Len Wilson's Blog, page 22

Peachtree Stories: LifeGate Counseling Center

We tell a lot of stories at Peachtree. It’s one of the most important parts of my job, and after turning on the faucet in the spring of 2013 there have only been a few weeks in which we haven’t run a video in worship. I will feature some of the best here as a way of modeling what storytelling in worship looks like, at least for us. The first features Peachtree’s counseling center, LifeGate, and was produced by Ron Dawson at DareDreamer Media.

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.

The storytelling problem that causes most videos to miss the mark

How to tell a story that also markets an idea.

According to several people, Peachtree’s Easter prayer vigil was a pretty amazing experience, so I decided to produce a video to tell the story about what happened. (Part of my job as the church’s Creative Director is to find great stories to tell.)

I like telling stories that match worship themes and sermons, to create a consistent message experience, so I targeted a week during our summer series dedicated to Hezekiah, which had a prayer theme.

All of my filmmakers are contractors (more on that for another day). I met with one of them and described my vision for the prayer story. On shoot day I went to the set for a while and felt good about the direction of the production.

Everything was fine until I saw the first draft. It was full of clips of people talking about how great the prayer vigil was.

Aargh!

 

Maybe you’re confused by this reaction. You might think that’s exactly what I should want. But this is where most storytelling – marketing, testimonies, nonfiction in general – misses the mark.

I didn’t want a promotional video.

This distinction is subtle but crucial. What I got was a video that marketed an event, and while well done it was just kinda boring. It didn’t move me.

Don’t make the business / church the hero. That becomes programmatic. And boring. A promo.

Instead, make a person the hero. And as with any good story this means that your protagonist undergoes some sort of transformation. Compelling stories focus on a character’s transformation, not an event, program or service. 

We’ll probably run the clip we received in the spring before next year’s vigil, but we didn’t run it with the Hezekiah theme, because it didn’t contribute to a singular focus on the power of prayer to change lives.

So what could have happened differently? Instead of letting the event drive it, find a personal angle, like so:

We meet a character.
The character has a problem or conflict that they can’t resolve.
He or she looks for help – in a video for the church, of course, the help comes from the Lord.
God provides them a future and a direction to take – a plan.
They implement the plan, and their life is changed.

Every good story is about a changed life.

Sometimes you can intercut multiple stories to achieve the same effect, where different people provide perspectives on the transformative power of the thing.

But in either case, whether a single person or multiple people, it’s about a personal, changed life.

When you do this you create a character arc and tell a story of a changes life. Then it becomes compelling not boring. Not a promo.

And oh by the way the thing gets promoted anyway.

For more information about the bones of how this works, check out Don Miller’s storytelling structure.

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.

Why Not What: Secrets to Casting Vision, Part 2

This is the second in a five part series on secrets effective communicators use to cast vision,

communicate big ideas, and affect change. Here’s part one.

I live with a wife and four grubby roommates. Sometimes, it’s hard to have ideas.

My commute home is a time for thinking on big ideas. I used to come in the front door eager to talk about what I’d just been pondering, only to watch in frustration as my words fell on the floor amidst a cacophony of dinner, homework and life.

For a while I developed an annoying technique where I would repeat the first part of my lead sentence three of four times to get everyone’s attention. My wife rightfully hated this. She’d say, “I’m listening, just tell me already. I have to do this other thing too!”

I was eager to talk about my ideas, but I wasn’t paying attention to the environment of the people with whom I hoped to share my ideas. I was making the myopic mistake of assuming that my family had nothing better to do than live with me in my head.

This is a problem for any communicator and any message.

 

People don’t care about your idea. They care about how it impacts their lives.

This sounds easy but is extremely hard to apply.

The reason this is so hard to truly learn is that we’re way down deep in our own passions. To us, the basic premise has already been established. We’re on board, deeply, and we’re asking advanced questions about our topic. But other people aren’t there with us. If they’re concerned with our idea, they mostly just care about how it impacts them.

