That is all.

I recently read a list written by a grade 8 student about the 30 things she hoped to do before age 30. With just over 3 months left before I turn 30 I was particularly intrigued to see what she hoped to accomplish. The list was as expansive and unpractical as you might imagine a 16 year olds lost might be. Hopefully by age 30 she will have accomplished more of her list than I have of my hypothetically 14 year old list.

Of course our plans at age 16 may not well reflect the future and all of these incredible and varied things that we wanted to do with our lives have probably (or will probably if you are not yet 30) passed away because slowly over time that list became filtered by what was feasible and practical.

You may have once wondered what you would do with your life and if you asked someone older and wiser for advice they almost, guaranteed, steered you towards the most reasonable options, more than that the most economically viable options.

No don’t study music, you’ll never make a living as a musician.
Dance are you kidding me, who’s going to pay you to dance.
Theology – are you crazy, of what possibly use could that be?

And over time brilliant, creative, intelligent people have come to believe themselves less than that. And even those of us who have won the game, the University professors, successful business women, lawyers and accountants and even the rocket scientists of the world have lost some of the our childhood ability to dream and imagine. Somewhere over the course of however many days and weeks and months and years it took for you and I to grow up, we moved from the broad list of things we imagined we could do with our lives and settled for a series of meetings.

There was a time though when all of us experienced much more of life, when we imagined unpractical and fantastical prospects for our future; before things became too complicated for our own good.

Maybe this is what Jesus was talking about when he said that his kingdom was best accessible to children. Perhaps this is part of what he meant, that they have some distinct advantage over those of us who have grown up a bit too much and complicated things a bit too far. Maybe sometimes we need to be drawn back to the simplest ideas so that we can dream big things again.

See at some point we trained ourselves to believe that the future would (and could) only contain a greater measure of today. Somewhere our history and our experience became a barrier to our future possibilities because all of our knowledge and experience about the world has convinced us that our contribution is limited in scope and range and affect

Don’t let your dreams get the best of you because the world is too big;
Too populous
Too damaged
Too far gone
Too evil
Too – insert your excuse here
Just too much for your story to impact

So forget changing the world, forget changing your particular slice of reality, forget the idea of even really changing yourself, the best you can do, is hope for a little more of what you already have.

More money, more status, a better job, a bigger house, a better family.

We’ve lost some of our ability to imagine that tomorrow could really be different than today and if there is anyone on earth who should be able to imagine a different tomorrow, it should be us who believe in an incredible yesterday.

Jesus said clearly that this incredible, world changing, kingdom, process that started with his entrance into history now rests with you and I. Directly he said that, “ the kingdom of God isn’t found through careful observation, and you can’t say, ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is’ because the kingdom of God is inside you.” [Luke 17:20-21] He said our choices, our lives- are now the tangible reality of this kingdom of God. What we choose is part of larger culture that will change everything.

The question is do we still somewhere inside of us have the ability to imagine audacious things, to believe that the next moment could be completely different from the one that preceded it and that regardless of our past determinations of success or failure; our next choice, our next encounter, our next relationship could be the seed of a completely new expression of the kingdom of God.

I had played with Google Reader when it was first launched but it wasn’t really a full featured product initially. Fortunately that’s not true any more. Google Reader like every Google product I have used regularly (maps, world, Picasa, gmail, talk) is improved substantially. For one the simple ability to organize feeds by category and then access all of the feeds within a specific category is a must. This is important because I have over a hundred RSS feeds I track and having the ability to read quickly read through all of the feeds in a specific category or topic is key for me. Not only that but by installing Greasemonkey in Firefox and then using this script you can access all of your RSS fees from within your gmail page. Awesome. The only thing missing was an archive system since this was all online. But Google you have come through yet again. Google Gears allows you to synchronize up to 2000 entries in an offline archive. Perfect.

BTW You can also access previews of both gmail and Google Reader from the google home page if you use the iGoogle personalized page.

Hit Kelowna to connect with Dallas and Annie in the early evening and then on to Vancouver. Got here late. Had trouble finding a Hotel. It’s 2:30am Pacific time and I’m off to bed. See you tomorrow.

