Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Copies, Copying, Copyright and Copy Wrongs

One issue that often confronts us is whether and how to use materials what we've discovered in our work. In the course of recently responding to an e-mail on this question, I wrote...

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The Leadership Challenge licenses their materials for use by other organizations at a cost of something like $100 to $200 per participant.

You can contact them at www.leadershipchallenge.com for information.

Use of this material also requires attending a training program which costs about $3,000

If your budget won't accommodate this kind of costs, there is nothing to prevent you from developing your own material/learning tasks loosely based on their content.

What is in view here is the concept of "fair use" which is an aspect of US Copyright law. (Not to be confused with the commonly known practice of "copy things right".)

One difficulty is finding out what the honest parameters of fair use actually are. Organizations who produce materials that might be duplicated don't want you to know that there is such a thing as the "fair use" provision so they will tell you it does not exist.

On the other hand, people who want to use anything they can find on the Internet or elsewhere without payment, acknowledgement or permission assume that until they get stopped there is no problem.

The government seems reluctant to issue guidelines for the "fair use" of copyrighted materials, preferring to operate on a "case-by-case" basis. This practice is also known as the "copyright lawyer full employment act" provision.

Those who have ventured to extrapolate principles or guidelines from case law end up with questions like:

1. Will the material be used in "not-for-profit" settings?

2. What percentage of the original material is used?

3. Will the material be used in face-to-face instructional settings?

4. In what country will the material be used? (U.S. copyright law is sometimes different from international copyright law.)

5. Is exact representation of the original material used, or just the general sense of a concept?

6. Are you talking with people who are trainers, or people who are lawyers?

It would be great if some Christian organizations could get together and come up with something like Christian musicians have done where an organization could pay a fee of $100 to $500 per year to get an overall license for using copyrighted materials throughout their organization. It would provide payment to the copyright holders, but also put the use of materials at a level that organizations could afford.

Flash Mobs, Body of Christ and Mission Leader Training


Today, Jeannie sent me a link to a flash mob video from a store in Canada. I had read about flash mobs, but was not aware of the video files that show some of their more public venures, singing, dancing and freeze action posing in a public place.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was isn’t this an amazing picture of the function of the Body of Christ in the world. One of my mentors, Pastor Ray Stedman, talked about the Kingdom of God as “God’s secret government of the earth.”

So when I see dozens or hundreds of seemingly normal people, in a very public venue, in the middle of their daily activities, suddenly breaking into a choral rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus, it quickly becomes obvious that they have a different agenda, and are responding to different cues, on a different timetable than others around them.

But isn’t this what we are supposed to be doing every day, all day? Not singing or dancing (at least not for people like me) but going about my daily schedule with a different agenda, a different purpose, responding to different cues, and looking for a different response?

Of course, I couldn’t go far without reflecting on how this kind of technique might be used on some of our training events. For example, use a prepared role play which would emerge naturally from a session with no introduction or instruction that would make it appear to be anything other than part of the dialogue in a session. Or have three or four people, at a particular point in the session, again with no introduction or announcement, stand and read something aloud in unison. (that might even wake up some of the people in the class).

Well that little bit of output has probably used up all my creative juices for the week. I think it’s time for a nap.

Drucker: Beware the Undoable Job

What implications does this have for ministry job descriptions?

 

Beware the Undoable Job

from What's Best Next  



Drucker:


“[The effective executive is] forever on guard against the ‘impossible’ job, the job that simply is not for normal human beings.


Such jobs are common. They usually look exceedingly logical on paper. But they cannot be filled. One man of proven performance capacity after the other is tried — and none does well. Six months or a year later, the job has defeated them.


Almost always such a job was first created to accomodate an unusual man tailored to his idiosyncrasies. It usually calls for a mixture of temperaments that is rarely found in one person. Individuals can acquire very divergent kinds of knowledge and highly disparate skills. But they cannot change their temperaments. A job that calls for disparate temperaments becomes an “undoable” job, a man-killer.


The rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned.


(From The Effective Executive)

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Planning Days, Weeks and Years and Tasks

I've been working on some personal planning recently, and I was reminded of something I learned many years ago. God has explicitly given us three time periods that mark our lives:

  • Days (morning and evening, Day One..."
  • Weeks (six days you will labor and the seventh day..."
  • Years (all of Israel's festivals are built around the annual calendar)
That's not to say that monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, etc. planning is wrong and should be discontinued. However that is to say that we should prioritize our planning for the time periods God has given us.

God has also given us clear instructions about the tasks we are to prioritize and some tasks we are to avoid. These are summarized in the Ten Commandments, the Great Commandment (and the second which is like it).

In all my planning and tracking I need to prioritize these. 

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Strategic and Action Planning for Ministry

Today I completed a draft learning assignment for World Team on Strategic and action planning.


