During a keynote in Holland, MI, last month, I made a passing comment about the Nones and the Dones—”the religiously unaffiliated and the religiously exhausted.” A remarkable article I read this week speaks to what “being the Church” means from the perspective of the Dones. Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes is a psychologist, theologian, professor, and author […]
Not hope. Imagination.
“We have this hope” has been a Seventh-day Adventist anthem for at least five decades. “We have this hope that burns within our hearts,” we sing. “Hope in the coming of the Lord!” There’s not much like hearing 70,000 people in a single stadium banging those lines out and insisting through the emphatic, vaguely Soviet, […]
Poisoned wells and expectations
In the second season of the Wachowskis’ web series Sense8, there’s an exchange between the ever-earnest Capheus and a television anchor. “I drive a bus,” Capheus tells the anchor. “If I didn’t take people where they hired me to take them, I wouldn’t expect them to get back on my bus. We expect leaders to […]
Knowing you don’t know best
One of my notes from February’s bystander training sticks with me all these weeks later: Often your first intervention will not work. Try another.” The maxim suggests to me patience and persistence with experiment. Focusing on results and using outcomes to assess people or programs won’t always make room for that. It also implies the […]
It’s hard out here for a stumbling block
It seems like every couple of months, female employees across industries are trading stories about organizational culture and “fit.” Far too often, these stories boil down to them not fitting at all. At Uber: A serial harasser has a Human Resources department that protects him despite years of complaints from peers and junior employees. At […]
Rituals reveal who we are
Ritual practices are intentions made material or concrete. Our ritual practices matter because they don’t just represent the commitments we openly acknowledge or declare. Habits reflect our implicit intentions as well. Policies are the material expressions of our core values. Budgets are a way to externalize priorities using the unit that this culture seems to […]
