Video Transcript: Change

Being an effective manager. Task 11, create a culture of change and innovation.  Isaiah 43:18-19. Forget the former things. Do not dwell on the past. See, I'm  doing a new thing now. It springs up? Do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. God can make new things  happen, even in the wasteland. In the desert. Philippians 3:12-14, Paul says, not that I've already obtained all of this. I've already arrived at my goal, but I press  on to take hold of that for which Christ, Jesus took hold of me, brothers and  sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do,  what's that? One thing Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is  ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me  heavenward in Christ, Jesus Paul's focus is on the future, on going forward.  Why is that? Why do we need to Why does a manager need to be looking  towards the future and dealing with change and innovation. Number one, up up  until the 1900 It was said that the accumulation of knowledge doubled every  century. So every 100 years, knowledge doubles. Two at the end of World War  II, knowledge doubled every 25 years. So every 25 years, knowledge doubles  today anywhere from one to 1.5 years nanotechnology, they say every two  years, clinical knowledge every 18 months. And IBM predicts that in the next  couple of years, information will double every 11 hours. So things are changing,  the things that we learned yesterday are no longer applicable today. When I  went to college, computer science people, I remember they had, they had punch cards, and they would program by punching these cards. And they'd have a  stack of cards like this, they'd stick them in the machine, and the machine would sort through them. I mean, it was an incredible amount of effort for very little  result. And then the machine took up the whole building. Probably my phone has more computer power than those whole old machines. So life is changing  quickly. Young people starting out today have bills I never had. I didn't have I  didn't have a phone, a mobile phone bill. I didn't have the internet that I had to  do, or cable TV, all these monthly costs that young people have today didn't  exist before in the last century, all the electric appliances and machinery, all  these things have all come within the last few 100 years. So life is changing  faster and faster and faster and faster. And whatever business you're in,  whatever product you're making, could be gone in the next several years.  Churches still exist. We believe that God is still on the throne, that his spirit is  operating, that that that will always exist. But that doesn't mean how we operate. Doesn't change language. Changes we we change our language so that people  can understand what we're saying. So there's still change, no matter what. So  why? Why do people resist change? If Change is inevitable. There's nothing we  can do to stop the change. But why do people then resist it? Why don't people  like it? Number one, there's this perceived loss of security. I have a job. I'm  doing this thing, but maybe this thing will not be needed one day. And what will  happen to my job? What will happen to my sense of what I do? I already know 

what I do, I'm really good at what I do, and now what I do is not needed. So  there's sort of a financial security, but there's also an emotional security. When  we have something that we do, and we do it well, we have sort of a security  feeling out of that. There's a perceived loss of job competence. A lot of older  workers, you know, things are become computerized, and then, and then the  company wants to switch over to a new computer system. And. And the older  folk don't feel like they can learn it that quickly, and the younger ones are better  at it, and they're faster, and they remember all the little steps, and they feel like  their competency is going down, whereas before, a tradesman would be good at with leather or making things carpentry. And as he gets older, he just gets better  because his knowledge becomes more and more and more. But now all of a  sudden, the whole thing changes, and I have to start all over number three.  There's the fear of the unknown. What's going to happen? I don't know. How's it  going to affect me? How's it going to affect my family? There's the fear of being  left behind. Others are going to catch on to this thing, this new technology or this new way of doing it, but I won't be able to catch on. I'm good at what I do now,  but I don't know if I can change there's the loss of current habits that make life  less stressful. It's habits. It's the habits in our life that makes life something you  can deal with. If you have to learn something new all the time. It's very stressful  the first time you you move to a new place, and you have to, you have to cut  your grass, and you go around and you don't have a system yet, and see, you  don't know if you should go this way and then turn or do this part and turn  around or whatever. So the first few times you you have to, you have to think  about the whole thing. And the whole time you're doing it, you're wondering it, if  you should try it a different way. You're experimenting. Well, finally, after a  couple of months, you got it figured out. And the next time you do the lawn, you  didn't have to think about it, you just automatically do what you did before or  driving to work. You know the first time you don't know, I turn left, I turn left, right. Or after a while, you your car almost knows exactly where to go. That those  habits in our lives make everything less stressful. The new technology comes  along. People had watches for for many years, and they had little hands, and  they just read the hands and and when, when daylight savings time, you have to turn the clock back, they just wound the hand back. They knew exactly how to  do it. I had an elder once who got a digital watch. After having a watch with the  hands, he got a digital watch, and then Daylight Savings happened. He had to  turn back an hour, but he didn't know how to do it. He didn't know how to hit  mode and then change and all the things you got to do with the digital watch. He had no idea what to do. So he just left it. So for half the year his watch was  accurate, and for half the year he had to add an hour or subtract an hour. I  remember sitting in a meeting looking at his watch, and it was the wrong time.  And I go, Well, you know, why don't you change your watch? He said, Well, I  don't know. So I had, I said, Well, give it to me. And because I knew, you know, 