(Gospel Leadership Profile) (5) Leadership Competencies The wisdom to know how and when to skillfully use leadership competences to reproduce themselves. Strategic planning: Focus on effective Spirit-led planning that results in a team accomplishing ministry goals. (Gospel Leadership Profile)
This brief statement incorporates four key indicators of the godly leadership we aspire to provide to those we serve by leading:
1.       Strategic planning
ü  Takes a long range approach to a mission, a task, an organization, etc. over a period of time.
ü  Begins with consideration of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) 
ü  Develops an approach to accomplish the objective in a particular setting.
2.      Effective tactical or action planning
ü  Breaks down the strategic plan into specific, short term goals, actions and plans.
ü  Develops a task list of the who, what, when, where, and the resources needed for success
ü  Effective plans can be implemented and lead to accomplishing the goal.
3.      Spirit-led planning
ü  Listens and responds to God’s voice, before, during and after the planning session.
4.      Focus on fulfilling mission and vision
ü  Aggressively evaluates and adapts plan to produce effective spiritual ends.
Suggested “challenge” and developmental steps on how to grow in planning:
ü  Review the process of coming up with the current team or field plan. List the options considered and discuss the alternatives chosen.
ü  Evaluate the current field or team plan. Discuss the issues faced in implementing the plans. Are the schedules realistic? Are the required resources available? Do leaders have the competencies to implement the plans? Are the plans producing the desired results?
ü  How does planning relate to Paul’s statement that we are “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them”? (Eph. 2:10)
ü  Do a Bible study on whether strategic planning is Biblical. (A helpful guide can be found at: http://www.buildingchurchleaders.com/articles/2003/le-031112a.html )
ü  A very helpful planning resource for non-profit organizations is available at. http://www.managementhelp.org/plan_dec/plan_dec.htm
ü  An outline for a ministry planning retreat is available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/10301532/Strategic-Planning-for-Pastoral-Staff
ü  So see an example of a strategic plan for a ministry organization (Calvary Bible College and Seminary) http://college.calvary.edu/about/institutional-research-and-strategic-planning
ü   Strategic planning is one area where someone outside your team or organization can be helpful, especially someone with planning expertise and experience. Ask your team leader, field or area director to help you identify someone who could provide help in this area.
ü  Ask a knowledgeable home side ministry colleague (from a sending or supporting) church to evaluate your team plan from their experience base.
ü  Evaluate current ministry goals against the SMART criteria, are they specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and trackable? How could they be restated to meet the criteria?
ü   Missionary pioneer J. Hudson Taylor stated: “Unless there is an element of risk in our exploits for God, there is no need for faith.” How do your plans embody risk? Should they?

Monday, September 13, 2010

Three Essential Management Skills

This post is a repeat from several months ago. I've cleaned up the formatting a bit to make it more presentable.

Three Essential Management Skills

The late Stephen F. Holbrook was a godly management trainer who went to be with the Lord about fifteen years ago. His work on the three key management processes was so clear and powerful, that after hearing him speak on them once in an one-day IFMA workshop in the late 1980’s I’ve used and taught his principles and processes ever since.

Here is the essence of what I understand Holbrook taught:

There are three essential management processes. When managers are doing management work, they are using one of these three processes.

The three processes are problem-solving, decision-making and planning.

It’s extremely important to know what kind of situation you have so you can use the right tool.

When you need to develop steps into the future, you have a “planning” situation.

When you have an unexpected result as the result of some action you’ve taken, you have a problem.

When you have to select a choice of action from a range of alternatives, you have a decision.

For Planning:

Planning is the thinking—the mental sequence of steps you go through—that helps you get from where you are to where you want to be, with a minimum of diversions. It’s a series of action steps to ensure the successful implementation of a decision.

Planning starts with a decision. Once the decision has been made, the process of thinking to implement the decision is planning. A normal plan statement would therefore be: “How to implement this decision to relocate the office.”

Planning implies a known goal, an explanation, a result, a target. Without it, there is no way of thinking through a plan adequately. You need a destination to do planning. Planning is not problem-solving or decision-making, even though it involves decisions being made in the process.

Planning is always done from now into the future. This contrasts with problem-solving and decision-making. Problem-solving is always looking back in time to find the cause of how we got where we are. A problem-solver is resurrecting facts out of the past. The time frame of a problem is, “the past—up to now.” The questions asked are different from planning.

Decision-making is in the present, choosing among alternative actions available to us or known to us. The questions are different form both problem-solving or planning.

When you’ve solved a problem or made a decision, the feedback and reactions are almost immediate, or at least they are timely. That’s satisfying to a manager, especially an action-oriented manager.

