The Ideation Experience

This week I’m at Leadership Network in Dallas participating in the Ideation Experience. LN invited people from around the world to submit ideas that could help accelarate the impact of the gospel in our lifetime.  Then they invited about 40 of the applicants to come to Dallas to share and further develop these ideas.

The gathering kicked off yesterday afternoon and has been very thought provoking. As a part of the process they brought in John Handy former Senior VP of Product Design for Mattel Inc, the worlds largest toy company. John is sharing his wisdom from 23 years of innovation and product design. Yesterday he told us we  should be able to explain any idea in 60 seconds. He calls it an elevator speech. Then he had each of us stand up and present our ideas in a literal 60 seconds. Here are my two…

EVEVATOR PITCH #1  Hi-Tech, Hi-Touch Leadership Development

We’ve all heard it said there’s a leadership problem in the church…I disagree…I think there’s a leadership development problem in the church.  If we took Eph 4:11-12 seriously, which basically tells us God has given leaders for the purpose of raising up other leaders, then we will find a way to resource and empower ALL leaders both staff and lay leaders to identify, recruit and equip future potential leaders.  If developing leaders is the critical need of the hour we have to work smarter not harder.
Imagine for a moment…

• if you had a system that gave all your currently leaders the confidence and the process to help them identify, recruit and develop 1-2 new leaders each
• if this system included high quality training modules taught by the best leaders in the world.
• if this content was delivered to your church free thru an online education management software that included a dashboard showing all the potential leaders in your leadership pipeline.
• if participation in this training required that potential leaders be personally mentored by an existing leader
• if each module was structured to not just dump information but used an interactive process proven to ensure transformation.

I believe this high tech high touch approach to leadership development could literally release millions of leaders in around the world to identify, recruit and develop new leaders for Kingdom growth.

ELEVATOR PITCH #2 Solar Powered MP3 Players for Leadership Development

In 2008 I traveled three hours to reach a village at the top of a mountain in Colon Honduras.  There I met a man who was pastoring a church of 10 people, in a community of 300.  The gospel was only reaching 3% of the population.  As I spoke with that pastor it became obvious his lack of leadership was limiting his ability to influence his community. 

Now multiply this story over and over again thousands of times.  It is estimated that over 90% of the worlds pastors are untrained.  Agencies that do international pastor training typically send teams 1-2 times per year.  It’s too little, too slow.  But if we could provide each of these pastors a solar powered MP3 player preloaded with leadership training we could provide an unlimited number of hours of training that would transform these men into strong, biblical leaders.  The impact this would have on that pastor would change his life, change his leadership and allow him to more effectively reach his community for Christ.

In case you are wondering how I did on my elevator pitch presentation….I choked.  Hey it’s hard getting a vision across in just 60 seconds!  But I get a second shot at it today.