digital things always have a mode in the mode, hit a button, and then you get a  boat go button and the one that adds up or down. And a lot of things work the  same, but for a person not used to that technology, it's just very stressful.  Everything is hard. Everything is difficult until you figure it out. So we lose the  habits we have. These habits in our lives makes life very easy, and all of a  sudden, all these habits get changed, and we have all this stress in our lives.  Why do most managers resist change? So change is coming. A manager is sort  of in charge of the organization, keeping things running, keeping things rolling,  keeping everyone working at their maximum capacity. Why is it that managers,  probably more than any resist change? They're the leaders. I mean, I can see  the people wanting to resist the change, but why does the manager want to  resist change? In part, it's because of what the manager does change leads to  chaos. Okay, when things change, you know, all of a sudden, the road that you  take to work is closed that leads to chaos. Now, what road do I take? What's the  best way I have to figure something else out? I have a mess on my hands,  whereas before, I could do it automatically without thinking. Change leads to  chaos. Managers like order. That's what they do. They take chaos and make it  into order. So they don't like things that come in and take their order and change it back into chaos, because now they got to fix something. Change messes up  plans and goals. Managers like known plans and goals. That's what managers  do. They make a plan for the project. They have all these goals. They break it  down into the steps. They have people assigned, begin, date, completion date,  and then something comes in and messes the whole thing out. One change  messes up the whole thing. Now you got to go in and redo the whole plan. You  had it all figured out. It's all nice. Now the whole thing has to be redone. Change  upsets some members of the team. Some people don't like change now they're  upset, man, or managers like everyone happy and working hard, we finally  figured out what we want to do. We've got our goals, we got our steps, we got  our assignments. Everyone's happy, everyone's working hard, and now  everything's upset. This person doesn't like the change. You know, something  has come down from the corporate situation, and now everything is upset, and  people are upset, and the manager has all this work to do. Number four, change makes the future uncertain, and managers like to manage the future. So I  there's someone in my church who owns a printing business. They print a lot of  books, a lot of Christian books, and recently, one of the biggest Christian  bookstores in the United States is filed for bankruptcy. So he just told me last  night that there's a lot of publishers that are hurting because this bookstore had  a lot of their books on consignment, and now they can't pay for any of them. So  a lot of publishers are losing 10s and hundreds of 1000s of dollars, and printing  presses don't know who where they're going to be printing, and it's just a whole  mess all that that one chain has a fact affected one business after another, and  all the managers of those businesses now have to rethink everything. You know,

they were counting on certain orders, and those orders aren't going to be there.  They were counting on getting paid, and now they have to write those things off  as a loss. So, you know, all of a sudden, the manager has a lot of work to do.  How can a manager help in the changes? So changes are coming. Okay?  Changes are coming. You can count on that. So how can a manager, instead of  being afraid of all the changes coming, how can he be in the process? Number  one, in planning, always leave room for change, because you're going to plan.  You have your calendar, you have your schedule, you have all the goals, you  have the steps, you have the assignments to different people. Don't figure out  your calendars so tight that one mistake is going to upset the whole thing, or  you're going to always be redoing it every day. So you have to figure that there's going to be problems. Leave room for some of the changes that you can't  anticipate, anticipate and prepare for change. What changes can you anticipate  coming? I mean, you have to look into the future and go, What are we really  good? What's happening? I mean, as as a leader in church, I need to be  thinking, you know, people and their schedules. How's this going to work? Is  Sunday morning going to be the best time for everyone to come and worship?  How are we going to do this? How do you? How do you, how do you have a  small group for people that are in their 20s, that are busy going to school? You  know, maybe we need a whole different way of communicating to them. Number Number three, see change is perhaps a new opportunity to succeed. So maybe  something different is coming down the pike. How can that different thing sort of  help us? How can we use this change? For example, it used to be, you know,  we had little one at least the United States. We had these one room  schoolhouses. They were a small little school, and all the grades would be in  one class, and so each grade would have to help out the other. And now we've  moved towards, you know, one grade for one classroom, for every grade one  age group. And our whole society has sort of moved in that direction, that that  like people get put together. We live in a very special interest driven society. We  have a magazine for every special interest that there is. There's an online  community for whatever you're into, if you're into old cars, there's a whole group  of people that are into old cars. If you're into sewing, there's sewing. If you're  into this specialized quilting, you can be in this specialized group whatever your  interest is, no matter what the topic is, there's a whole group of people doing  that. You can find the group that likes exactly what you like. So we live in a  culture filled with that. So what's happening is families being separated from one another to go to their special interest. So dads are going over here, moms are  going over there. Each kid has their own special interest, their own special  group. When that when the family gets into a car and. Everyone has their own  music. They're listening to their iPod, or whatever their listening device is.  Everyone has their own genre of music they listen to. It used to be there was  only one radio in the home, and everyone listened to the same thing. Now 

