Len Wilson's Blog, page 20
January 23, 2015
8 Brilliant Insights About Story From Robert McKee
1. The archetypal story unearths a universal human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression.
2. Screenwriters [storytellers of any kind] learn that economy is key, and brevity takes time.
3. No one can teach what will sell, what won’t, what will be a smash or a fiasco, because no one knows.
– This is true of Hollywood and was true in my time in book publishing as well. If someone says they’ve got a guaranteed market killer, run. They’re just selling you the idea of selling itself.
4. The storyteller’s selection and arrangement of events is his master metaphor.
– This belies easy comprehension, and requires a meta-awareness of the way a story unfolds, which has as much meaning as the narrative itself.
5. Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality.
6. Values are are at the soul of our art. In decades past, writer and society more or less agreed on these questions, but more and more ours has become an age of moral and ethical cynicism – a great confusion of values. This erosion of values has brought with it a corresponding erosion of story.
7. Don’t mistake verisimilitude for truth. This writer believes that the more precise his observation of day-to-day facts, the more accurate his reportage of what actually happens, the more truth he tells. But fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small “t.” Bit “T” Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together and tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed… What happens is fact, not truth.
Or as I say in Think Like a Five Year Old,
Truth and honesty are not the same thing. Someone can be truthful and not be honest. A truthful response is precise but not necessarily honest, because it’s only concerned with the outcome. When we’re detached, we can be truthful and precise, but we may not always be accurate and honest. Honesty is deeper; it’s a form of soul alignment that marries intent and spirit with outcome. The creative life – and the spiritual life – is concerned not with truth as extrinsic precision but with honesty as intrinsic motivation.
8. Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
- This last one is disheartening for most people I know. But do we dismiss story as a result, or strive for more brilliant storytelling to match our profound material?
About the Author
Len Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
January 20, 2015
The Myth of the Right Brained Thinker
Recently I posted that, in spite of our conventional wisdom, creativity doesn’t necessarily equate to the arts. Creativity is more universal than the gift and skill of artistry. Yet this false belief is pervasive. I heard it again this week.
The entire association of creative/artistic/right brained is rooted in a false dichotomy of the left brain and right brain. A 2013 research study of over 1000 people aged 7-29, found no evidence for categorizing left vs right brained people. (Even the assumption that we can verify our identity through empirical evidence is messed up. This is a topic for another post.)
In my work in the church, most mentions of the word creativity seem to come in relationship to worship and the arts. These can benefit from creativity, to be sure, but the potential for innovation in church life goes far beyond worship. Innovation happens wherever there is creative thinking, applied.
The myth of the right brained thinker isn’t helpful because it suggests that we’re either hard wired for creativity or we’re not, and also because it suggests that the only kind of creativity is that which is related to artistic expression. Creativity is just as possible in electrical engineering as it is in songwriting or the culinary arts. Every one of us is capable of creative ideas.
Here’s the action step.
As a leader, give all of your people—including yourself—the freedom and encouragement to dream of better ways. This includes the maintenance team of your organization, or the accounting people. Schedule time for this to happen.
Ahout the Author
Len Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
January 13, 2015
3 Characteristics of Creative Innovation
In grad school, I worked down the hall from the ENIAC. Fortunately, it had become a museum piece, life was in color and we worked on Silicon Graphics terminals instead.
What happens with our creative ideas? Applied creativity, whether in our personal or professional lives, becomes innovation. We innovate when we put creative ideas into action.
Engineers John Mauchly and Presper Eckert started construction on the first modern computer in June of 1943 in Philadelphia. They called it the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC. (Their creativity was in engineering, not branding.) It was operational in November 1945.
“There is a world market for maybe 5 computers.”IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943Prior to the ENIAC, a “computer” was a person, usually a woman: a data entry employee who punched keys and cranked handles on desktop adding machines. Not everyone saw the need for a room size computer, either.
