Bringing innovation to churches and nonprofits

This week I got to spend several days with my grad-school friend, Bill Habicht, brainstorming a workshop we're presenting at the NEXT Church National Gathering in March.  The title is Ideation for Innovation - it sounds bigger than it really is.  Basically, we want to help folks think differently.

It's SO easy in church-world, and in any organizational context for that matter, to fall into familiar patterns when approaching challenges and developing solutions.  You know, because, "we've always done it that way."  In the end we usually wind up feeling stuck. But, if we think back to those breakthrough moments where we were able to effectively problem solve, they typically came when we envisioned and approached the problem in a different way.

So, we’re designing a workshop that offers tools for helping others think differently.  To do that, we were challenged to think differently:  what tools are people using in other contexts that we could use with our workshop participants? We spent three days brainstorming, dreaming, revising, and planning. We’ve borrowed concepts from Stanford’s D school; models from Ash Mayura; and conversations from local idea-makers in the RVA area.

Church and non-profit organizations face many significant challenges.  We can discover creative and innovative solutions for these challenges...if we allow ourselves to think about them differently. Stay tuned for a recap of our session in March 2017.