everyone does their own thing. So so people are being separated from the  family. The family isn't the thing that holds people together, it's the special  interest that's holding them together. So the church often will then just follow  what the what society is doing. So when you go to church that you know, the  dads go over here, the moms have their special thing. The kids all go to the  class that they belong to, and everyone goes to whatever the their interest is, so we just follow that. That's a change that has happened. Okay? So in one ways,  that's a that's a negative thing, or we can see this as an opportunity. See the  whole culture is separating the family. Why don't we be the organization that  helps bring the family back together? Because no one's doing that. I mean, what an opportunity. I mean, instead of bemoaning the culture we live in, oh, we live  in a culture that's destroying the family as a church, we could say, Wow, no one  is trying to help dads and sons do something together. So if we just plan  something where dads and sons do something together, we will have no  competition, we'll be the only ones doing it. What an opportunity for the church.  So sometimes the change just leaves a hole, leaves a need that your  organization can try to fill. Number four, help the people you manage do one  through three. So not only in your plans and goals. Do you leave room for  change? But you help all the people you're helping do the same thing. Number  five, give people time to change. My wife, my oldest son, the minute I suggest  something, they are they're dead set against no matter what it is, no matter what I suggest, they are dead set against it, because their minds take time to  assimilate whatever it is I'm suggesting. Okay, it's a change they have. They like things in order. They like things planned, and they have their sense of what this  week or this month or this year or their life is going to be and I suggest  something, and they don't. They can't assimilate it. It takes them a while. Some  people are very quick. They hear something new and boom, they can assimilate  right into their life. I'm more that way. I like the change. Oh, that's cool. Let's I  can somehow I'm going to make that work. But others need to hear it, not just  once. They're against it, doesn't mean they're against it. So then you say it  again, and you say it again, and then they list their objections, and then you  have to meet all their objections. So if you're leading a church and you want to  change something, it takes a long time for people to come around. My first  church, we just wanted to change their worship time a half an hour. And you  would have think that I started World War III because people were threatened by it. They came up with all kinds of reasons why this isn't going to work, but it just  took time. People need time to get used to the ideas and the change around  them. How to create a culture of innovation. Number one, brainstorming  sessions on problems. Okay, so change is really just another problem. So  society is changing. What do we do about this problem? So instead of bringing  the new idea, just bring the problem, and now we have to solve the problem.  Brainstorming sessions just for fun. Get the people that you're leading and 

working with, get them used to this idea of brainstorming, thinking about things.  It doesn't hurt to think about things. You can do it just for fun. How can we make  sermons more interesting? So we're going to brainstorm that. So we put that, we put that on the whiteboard, and we think about sermons being interesting. Okay,  