After you’ve planned a project, on the other hand, you’re faced with waiting to see if it works. On top of that, some things are sure to happen anyway, no matter how minor, to mar perfect results. And if that’s not enough, when the project or activity is completed, the planning has been long-forgotten.

When managers make decisions or solve problems, there is more of a sense of being active, of getting something done at the time. Planning seems anything  but an activity, it’s more like a “passivitity.” Without that sense of immediate payoff, it’s easier to leave undone and many do.

Six Steps of the D – A – F Process

DEFINE AND DETAIL

1.     Define what should happen
2.    Detail the sequence of action steps to get there

ANTICIPATE

3.    Identify areas of possible trouble or opportunity
4.    Take preventive action against/for the likely causes of possible trouble or opportunity

FEEDBACK

5.    Organize contingent action to reduce the seriousness if trouble occurs or enhance the opportunity if that occurs.
6.    Set up feedback to tell me I have the actual trouble or opportunity.

For Problem-Solving

Profits are up. Why? Sales are down. Why? Product quality complaints are increasing. Why? This department functions better than that one. Why? Attendence is exceeding expectations. Why?

Good managers are always asking why. When the question is “Why,” and you don’t know the answer the thinking process we use is called problem-solving. It is the search for the cause of an effect I can’t explain.

Managers, especially in people situations, tend to jump to a cause and act on it, without making the effort to find out why. This process incorporates a series of disciplined steps you can use to find out why something is happening.

Knowing where and how to start analyzing a problem is the first key step. We need to differentiate problems, for which problem-solving processes are appropriate from decisions. Difficult decisions are usually called “problems,” by most people. The steps to effective decisions are different from problem-solving, so we need to clearly separate the two kinds of situations.

The thinking needed for problem-solving has very different characteristics than decision-making. They start at different points in time, have different targets, different emotions and very different questions to ask.

Problems are situations where we need to know what agrees with what we expected, and what variables are deviating or disagreeing in time, place and circumstances from our expectations. A commonly accepted management definition, which dates from Socrates, says, a problem is a deviationfrom an expected norm, for which I don’t know the cause.

This definition implies that there was an expected or desired result that didn’t occur. A goal was deviated from. You expected 200 people at a new product introduction, only 150 came. It’s a problem if you don’t know “why.” If you do know why, it’s a decision. It may be a difficult, perplexing decision, but it’s a decision, not a problem.

The five steps in thinking clearly about problems are:

1.     Name the problem
2.    Describe it in detail
3.    Generate possible causes
4.    Evaluate the possible causes
5.    Confirm the tentative conclusion

This thinking process is basic cause-effect logic. It also uses inference. We move from a known to something we hadn’t known before, but we can infer it. We have an effect we do not know the cause for. We want to find that cause for this known effect.

·          The first two steps deal with known facts.
·          Step three steps out into hypothesis (inference) based on known facts.
·          Step four involves a disciplined separation of necessary missing data, by the use of compasason logic.
·          Step five gathers the missing data to confirm or deny the reasonable deducted conclusion.

The thinking process begins and ends on a factual basis. In the middle we use inference reasons to look beyond the known to find the unknown cause.

Decision-Making

Of those skills that seem to separate top managers from the rest, the ability to make more good decisions than bad ones is frequently mentioned.

Critical factors in effective decision-making are:

1.     Experience
2.    Intelligence
3.    Good judgment

All of these will help you, but unless you have a way of sensibly handling all of the information coming at you, your decisions may not be as effective as they could be.

When an individuals experience, intelligence and judgment are combined with his use of a visible and logical process for extracting relevant information from vast quantities of irrelevant and often misleading information, the coupling of ingredients allows more effective decision-making.

A decision is a situation that calls for a choice of action. It is usually associated with some uncertainty. Most people refer to these situations as problems. For example, “My problem is whether to give the job to Sam or Al.”  In the managerial sense, that is not a problem, it’s a situation that calls for a decision-making process.

Since a decision calls for action, it calls for a description that includes an action verb, such as select, choose, elect, change, improve, etc. (Choose a marketing promotion idea for the first quarter.)

Ten Steps of the O – A – R Decision-Making Process

Objectives

1.     State the goal (a simple statement of what I am going to do)
2.    List objectives (sometimes called criteria—time, money people, results, resources)
3.    Seprate objectves (required vs. desired)
4.    Weight the desired objecties (prioritizing with a scale)

Actions

5.    Develop alternative actions (possible choices, ways to DO the goal)
6.    Screen actions against required objectives (Does it meet the specifications?)
7.    Evaluate actions against desired bojectives (HOW well does it meeet the objectives?)
8.    Make a tentative decision

Risks

9.    Analyze risks (weigh seriousness vs. likelihood of occurring)
10. Make a decision (choose an action best balance objectives and risk)

I have handouts and PowerPoint for all three of these if you are interested.