Author: Allen Bingham

I am a follower of Jesus, husband, father, and pastor of Haymount United Methodist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, USA.

How does a Minnesotan become obsessed with Southern gospel? Unlike many conversion narratives, I can’t pinpoint the hour I first believed. I do know that my encounter with gospel music has transformed my understanding of American popular culture. … My favorite comes from the pen of Big Smith’s Jody Bilyeu. Frustrated by Southern gospel’s death-haunted lyrics, he focuses on the life and teachings of Jesus. Here is Bilyeu’s version of the “upside-down kingdom”: The rich man’s poor– That poor boy’s wealthy. The strong man’s weak– The sick girl’s healthy. The stranger belongs The right man’s wrong When Jesus turns the world around Hearing Bilyeu put the gospel in Southern gospel makes me fly away.

John Schmalzbauer (a Minnesotan Lutheran) says southern gospel is a key to understanding American pop culture

So true!  Here’s how Seth days it: Lots of things about work are hard. Dealing with trolls is one of them. Trolls are critics who gain perverse pleasure in relentlessly tearing you and your ideas down. Here’s the thing(s): 1. trolls will always be trolling2. critics rarely create3. they live in a tiny echo chamber, ignored by everyone except the trolled and the other trolls4. professionals (that’s you) get paid to ignore them. It’s part of your job. “Can’t please everyone,” isn’t just an aphorism, it’s the secret of being remarkable.

Seth Godin says one of the hardest things about work are the trolls that enjoy tearing you down.

The most effective designers know instinctually how to navigate bureaucracies. They handle matters “often in subversive ways,” Lucente said. “They quietly figure out how to end run the system and get things done. They know how to work it.” It helps for a designer to have multiple interests. “The people who are going to flourish are the schizophrenic ones,” said Bill Moggridge (shown at left in the photo above), co-founder of IDEO. “A lot of people at IDEO have degrees in different areas than they work in. You have to be great at one thing, but interested in working with people in different areas.” His term for this personality type: “cross-dressers.” Example: Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfus both designed theatrical sets before turning to industrial design. Design thinking works best when integrated. Engineers start with technology. MBAs start with funding. Designer start with people. The trick is to get interdisciplinary teams to raise their collective I.Q. by working in the overlap of those three areas. “That’s where innovation flourishes,” said Moggridge. PowerPoint is the enemy. The kind of discourse associated with Power Point presentations, with bulleted observations marshaled in support of an argument, tends to be team divider, not a unifier. “What organizations are good at is debating,” said Jeanne Liedtka, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. “Debating very rarely leads to real solutions.” That’s because debates tend to revolve around data and examples drawn from the past. Design thinking should be about future possibilities. Be stupid often, but early. Executives often harbor the unrealistic ambition of being right 100% of the time. A few stupid mistakes can actually make you smarter, in the same way that physical exertion rounds you into shape. For obvious reasons, mistakes are less costly if they’re committed early in the process.

5 ways design thinking can raise the collective IQ of your organization as it looks to the future.

via Mashable and CNET Should you be one of the five participants chosen for the five week bathroom extravaganza, your title will be “Charmin Ambassador.” Your mission will be to work inside the makeshift bathroom site in Times Square and update your own blog, share content on social media sites, and even add your insight and experiences to Charmin’s online properties. As a privileged potty party, you will also need to share, “family-friendly video from the restroom space and surrounding areas.” While most of us are absolutely horrified by the thought of taking photos and videos of families using Charmin toilet paper while enjoying their go, we’re pretty positive that there are at least five people in the New York area interested in the $10,000 check for compensation. Should that be you, you can audition on November 5 at the New York Hilton Hotel (53rd St. and 6th Ave.) from 10am to 6pm. Just be prepared to answer questions like, “why do you enjoy the go more than anyone else?,” and “what qualifies you to be a bathroom ambassador?.” We’re not joking.

Charmin is paying for five “Enjoy the Go” ambassadors in Times Square. Is social media going down the toilet?

Here is their opening scenario … Your business has a big problem. You’ve thought about it, but you can’t seem to crack it. So you consult your colleagues — to no avail. Then you turn to the big guns — your industry’s top experts. They’ve got nothing. (Well, to be precise, they’ve got 40 PowerPoint slides worth of nothing, and you’ve got $225,000 less of something.) Now what? You might take some inspiration from Pete Foley, associate director of the cognitive science group at Procter & Gamble, who was looking for an inspired solution to challenges faced by P&G’s feminine-care business unit. Its R&D staff had pursued several approaches, but none of them offered the breakthrough that Foley craved. So he did the next logical thing: He took his team to the San Diego Zoo. The zoo is developing a specialty in biomimicry, a discipline that tries to solve problems by imitating the ingenious and sustainable answers provided by nature. In a working session with the company, the zoo’s biomimicry experts made an unexpected connection between P&G’s problem and the physiology of a gecko. Other ideas came quickly, inspired by flower petals, armadillos, squirrels, and anteaters. (Full disclosure: Chip led a workshop with the biomimicry team on another issue.) By the end of the day, the working group had generated eight fresh approaches to the challenge. It was as if Ideo had opened an office on Noah’s Ark. Most of us don’t solve problems this way. We start by tapping the local knowledge, and if it’s insufficient, we go looking for specialists. But what if we’re following the wrong protocol? We should stop looking for experts and start looking for analogues. It’s a big world: Chances are someone has solved your problem already. And she might be an anteater.

The Heaths @ FastCompany offer a guide to copycatting that may work when peers and consultants have failed you.

Their conclusions follow a good conversation: BRONSON: The thing is, kids should be coached in how to deal with their emotions. But we do this already – every parent and every teacher helps kids with this, in real time, as real life is happening. I believe that’s how kids learn to deal with it. Very gradually. Through thousands and thousands of real interactions. I don’t see any evidence it’s something that can be taught with a few orchestrated rehearsals of mock-interactions in a classroom.MERRYMAN: The premise of the emotional intelligence curriculum proponents is that you – you children – are not able to sufficiently develop emotional regulation and appropriate social skills and decorum on your own. Your parents are ineffective teachers. You cannot be trusted to learn how to behave from your experiences with friends and family and colleagues. You need to come to class for it. Those who don’t get these classes will lead hollow, hurtful, and overly-emotional lives.

Bronson and Merryman close their conversation on teaching children about emotional intelligence @ NurtureShock

Here is an extended quote: Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions. The answers you’ll get from a futures exercise are rarely cut-and-dried, but ideally will help you make your decision more thoughtfully. Futures thinking isn’t a Magic 8-Ball, a process where all you need to ask is “Should we do X?” (and getting “Ask Again Later” as a result is neither useful nor surprising). It’s a subtle point, but I tend to find it useful to talk about strategic questions in terms of dilemmas, not problems. Problem implies solution—a fix that resolves the question. Dilemmas are more difficult, typically situations where there are no clearly preferable outcomes (or where each likely outcome carries with it some difficult contingent elements). Futures thinking is less useful when trying to come up with a clear single answer to a particular problem, but can be extremely helpful when trying to determine the best response to a dilemma. The difference is that the “best response” may vary depending upon still-unresolved circumstances; futures thinking helps to illuminate possible trigger points for making a decision. One important point about the difference between problems and dilemmas: with dilemmas, you will generally have a sense of the different possible responses, and have to make an intelligent choice between them. With problems, the solution is almost by definition hidden, and must be discovered. Futures thinking is much more robust when dealing with dilemmas.

Jamais Cascio says explore the future by posing questions as dilemmas to wrestle with instead of problems to solve.