I get up and I just speak, and I speak of the Bible. How can we make that  interesting? Well, we can have someone drawing, you know, I'm talking about  something, and they can actually draw whatever I'm saying on a whiteboard  behind me. Now we've done that. It's very interesting. Or maybe we can have  some video going behind or would that be distracting? I don't know. Or just  brainstorming, thinking about ways to do this, maybe you could have a team of  people give the sermon. Or maybe, maybe, maybe you could just get up and  instead of saying anything, just stand at the pulpit like this, and then everything  you want to say is just on the PowerPoint, and the PowerPoint automatically is.  Just going, and people have to read along. And after about two minutes, they're  wondering, you know, what's going on, and they just, and you just let it go. I  don't know if that's a good idea, but we're just having fun. We're just, you know,  seeing what we could do. So brainstorm, you know, get people thinking outside  the box. It doesn't mean you're going to do these things. Help you think of the  absurd. Think of the crazy thing, just to get used to change. You know, probably  we're not going to do any of these things, but get used to the change number  three, reward innovation. Honor the people that come up with a different way of  doing it. I was, I was doing the renovation last night, and we are doing some  drywall. I don't know if you ever done drywall, but drywall is extremely heavy,  and as we're doing this and putting this in, and I had to go get some new sheets. They were 12 feet by four feet. They're half inch thick, and they were heavier  than all get out. And I said, you know, if I was in a drywall, I would think of a  different way of doing this. I mean, why can't we have like, like, plastic drywall?  It's just, it's just light plastic, and we stick it up, we pound it in, and then we inject it with something heavy or something and all the drywall. People were like,  That's the craziest. What's wrong with the way it is? They were like, This is how  we do it. We're used to it. And they were threatened by my crazy idea. I mean,  maybe it is a crazy idea, but they were, like, totally dead set against doing  anything different than what we're already doing. Reward innovation. Reward  people thinking of different ways, even if the ideas aren't that good. So reward  ideas, reward attempts. You know, you tried something, it didn't work, but you  know what? At least you tried something. Reward successes. The somebody I  mentioned, I think, in one of the earlier sessions that I have a Bible business  that I print, like 50,000 New Testaments without covers. And then I put, you  know, a ministry's cover on, you know, whatever ministry that exists, NASCAR  people, cowboy people, whatever. And someone was really interested in the  King James Bible. And I like the King James, but to use the King James New  Testament as an outreach Bible, I mean, a person who's never read the Bible in 

their life, they open up the King James Bible, and it's got words you have no  idea. You have no idea what it's saying. The King James is a wall of words  because there's no chapter headings in the King James, and there's no  quotation marks in the King James, so you don't know when someone's  speaking when they're not speaking, you know, Jesus said, but there's no  quotation marks. So it's, it's, you know, the format is really hard to read. Some of the words are hard to understand, but there was a ministry that really wanted  the King James Bible. So I sat down and elected the King James Bible. It is, it is  kind of cool. I like the, you know, the the archaic way of saying things. And so  when I grew up with it myself, so I took the King James, the original King James, 400 years ago, King James the old Bible. And what I did is I added, I added  quotation marks. I just went through and added quotation marks where  someone's speaking, that's a quotation mark. Then I just added the chapter  headings. Now the King James Bible is still there. It's still literally the King  James Bible, but I added quotation marks and I added chapter headings.  They're not part of the Bible per se. They're just like study helps along the way.  And then I took all the the archaic words, the words that we have no idea today  what they mean, and I just put in parentheses what they mean. So this is the  Bible that I finally made. It's called a cowboy Bible, wild horse ministries. And  this ministry, the guy here, kind of taming a horse. He'll, he'll go to a fair, and  he'll have 200 people watching. He has this make made up fence thing. And  he'll, he'll train a horse, take a horse that's never been ridden, and He'll calm him down and show him how to train a horse in two hours, and the whole time he's  using it as a metaphor for sharing the gospel. So he'll say something like, do you see how this horse is running away from me? And that's what we do, too.  Sometimes we run away from God. God wants to help us, and we're fearful, and so we run away. And so he has this whole thing that he does at the end. He  gives away the King James Bible, but at least now people have a shot at  understanding what it means. So I took a problem, saw the problem, and  instead of just doing nothing with it, I tried. To think of. Well, how can we work  with this? How can we change this, do something innovative that will help  someone actually succeed with it? So as a manager, it's not just about getting  things organized and done. Well, many company, many companies will be  organized and and and, and well running, and they'll be well, running right into  the ground, because they're managed well. They do everything well, but the  product and the service that they provide does not meet a need anymore. The  needs have changed, so you have to be willing to see the needs and to adjust  what you're doing to meet the needs. It doesn't mean, like in the Christian world, that we compromise on the Gospel. The Gospel can speak to anyone, but it has  to speak in the people's language.