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Also Joe will be in the west early next month. He and I are travelling from Calgary to BC stopping along the way to talk to interesting churches for thinkerlabs‘s documentary project. Expect (in)frequent updates.

Generally I use a big whiteboard in my office but lately I have been going old school and using a notebook again. There is something cool about the tactile sensation of pencil on paper. I like to represent my ideas visually so mind maps work better for me than lists. There are always lots of ideas swirling in my head and I like t be able to visually see how they connect.

Here’s an image from a page in the notebook I take with me everywhere.

Click the image for higher resolution

I sat at Second Cup from 9:30am this morning until about half and hour ago. It’s after 4pm now. In that time I wrote four half messages. None of them particularly bad- but none of them particularly interesting enough for me to finish. Manef even took pity on me and brought me another half-sweet vanilla bean latte around 2:30pm. The one I paid for had been gone for about 4 hours, so maybe he felt it helped give the air of paying customers in his store.

This is where the tension of process and product gets to me sometimes. I love to write. I love to communicate. Truth is, I love the pressure of working on a deadline but there are times when the product, a finished message in this case, takes precedence over the enjoyment of the process.

That’s the reality. The danger is letting the demands of the product kill the enjoyment of the process.

I�m going to start in the middle of my process today though. This is how I move from concept to outline. Specifically how I take an idea for a message and create a map for my writing. It�s certainly not for everyone, so I�m not trying to prescribe it, just throwing it out there as a discussion point.

I start with a bank canvass. Literally. I stand in front of my white board with a marker and nothing but the idea in my head. That idea could be a scripture I want to speak from, or a topical concept that I want to explore. I write that idea in the middle of the board and circle it. Then I begin to �mind map� every connected idea that comes into my head. If it�s a primary connection I draw a line to the central circle. If it�s a divergent thought, sparked by another entry on the board I connect it to the point.

Now a lot of people have gone through exercises like this before. The problem is most people start editing as they go. That�s a disaster. This stage has to be completely blue sky. If you are a pragmatic minded person, an engineer mind, then you will need to discipline yourself to turn those skills off for the moment. (don�t worry you�ll need them later) In this stage you are putting anything that is remotely connected to your central idea on the board and drawing lines to show where those ideas where sparked from. This is important because often times the bad ideas we have become the genesis of better ideas and if we edit them too early they don�t serve their purpose in sparking divergent thoughts.

In this stage I am adding personal stories that could be used as illustrations, quotes I have heard, books I have read, scriptures that may be relevant, concepts, visual images, metaphors, anything that is sparked gets written on the board.

After I�m done this is what my board looks like.

BTW I photograph all my white boards and put them in an archive folder. I highly recommend this. It helps because often times I will go back to ideas that came in one session but were deemed impractical for that purpose and discarded. Just because a idea doesn�t get used today doesn�t mean it won�t be valuable tomorrow. Sometimes I will use software like FreeMind to do this type of exercise on my notebook computer but I prefer the physicality of working with the white board. I have found that for me physical activity (writing large on the board, waking around the room, talking to myself out loud, bouncing a ball, etc) helps to occupy my right brain and allow my left brain more freedom to create.

I decide when I am finished stage one completely arbitrarily. Generally it is just when the ideas begin to slow considerably. If I am spending more than a couple minutes between idea entries then it is probably over the session. Creativity is hard work but banging your head against the wall is counter productive. Set things aside and come back if necessary.

After this stage is completed I take a break. Often I wait until another day but I would suggest at least engaging in some different mental exercise before moving to stage two.

In stage two I begin to circle key ideas. These are any ideas that particularly resonate with me. They tend to be strong divergence points where lots of new ideas branch off from. These become anchor points in my outline. Once they are identified I label them in my thought process by numbering (or lettering) them off to reflect how I could move through the points (ie. A, B, C). Once those anchors are identified I start to erase all of the lines on the board and draw new lines that move through the anchor points and important sub points. This usually means I end up with a bit of a spaghetti noodle through my thoughts but it allows me to take all of the creative thoughts I have spewed out and begin to create some order from that output.

This is a simplified before and after image of this step. The first image is a fairly simply mind map from stage one. The second is after stage two. If you look at the entries you notice that very little has changed other than that I have been able to trace a logical thought progression through my ideas.

