Creating During Crisis
Recently Visionary and Founder of SALT Conference, Luke McElroy, was able to chat with coach, speaker and leader, Stephen Brewster. Stephen has been a big advocate of our SALT Community using his gifts to help the local church and Luke was fortunate to have the opportunity to chat with Stephen about everything from creative meetings to the best ways to utilize an online platform during this time of church shutdowns. Here are 4 tips to help make the most out of your time and your team’s time during the shutdown.
Keep Learning.
(5:36) It is so easy, while at home, to get side-tracked and unfocused. Creating can become burdensome, however, is so important to keep learning during this time. Great things don’t come out of normal, we have to push ourselves. We should be consistently learning about ourselves, our team, our organization structure, organization, your church’s communication, your abilities as a technician. By taking this time of church shutdown and lack of “busyness” we have an opportunity to create better structure, to be better.
Leverage your content
(10:50) Stephen says “our content on Sunday shouldn’t just live on one shelf it should live on several shelves.” Meaning how can we take what was taught during our Sunday live gathering and utilize that throughout the week, with a bible study, devotional, podcast etc. Break it out into several pieces so that your community is able to ingest throughout the week. In the book, Content Inc., the writer discusses different ways to take a piece of content, like a video, and break it down into multiple pieces to use on multiple channels. You could take a 1 minute bit from the video and use it on Instagram, make a quote graphic from the video, create a quick devotional using one of the points from the video. By creating multiple “shelves” you engage a broader audience.
Communicate More
(16:27) Right now we are working in a virtual environment and it can be very easy for our communication to become a check list of what tasks are being done. If you are a leader, it is important that you aren’t just communicating tasks but also communicating value. Until the pandemic caused us to shut down our workplace we took for granted the “water cooler” talk. You know the times we ask about the spouse and the kids. No one wants to create a zoom meeting to discuss those things, we want to get to point and move on. We have to be careful to make sure we make time for those important conversations.
For instance, our team does a meeting every Monday morning and the first question our leader asks “How are we?” then proceeds to see how things have been going (personally) since our last meeting. This becomes a chance for us to give a 2 minute update on the family. After that we move on to tasks and projects. It’s quick and beneficial for the team.
Dream with your team
(23:59) Is your team in the habit of doing a creative meeting? We do a lot of creative meetings and we are big believers in the creative meeting. We did a series on them, you can check that out here. That said just because we can’t do a creative meeting in person doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them. I love how Stephen Brewster broke down the idea of doing a virtual creative meeting then discussed the important aspects of that meeting. Here is the breakdown:
- What does a Zoom creative meeting look like? (25:42)
- What are the 10 disciplines of a creative meeting? (27:21)
- Why do most creative meetings fail? (29:40)
- Who should you invite to a creative meeting? (31:02)
- How to conduct your online creative meeting? (32:50)
- What is the 4 door process to refining the creative ideas? (33:52)
- How to invite people into a creative meeting? (36:10)
- Getting someone to commit to coming to a creative meeting (45:09)
Lastly, if you decide to take a cue from Point #1 and “Learn More” then we suggest checking out Brewster’s new podcast called the, Blue Collar Creative. Each podcast is only about 20 minutes and gives very practical advice on creativity within the church.
