build trust.

a. Trust is easiest relationally when people are aligned missionally.

b. Trust impacts speed:

i. Where trust is low, speed goes down and costs go up.
ii. Where trust is high, speed goes up and costs go down. (see Stephen M.R. Covey…Speed of Trust)

4. Eliminate alignment killers:

a. Unclear wins.

b. Ministry clutter.

c. Infrequent communication (your mission vision and strategy should never be ‘old news’ to anyone)

d. Infrequent relational deposits.

e. Infrequent follow through.

5. Stick to your strategy long enough to see if it works.

a. People aren’t used to alignment.

b. People aren’t used to clarity.

c. People are used to getting ‘their own way’

Ultimately, people gravitate toward a clear and compelling mission, vision and strategy.

And eventually, they even align themselves around it.

Those are my breakout notes. For more information on aligning a team, you can read this post that outlines 5 things I learned from North Point about team alignment.

What questions do you have about keeping a team aligned?

Here is the outline for my talk called Gaining Ground While Standing Strong: Five Strategies for Leading Change Amidst Opposition that I delivered at Orange Conference 2013 in Atlanta.

Change is one of my favourite subjects. In fact, this talk is a very short summary of a few of the key ideas in my latest book, Leading Change Without Losing It (you can get more info or buy a copy here.)

Why Do People Change?

People change when the pain associated with the status quo is greater than the pain associated with change.

Strategy One: Do the Math

People typically divide into four groups:

Early Adopters

Early Majority

Silent Majority

Opponents

Most leaders make two mistakes:

They assume loud=large

They assume volume=velocity

Although the opponents are loud and claim to represent ‘everyone’, they don’t. They represent about 10% of the population.

Although they claim to be going somewhere, opponents typically have a vision for the past, not for the future.

Focusing on the early adopters and early majority will help you navigate change.

Strategy Two: Choose Your Focus

You can focus on who you want to reach, or who you wan to keep.

Shifting your focus engages your fear.

is it more frightening to lose a handful of people or never accomplish your mission?

Would you rather lose the opponents, or the early adopters.?

Strategy Three: Find a Filter

Without a filter, everything sounds compelling.

As a leader you need to develop the questions that will shape your future.

The two question I ask are:

Is there a biblical argument in what the opponent is saying?

Is this the kind of person we can build the future of the church on?

If the answer is no to either question, listen graciously and move on.

Strategy Four: Attack Problems, Not People

Separate the people from the problem.

Turn to God. Because if you don’t turn to God you’ll turn on them.

Empathize with your opponents.

Wait a day before responding to any kind of correspondence that upsets you.

Strategy Five: Don’t Quit

Most leaders who change the world don’t move every five years.

Find good friends you can talk to.

Create an encouragement file (save anything positive that comes your way).

Develop a devotional life that has little to do with work.

Those are my notes. What are your questions about change?