That’s the way it is with new things. Most people don’t get it.
According to what constitutes a computer – not a woman, but a machine – the ENIAC was the first computer. It functioned for 10 years. Motley and Eckert weren’t the only ones, though. Others had the need for a more efficient way to do compute mathematical equations, and some had been proposing solutions for decades. The first written works for mechanizing mathematical operations appeared in 1820. But nothing had stuck.
Why?
True innovation, as opposed to the person tinkering with a prototype, is difficult to achieve. Just ask the other people working on computing at the time. Consider these three characteristics:
Fully functioning and in constant use.
Working for a long period of time. (The ENIAC worked for 10 years.)
The basis for subsequent innovations. (The alpha dog.)
This last one is critical and may seem like a high bar for innovation, but it is the distinguishing factor. Think of it this way: innovation is influence. We celebrate the story of Walt Disney because his was the basis for all theme parks to come. Innovations are trend setters.
Your idea doesn’t have to affect an entire industry, but it can’t be a one-off. It has to be something on which others build.
About the Author
Len Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
January 5, 2015
How I Got Rid of the 24 Page Bulletin
When I started as Creative and Communication Director at Peachtree, the church was producing super lengthy bulletins for weekly worship, up to 24 pages long. They were the size of a university syllabus, or maybe a small town phonebook. Here’s an example of the old style.
Peachtree was in desperate need of innovation in general, and with the bulletin in particular.
I had come to create “a storytelling culture,” which is a cool way of saying that I was hired to bring creativity and innovation to worship and communications, using more narrative and less information-based approaches. One of the most obvious needs was the 24-page bulletin and the church’s absurd dependency on print.
Why Peachtree was so dependent on print isn’t hard to understand. Peachtree is a stately church, part of a “high cotton” tradition with a great reputation as one of Atlanta’s finest institutions. Innovation in communication systems tend to work their way up the socio-economic ladder, with the laggards at the highest rungs, because they have the most invested in the old systems. There’s a high correlation between socio-economic status and resistance to innovation. Peachtree is no exception.
The church even has a commercial, 4-color offset press in the basement. Some of my more innovation-minded colleagues hated the symbolism of the press and hoped I would get rid of it or at least drastically minimize its use. I saw it not as an albatross to moving forward but an incredible asset, when used properly. However, 24-page weekly worship bulletins, which is what the church was doing, were not the way to go.
The problem was, I couldn’t kill it right away, because the congregation was dependent: it was the main way the church communicated. If I killed it, people would have no way of knowing what was going on.
First, I needed to grow other means of communication.
I ran a survey on preferred channels, or means of communication. I launched a Facebook page and grew it to 1000 likes in a few months. We installed HD projectors and permanent screens in the sanctuary. We began creating branding packages for our worship series. We revamped the church’s website. We rebuilt the dead campus hallway screen distribution network. We established priority for what gets communicated and when, so it wasn’t a free for all of competing information.
The idea was that when people were used to our new systems, most of which were digital and visual, in worship, in social media feeds, and so on, we could make the switch.
The projectors were expensive and the permanent screens in the sanctuary were controversial. But once those were in and we began using them every week, we could make the switch in the bulletins.
At the one year mark, with other systems in place, we debuted the new bulletin.
It was four pages long. Here is the first one we produced.
We got some push back, of course, and added in a few things – but without extending the length.
Here is an archive of all of them as we post them, so you can see the most current one.
One friend in Atlanta’s branding and marketing scene calls it the best looking church publication he’s ever seen.
My lesson: To make change happen, don’t kill the old thing. Introduce alternative new innovations, which once established reduce the influence of the old thing.
About the Author
Len Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
December 29, 2014
Growth isn’t the goal; it’s the outcome.
The unspoken criticism of the image is directed toward church leaders who ostensibly advocate change on a trendline, with the accompanying loss of the church’s traditions.