When I started at Peachtree I quickly encountered the funnel problem, in which leaders live at the bottom of the funnel and forget what it’s like for outsiders at the top, up on the rim. Regardless of the focus of your message, it’s safe to assume that you’re at the bottom, and most of the people to whom you’re communicating are at the top.

Connecting with people is not a question of sincerity of cause or belief or piety, but a question of engagement.

 

Connecting with people requires understanding the difference between the why and the what.

Simon Sinek is the master of the why. He’s developed a simple yet profound idea called The Golden Circle. I’ll let him explain it in his TED talk, here. Start at 2:22 and go to 3:51 to get the full effect.

Most of us start on the outside – the WHAT – and move in. The best people and companies keep the core first – the WHY – and from it direct all major decisions. They move from inside out.

The greatest communicators eschew the details not because they can’t handle them but because they know their audience doesn’t understand them, or understand why they should take the time to understand them. They are great communicators because they are able to think like the audience thinks and incessantly distill their ideas into morsels that are relevant to the audience.

No matter what your thing is – teaching music or raising capital campaign money or preaching or selling shoes – most other people are at the top of the funnel. The moral value of your cause has nothing to do with it.

Reaching people doesn’t just happen.

 

You have to make people understand why your idea matters.

Finding the WHY is the hardest thing.

The WHAT invites complexity and diffusion of purpose. This is our natural state. All the entrails we chase make sense to us – we don’t question their value, we just follow our interests. But most other people don’t get what we get.

The WHY forces simplicity. It is the core, the cause that matters to others. When we know our why, we have the litmus to test the value of everything we do.

It is no coincidence that TED forces their speakers to reduce a lifetime of passion and research into an 18 minute presentation.

When you say everything, you say nothing. you’ve got to edit. Choose what is most important. People have full lives.

 

Make it about your why.

 

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.

3 Things You Must Have to Achieve Creative Success

On July 20, we – meaning all of humanity – celebrated the 45th anniversary of what in my estimation will in some future era be remembered as the highest achievement of modern history: the moon landing.

The moon landing is rich with illustrations and lessons. Chief among them, as I write in Think Like a Five Year Old, the moon landing illustrates the great things we can do with the power of our God-given creativity.

The NASA program demanded and attracted the most creative people – solvers of intractable problems, people with ingenuity and innovation. While NASA certainly recruited people of the highest caliber, I believe the corporate ethos that developed around the mission to put a man on the moon made the creative energy of the entire operation - including the some 300,000+ people involved –  better.

While we celebrate individual heroic achievement, we might also pay attention to the kind of atmosphere which fosters great things. Neil Armstrong, the commander of the Apollo 11 mission that first landed on the moon, wrote about the commitment everyone had to the mission:

Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about 1,000 separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have. I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy on the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, “If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.” And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this thing off.

When I was working here at the Manned Spacecraft Center, you could stand across the street and you could not tell when quitting time was… people just worked, and they worked until their job was done, and if they had to be there until five o’clock or seven o’clock or nine-thirty or whatever it was, they were just there. They did it, and they went home…

The way that happens and the way that made it different than other sectors of the government to which people are sometimes properly critical is that this was a project in which everybody involved was, one, interested, two dedicated, and three, fascinated by the job they were doing. And whenever you have those three ingredients, whether it be government or private industry or a retail store, you’re going to win. (excerpted from Rocket Men, by Craig Nelson.)

According to the first man to walk on the moon, if you want to create great things, for yourself or your organization, look for:

Interest

The work isn’t boring. People are being asked to solve difficult problems, and in the process stretching their knowledge.

Dedication

Commitment only comes through a sense of higher purpose. In the moon mission, people weren’t entitled; they considered their involvement a privilege.

Fascination

A genuine sense of fascination with what you’re doing. From the top to the bottom of the organization, people were aware that they were breaking new ground and were simply curious about what was going to happen.

I think the loss of this third factor is what led to the decline of NASA’s excellence following the moon landings.

How might you look for these three ingredients in your mission?

 

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.