Great post on the death of silos and working smarter in organizations over at rightreality.com!
This is a great post for the small and large church or organization. The "staff" could just as easily be the "teams" of volunteers.
Thoughts?
A new blog has enetered the blogosphere…
Be sure to check out www.multisiterevolution.com and keep up with what’s new in the multi-site church world…you can be assured this will make it to this week’s podcast!
Seacoast Church along with several other churches are mentioned in a Charlotte Observer article that those who follow the multi-site movement might be interested in…
One interesting quote from the article…
"In video or DVD sermons — some sermons are even downloaded from the Internet — are we looking at the future of organized religion?"
Check it out!
John Moore over at Brandautopsy has been posting on his experience while working for Starbucks. While attending seminary in Dallas, I worked at a Starbucks and took several of their management classes because I wanted to learn how they produce leaders so fast…John had this post today which I have added to based on a multi-site church view….
Starbucks will not deny they are everywhere. But they are everywhere because customers want them to be everywhere. Otherwise, they wouldn’t’t be there. (Starbucks is smart like that.)
When a church is asking – should we go multi-site, I think that one of the first questions that should be asked is, "Are there people in a community near us that would want us there?"…this works for us at Seacoast Church by looking at our database to see where people are driving from. If 300 families are driving from 45 minutes away – that is probably the "customer" saying we want a Seacoast Church campus closer to our home.
Starbucks works under the premise of being everywhere customers want them to be. According to internal research studies, customers would be more satisfied if they had a Starbucks more convenient to them. So Starbucks satisfies customers by opening more stores in more places to be more convenient to more people.
I think this is true in the church. The only people that like large churches that are built in zoned areas for large buildings that are not close to peoples homes are Pastors. So, with multi-site we can literally take people their church to their home…not to mention those that would love to attend, but will not because it is not a convenient location.
Starbucks Tribal Knowledge tells us if you stop competing on quirky and quaint and you must start competing on being convenient and consistent. For Starbucks, it has been a trade-off that satisfies more customers leading to greater sales success.
With multi-site it is very difficult to set your-self apart as the church with the most technology or even the "most excellent" – this is a trade-off of being highly mobile and smaller. However, convenient and consistent can be a key.
I would like to take a few posts to look at this…what do we need to be convenient and constant in at the campus level in a multi-site church?
I just took the Strengthfinders test last week that is a part of the book , Now Discover Your Strengths…
Here I am:
Strategic
Activator
Maximizer
Command
Communication
More on these later…
I finished up another notebook this week. I am in about 9-12 meetings a week and find that with the many varying tasks and projects that come my way, notebooks are a great way to stay sane. They, along with a unique pen that is easy to keep up with, are a great way to keep up with meetings and keep great notes.
Because I am a little OCD I use the same black notebooks – having bought several of them at one time a year or so ago. I am a little different than a recent post by one of my organization heros Michael Hyatt who gives some great advice in the post, the lost art of note taking, in that I review my notebook after every meeting, transferring items into outlook using the GTD Outlook add-on.
The key for me is that I write down as much about the meeting as I can (filtering out stuff that just does not matter). In order to do this here are some things I practice. Be sure to check out Hyatt’s above post for other great stuff.
1. I write down key words, not entire ideas. This makes my post-meeting review essential. Filtering takes time. I have been attending the same basic meetings with a similar core group for 2-3 years so I have come to a better place with that.
2. I circle action items. If it an action item that I will handle I simply circle it, if I will be delegating it – I circle it and then draw a line outside the circle and write a name.
3. Many of my meetings are in regards to our weekend services at Seacoast Church. Because there are 10 campuses, up to 3 hours away, that need to know this information as soon as possible it is essential to provide accurate summaries of these meetings in digital form. To help with this, we have an online discussion board (we call it the Creative Blog for simplicity though not really a blog per se’) that I put these notes on. This serves as a log, so I don’t need to keep a paper-trail as Hyatt does.
4. When a page has been "blogged" or entered into Outlook, I rip it out. When a notebook is out of paper I throw it away.
Seems like simple stuff and really is, but knowing that all unprocessed notes are in one place is truly a stress relieving and highly productive state to be in.
What are some ways that you stay sane?