I agree with the parody-makers that such change is a bad idea. But not because new forms of worship are bad; rather, a lot of what passes for innovation in the church is a backwards, outside-in approach to creative thinking, and invariably it fails.
It’s critical to understand what innovation is and what it is not.
Innovation Comes From Within
Change that works isn’t a trend to adopt or a technique to add or a committee or staff person to acquire. Innovation comes from within, from our inherent creativity. We’re made to be co-creators, in the image of God. Creativity is what we’re called to do and how we’re called to live. Part of the beauty of redemption in Christ is that we now have the freedom to rediscover the creative wonder we were given in the beginning.
Creativity is raw material. It’s the process of having new ideas with value. Most of us lose sight of our creativity and become content with following and maintenance and comfort and even consumption, and we lose track of our capability to generate new ideas.
Innovation is the process of acting on new ideas. When we create, and we make new things, we call the resulting deliverable “innovation.” Innovation is the resulting new product or program, the new service that leads to new attendees, the new communication system that keeps people plugged in better to the church, and so on. Innovation is the end result of creativity.
85% of churches are plateaued or declining in weekly worship attendance.
14% are growing by transfer.
1% are truly growing.
Of the churches that are growing, 56% score high in innovation and only 18% do not.
Hartford Institute Study of Congregations in America
Innovation Seems Novel When Creativity is Latent
The problem is that, since we’ve lost sight of our innate creativity, in most organizations – education, business, and the church – innovation is scarce, and invariably meets with resistance.
This is perhaps why over 90% – almost all – congregations decline after their 15th year of existence. (Meaning, statistically speaking, there is a dramatic reduction in baptisms in congregations after their fifteenth year.) To use an old Texas saying, they begin to confuse Jesus and the horse he rode in on. They make holy the methodologies that they used at their inception, then the time and space around the congregation changes.
Jesus fought against the practices of the religious establishment of his day because they had done precisely this – they had come to value their methodologies more than their source.
The problem with the image above is that the basis for it’s mockery suggests that there is one perfect incarnation of a Christian congregation, aloft above time and space, when there is in fact not. There is a universal body of Christ, but the form that the body of Christ takes is through local congregations, and each congregation is Incarnational – it lives in a time and space, and as a result trades in ideas limited by that time and space. These ideas get old as time and space changes. What the church needs is people being who they’re made to be, creating.
Sing to the Lord a new song. (He’s tired of the old ones.)Psalm 98:1
When We Create, We Introduce New Ideas
I don’t know many people who set out to upset those who prefer the status quo. I just know people who want to create. Creativity is what we’re made to do and who we’re made to be, as humans and as Christ followers. When we create, the things we make grow. When our focus is on making something new, innovation is what happens. To be creative, to innovate, is to be a change agent – not because it’s trendy, but because it’s what we’re made to do.
Church vitality / growth / life isn’t the goal; it’s the outcome.
About the Author
Len Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
December 19, 2014
What Is Your Best Innovation of 2014?
2014 is toast. Stop for a moment and look back over the past year. What is the best new innovation you’ve been a part of? In your work, home, church or in your personal life?
Hopefully you can think of one. Write it down. If you have multiple ones, or categories, great! Write those down, too.
I love creativity, and I talk a lot about it in this blog, and it gets lots of buzz. Creativity is an essential part of life, just as it is, without ambitions to monetize. (In fact, the need to monetize creativity in our personal life kills creativity.)
But sometimes, especially in our organizations, we need more than just a good idea. We need an idea that delivers new ways of thinking and acting. Creativity only counts in organizations when it leads to something that ships.
This is how I define innovation:
Innovation is creativity that ships.
By that I mean that innovation is creativity that does something specific. It delivers a real solution to a problem. It meets a need.
When creativity impacts people, it becomes innovation.
How can you innovate in your work, home and church in 2015?
