Hola mis amigos, ¿cómo estás? I’ve returned from study leave, much of which I’ve spent learning Spanish and living with some wonderful Argentine Baptist friends. “Why?” you say. First, because Argentina is awesome — have you ever heard of dulce…
TRENDING: Lessons from Argentina, part 2: Cities
If you want to know what is coming to the United States, look south. As a Tar Heel, I’ve always known this. But now, I’m suggesting we look even further south than Chapel Hill — all the way to the…
TRENDING: The future of creativity, part 2: Against brainstorming
Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works makes an appealing case that the future of imagination and creativity will emerge from groups rather than from solitary genius. But before you leave the solitude of your study for a table of six at…
TRENDING: 10 jobs in a career
My friend Bob Dale is a walking trend-spotter. Maybe it’s because his son is a professional futurist. Or because he’s written a zillion books on leadership. Or he is reading about five very different books at a time most weeks….
TRENDING: The future of creativity, part 3: Plussing
Jonah Lehrer’s book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, is a “popular science” approach to how we foster imaginative environments for complicated problem-solving. One, use groups—you need the friction of a variety of perspectives. But two, don’t brainstorm with a goofy, positive, “every-idea-is-great”…
TRENDING: The future of creativity, part 1: Q
My friend Jim Baucom gave me a copy of best-selling author Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works. The sleeve of the book promises “a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity.” Shattering the myth of muses, higher…
TRENDING: Movement thinking, part 2: Intentional networks
In our last column, we examined the trend of “movement thinking” by looking at Steve Addison’s, Movements That Change the World: Five Keys to Spreading the Gospel. One of Addison’s keys is “Contagious Relationships.” The author says that “movements spread…
TRENDING: Movement thinking, part 1: Adaptive methods
A powerful and welcome trend today is the conversation about starting movements. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Seth Godin’s Tribes and Ori Brafman’s The Starfish and the Spider have electrified and mainstreamed this topic. A movement is an informal grouping…
TRENDING: The stuck and broken?
Recently, I was part of a conversation with 10 pastors discussing discipleship. All agreed that their churches were producing exactly what they were engineered to produce: attenders. There’s nothing wrong with attending church. You just can’t say attending church automatically…