Generally as I move to stage two a lot of the more impractical ideas have to be discarded but often times the divergent entries from those discarded thoughts become part of the progression line.

Again, this may or may not help you in any way. It works for me because my mind is a fairly strong combination of visual and logical. Anyway try it out or let me know about your ideation process.

Thing is this our world has changed. The knowledge worker is the new status-quo. Tom Peters calls it the white-collar revolution. The currency that most of us work in today is ideas. The problem for institutions is that ideas aren�t measurable in the same old ways. I am a creative. A large portion of what I do is consumed in that role- but I am also a manager. In institutional speak I have six �employees� that �report� to me. If they were all simply involved in the manufacture of things that would be adequate language but they aren�t. They are all involved, as I am, in a creative role and that necessitates adjustments to how I perceive my role. My job as a �boss� can�t be about measuring productivity in a traditional sense. I need to re-envision my employees as �creative peers� who instead of working for me, �work with me�. Now that may sound like just a semantic shift to make people feel �empowered� but it�s more than that.

In the past a workers progress was measured through periodic intervals. A snapshot in time is taken, their productivity is determined and then they are measured against that interval. At a later time another snapshot is taken. They may be more productive and be praised (recognition, raises, etc) or less productive and be disciplined. The problem with this model in a creative environment is that productivity is not a steady incline. It fluctuates radically. And so to determine an individual�s value to an organization much more than a snapshot in time needs to be considered. Our cumulative productivity over long periods needs to be considered. When short term dips in productivity occur managers have to resist the urge to encourage their employees to increase their output. They need to recognize that this is part of the creative cycle that takes place.

That�s not a blank check. Our productivity can�t remain low indefinitely because then we become a drain to the organization but from an organizational level we re-imagine work relationships to reflect peer teams. In a subordinate structure, during times of low-productivity my primary goal as a manager is to improve my employees output. In a peer structure my role as team leader is to manage the creative cycles on my team so that different individuals will be able to compensate for my low productivity periods and that I will be able to contribute during other�s dips.

There are very few new ideas under the sun, maybe none. This stuff is no exception. Most of it I stole from Todd Henry (The Accidental Creative). If you are working in a creative role he�s a great guy to check out. There�s a lot of pay content on his site but he does have a free podcast in iTunes and the stuff is really valuable.
Tom Peters is another great author. His book Re-Imagine is a great study in creative publishing and the content is pretty good too. You can find it online or in print.

After getting in late last night, I decided to take the today and stay away from the office to write. Thing is by the time the morning rolled around, I didn’t feel like it. So I stayed in bed. After that I got up, showered, put my Mod Robes on (remember those) and hung around the house. I watched a couple episodes of Battlestar Gallactica, which by the way I am actually starting to think is pretty cool. (ht Jae) I found a fun little flash game on digg.com, cleaned the mounting pile of dirty dishes in our kitchen, vacuumed the bedrooms and then put some photos into frames.

Truth is, there are a ton of things that I could have been doing today, a ton of things that I probably should have done today- but I didn’t.

So far this month (today’s the 26th for the record) there have been 4 days I haven’t been at westside. I have written 3 weekend messages, done the artwork for next months set design, spent hours editing the website, chaired creative meetings, attended board meetings, congregational meetings and worship concerts, interviewed prospective employees and prepped series outlines for next month.

But today I did nothing when I should have been at work.

It’s part of what I love about my job. I love working in a creative role. I love the wide fluctuations in my productivity (thankfully for me and westside my capacity is pretty high). I could never last for an extended period in a role that consistently took 75% of my capacity. I thrive in an environment where I can work at 100% to the point of creative exhaustion and then withdraw into times of minimal output. This is the struggle with institutionalized creativity- there is an ever present tension between process and product. Institutions want us to create great products (messages, artwork etc.) but they also want to define the process through which that is created (office hours, performance reviews, etc.) to make sure their investment is worthwhile. For me, nothing days, personal days, completely unproductive, wasted days are the space from which I regain capacity to produce.

That’s the tough thing about measuring a creative role. In a day I can crank off a great message- or I can get the bedroom vacuumed (if I’m lucky). Thankfully I have a role that works for me. Now hopefully the people that keep me employed stay happy with the stuff I create when I’m working at 100%.