About the Author
Len Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
December 14, 2014
How I Narrowed My Focus for 2015
Everything I read about best practices for making things – for blogs, books, videos, anything you’d publish or market – talks about the need to narrow your focus. Of course, it makes sense in my head; my marketing and business experience has taught me that any successful idea needs to solve specific problems posed by specific audiences.
But while it may be easy to apply to see the main thing for other peoples’ ideas, it has been particularly difficult to nail down a tighter focus on this blog. I tend to be all over the map with my thoughts and, if you were to ask me what my main thing is, I’d have a hard time naming less than 5 topics.
So I decided to run an experiment…
What I Tweet About Most
1. Using this feature, I downloaded every tweet I’d ever posted, which as of this writing is over 3600 since 2008.
2. I went through every one of them. (Yes, that took a while.) I deleted the replies, duplicates, strays and junk. My test was whether I’d want to post it again. And maybe I will – I had a fun time rediscovering some gems.
3. I applied categories to every viable tweet. The following 13 categories emerged as clear favorites. I tried a few others as I went but when I ended up with so few for these stray categories, I went back and re-allocated them.
My Topical Breakdown
After this process, I landed on 620 good tweets. Here’s a breakdown of tweets, related to:
Think Like a Five Year Old (my book on creativity): 135
Innovation (applied creativity in churches and organizations): 101
The creative process: 97
Story (mostly tips and applications): 57
Writing (usually tips and techniques, some quotes): 55
Art (usually advocacy for it): 52
Personal faith formation: 37
Finding and pursuing your calling / passion: 34
Leading creatives / artists: 28
On the need for honesty: 22
Worship practices and church life: 12
How to do a good presentation: 8
New technology: 5
My New and Improved Focus
There’s a pretty clear winner here – the variations of creativity. This may seem like a no brainer if you read this blog, but what is interesting is how infrequently I posted about topics I’ve previously promoted on this blog, such as marketing, worship and technology.
This process has taught me that I need to tighten my blog focus around personal and organizational creativity: our need for it, how to engage a creative process, and how to make innovative things happen in churches and organizations.
So this is my blog focus for 2015 and beyond.
If you tweet a lot, I recommend trying this for discovering a tighter focus.
About the Author
Len Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
December 12, 2014
If The Horse is Dead, Dismount
As I got older, my confusion gave way to frustration and then embarrassment over the inability of the church to communicate. I came to follow Christ, but many of my best experiences of the Word and of Christian community happened not within the usual worship and gathering rituals in the church, but outside of the church, such as with a small group of brothers in a Bible study on my college campus. It seemed to me that the church has the best story, but it is rarely told.
Deeply bothered, I decided to devote my life to helping the church be more creative and more effective in its ability to tell the story – through its technology, language, images and symbols, and so on.
In my 20s, some friends and I experimented with telling the gospel story visually, using new digital technology. That experience, at Ginghamsburg Church in Ohio, helped launch the era of screens in worship as well as my first two books, The Wired Church and Digital Storytellers. But it was never just about technology in worship for me.
In my 30s, I taught churches how to design and implement more creative worship, using metaphor, image, team dynamics, and so on. My work with Jason Moore through our company Midnight Oil Productions led to several more books and helped thousands of churches produce more creative experiences of God in worship. But it was never just about creative worship design for me.
Now, in my 40s, I am back in the local church, leading all of creativity and communications in one congreation’s life. I oversee digital, visual and print technology, worship’s visual components, and all church wide marketing and advertising. And while branding is large part of what I do, it’s not just about church marketing for me.
There’s a common foundation under each of these ventures – a need to find connection, or meaning. A need to overcome esoteric and off-putting language, symbols and experiences that prevent people from experiencing the life changing power of Christ. And it doesn’t matter if worship consists of guitar-led choruses instead of organ-led hymns, or offer seats and coffee instead of pews. People can be confused in any sort of setting.
I think a lot of our problem has to do with the fact that we lack new creative ideas and innovations.
