I’m experimenting with the Pomodoro Technique this week.  It is a way to organize time and activity.  It’s simple.  Choose a task.  Set a timer for 25 minutes.  Work on that task only until the timer goes off.  Then, take a break. I tried it yesterday, for the whole day.  I discovered I don’t like taking breaks.  I also realized I need them.  I do mental work all day, so it’s not like I need to sit down for few minutes, get a drink and catch my breath, so  I can go back to swinging a hammer.  I obeyed the Pomodoro yesterday and stopped and took a break (well, sometimes) and discovered I was mentally more alert and productive all day. So I’m starting today with this in mind – take a break!

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Yes, it’s been two months since I posted.  Yes, like most of the leaders I train and coach, I have too much to do.  The options are simple – do less or do more.  The real goal is to do both – less time spent on less important activities and more time spent on more important activities.  The obvious question, how?

I’m familiar with a wide variety of time-management tools – have tried and trained in several of them.  I came across something new that seems to have great potential, The Pomodoro Technique.  I am going to try it starting tomorrow.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

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I was watching Shawshank on my cross country flight home on Thursday.  A line at the end got me thinking about essential ingredients again – what are the essential ingredients for developing leaders?

“That’s all it takes really, pressure, and time.”

I don’t know about the “all” part, but I agree with pressure and time.  Development, or training, is just change towards a particular focused outcome. Change almost always requires pressure and time.  Pressure, because without it we almost always choose the comfort of the way things are.  Time, because old habits need to die and new ones need to be formed.

Essential Leadership Ingredient #2 & 3 – Pressure and Time.

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One of my goals in coaching is to help people discover and focus on what they do best.  A common question I ask is, “what are you most likely to be doing when you lose track of time?” In Drive, Daniel Pink reviews the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and the theory of “flow.”
“in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort itself the most delicious reward. … In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place and even self melted away.”
My conviction is that every person was created by God with a purpose and gifted by him with unique abilities to accomplish it.  Csíkszentmihályi’s observation of “flow” is describing what someone experiences when engaging their abilities in the pursuit of that purpose.
This is what struck me – “flow” as Pink relates it, isn’t easy.  It involves a distinct element of challenge.  It’s not overwhelming.  It’s not me trying to run a marathon today.  It’s me putting in a couple extra miles on the bike.  It’s me not playing it safe, but choosing to give myself to something just a little bigger than I can manage on my own and trusting my creator to fill in the gap.
How about you?  What will you give yourself to today that is bigger than what you know you can do?

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One of the examples in Daniel Pink’s book Drive that caught my attention was the candle problem.

Individuals were asked to fix a lighted candle on a wall (a cork board) in a way so the candle wax won’t drip onto the table below.  They are given a candle, a book of matches, a box of thumbtacks.  Solving the problem requires overcoming something called “functional fixedness.”  I would just call it creative thinking – putting things together in a new way.

All of that is just the necessary background  What caught my attention was an experiment conducted by a Princeton psychologist named Sam Glucksberg.  He added a simple twist to the candle experiment – figure it out faster than everyone else and you’ll be rewarded – and discovered that the promised reward made people SLOWER not faster.  Apparently creativity and rewards don’t mix.

So if offering rewards hinders creative thinking, how do you motivate yourself and others?

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I just finished reading Drive by Daniel Pink.  The topic is motivation. The point is to challenge the conventional wisdom.  “The way to improve performance, increase productivity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad.” A simple idea we implement at some level almost every day but according to Pink it doesn’t work.  Especially when it comes to non-routine tasks – the kind the few of you who read this regularly are most likely to spend your time doing and leading others to do.
Pink argues, and provides ample social science research to back it up, that “rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work. And by diminishing intrinsic motivation, they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes.” Think Tom Sawyer and painting the fence in reverse.
Instead of reward and punishment, Pinks suggests we pay more attention to natural intrinsic motivators.  Specifically, he “argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.”
The last section of the book provides practical ideas for implementing a more functional motivational operating system in your own life, family and organization.
If you like Gladwell and Heath, which I do, then you’ll probably enjoy Drive, which I did.  I found a few specific ideas thought provoking and will dive into those in the next few posts.


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I’ve been craving some fresh guacamole.  The last batch of avocados have been sitting on the counter for a week – and still aren’t ripe enough.  No avocados, no guacamole.  They are an essential ingredient.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we develop leaders for church planting and wondering what are the essential ingredients?  That prompted me to pick up a book I haven’t read since college, Dedication and Leadership by Douglas Hyde.  Hyde was an active member of the Communist party for 20 years before converting to Catholicism.  He wrote the book as a series of lectures to offer the church lessons in leadership he learned while in the party.  There are many great insights, but this one speak the question of essential ingredients.

Any communist tutor conducting a course in leadership would insist right at the start that the very foundation and starting point must be dedication.

This is something for others who are concerned with producing leaders to appreciate too.  It is of course quite possible to produce leaders of some sort by teaching certain techniques.  These are not the sort of leaders the communists are interested in, nor, I suggest, are they the ones the Christian cause requires most today.  You can learn certain techniques and so become a leader who leads for himself – if by leadership you simply mean getting to the top whether it be of an organization, a business, a profession or the political system.  But the first requirement, if you’re going to produce a leader for cause, is that he should be dedicated.

Essential Leadership Ingredient #1 – Dedication.

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Just thought I’d let you know my post on “Form and Function” is on the Willow Creek Association/Global Leadership Summit blog.

http://wcagls.blogspot.com/2010/03/function-trumps-form.html

They were such great organizers and host for our trip.  Really appreciate they’re team and what they do!

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I spent yesterday in Las Vegas to be part of the grand opening of Verve.  There are many great things I could write, but it’s late so I just wanted to pass along a quote from Vince‘s message, it’s worth repeating:

“People are not changed by being rejected for what they’ve done. People are changed by being loved for who they are.”

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10 planes, 9 cars, and 8 trains later I am home from Europe and slowly recovering from the jet lag. I wanted to post one thought that has really stuck with me – the interplay of form and function.  During 12 days of travel, in 5 countries I had never been to, I was constantly confronted with new forms.

• Food – I ate some great meals, but they weren’t always what I expected.  Hotel breakfasts included sliced meat and cheese which always made me wonder if I’d slept late and arrived for lunch.  Sandwiches came with one slice of bread and you ate them with a fork and knife.  Pancakes were filled with meat and cheese and you ate them for dinner.
• Transportation – I visited 5 countries and never needed a rental car.  For the most part trains covered the distance from airport to hotel.  When they didn’t a taxi ride meant a very well kept Mercedes not a “will it survive the 2 mile trip” Chevy.
• Toilets – forgive me for going there, but I honestly found this a fascinating illustration of form and function.  How complicated can a toilet be?  They all worked different, some had levers you had to work more than once.  Some had buttons you pushed.  Others had rods you pulled.  I don’t remember seeing a single motion sensor flush, which is now found in almost every public restroom in America.

Though not what I was familiar with, each of these things served the function intended.  The food nourished my body and tasted good too.  The trains and taxis got me where I needed to go, often with great ease.  The toilets – well they served their purpose.  The lesson – many forms can accomplish the same function and the function is what matters.
I believe we would be so much more effective if we applied that lesson to the expression of our faith.   Jesus said, love God, love people, make disciples.  Three functions that can be accomplished with a multitude of forms – some of which we have yet to imagine.  If only we would realize that we are free to do just that.

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