There’s an old Texas saying that goes, “If the horse is dead, dismount.”
All organizations tend to ride dead horses, and need innovators to do the hard work of raising up new horses. I want to help the church innovate. However – and this is the problem – the church, I believe, is worse when it comes to riding dead horses. In addition to the natural human bias against new things, we make it worse because we ordain our old ideas holy. They’re just ideas for a time and space, but we make them sacred and unassailable, or at least allow this to happen without question.
All of those confusing phrases and images I heard as a kid were simply creative ideas from a previous era that we the church rode until they died.
What the church needs is to set about the business of making new ideas. New horses. And not just once more – but in perpetuity.
We need to create an environment where people are free to create, try new ideas out, and discover what resonates with people, both outside of and inside the walls.
What we need in the church is a culture of creativity and innovation.
About the Author
Len Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
November 14, 2014
What the Bible says about creativity
Did you know there’s a verse in the Bible that talks about creativity?
Consider: When you’re talking about an artist’s “work”, you’re usually referring to a new piece of art or a project or something that the artist has made—perhaps a new table to a carpenter or a new bronze to a sculptor or a new tapestry to a weaver. People who make things say, while describing their current project, “This is my work.”
There’s a verse in the Bible that I call the creativity verse, because it refers to the creative act of making such a work:
Instead, we are God’s accomplishment, created in Christ Jesus to do good things. God planned for these good things to be the way that we live our lives.Ephesians 2:10 (CEB)
The word translated here as “accomplishment” is the word for such a work. Some versions use “handiwork” or “masterpiece.” I like this translation because it suggests that the job in question is not just any old project, like filling out a form or building a trash can, but a work of art, a true accomplishment.
The Greek word here is poiéma (pronounced “poy’-ay-mah”), which means “a thing made” or “a work,” and is the object of the verb poieó, which means “to make, do.” These two linguistic cousins describe the creative act – the one who makes and the thing that is made. The word only appears in one other place in the Bible, in Romans 1:20, where it refers to the collective works of God in creation, or the sum of all things that God has made, a sort of greatest hits collection of the Creator’s most fantastic works.
Also, the word poiéma is the ascendant of our modern “poem.” So perhaps it might be translated as such:
God is the Poet and each of us is a sonnet (re)created in Christ Jesus to do good things. God planned for these good things to be the way that we live our lives.
This is the creativity verse because it describes both the Creator and His greatest creation—not nature, but us. And, it suggests that we are to make or do as God has done.
Thanks to @MAGuyton for a Twitter comment that aided this post.
About the AuthorLen Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+
Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
October 30, 2014
Peachtree Stories: Christi Paul
Storytelling takes on many forms in worship. Sometimes pieces stand alone, by design; other times, as with this short film, we cut it in such a way for it to live inside a sermon (a story within a story). This video, in fact, was a part of a 10-week worship / sermon series called The Story, which looks at the single, overarching narrative of scripture.
The theme for the day focused on the Old Testament character of Joseph, who was sold by his brothers into slavery. Joseph suffered much at the hands of family members, but God redeemed it. The woman in the video, Christi Paul, has a similar story. Hers is about surviving domestic abuse, and how God has redeemed it.
We shot it “Diane Sawyer” style, with our Executive Pastor Marnie Crumpler doing the interview, and used it as a (powerful) sermon illustration. Notice that it doesn’t tell the story on its own; it’s missing many parts, such as her back story and what led her to the place she found herself. When using a segment like this, these other details are handled live by the speaker.
Christi Paul is a Peachtree member, a CNN anchor, and the author of Love Isn’t Supposed to Hurt (Tyndale, 2012). This short film was photographed and edited by Dave Karger at Atlanta Cinematic.
About the Author
Len Wilson Facebook Twitter Google+Writer. Story lover. Believer. Branding philosopher. Breakfast chef. Tickle monster. Dr. Pepper enthusiast. Creative Director. Occasional public speaker.
