You may remember that I blogged about Living distinctively a couple of months ago. One of the main parts of the study is a DVD interviewing Christians who are working at the top of their field. One of the people interviewed was Patrick Dixon, “Futurist”. He was inspiring so I decided to follow him. He just uploaded this to YouTube:
There are some fascinating statistics quoted here as he uses them to illustrate how we move from “hierarchical leadership” to “people movement”. The Church ™ is currently struggling to integrate a hierarchical management structure within newly formed teams that are created to work together. The “people movement” that Patrick describes is surely the perfect description of the calling Jesus made upon each of us. A transformative, missional community.
So how do we encourage people to work effectively together? How do we enable “teams” to create real relationships within them? How do we foster our communities to become more than institutions but people movements that spread from place to place?
What i like about this guy’s people movement idea is that it isn’t about one group of people trying to dictate to everyone else how they should all behave. Its about one group of people demonstrating a way of doing things that is so attractive that other people see it and want to be a part of it and choose to emulate it.
Good questions: “make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose. Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.”
I think what grabs me most about what he says is that he isn’t being prescriptive. He isn’t saying “act like this and it will change the way you [in this case a company] operate and make you more effective”. He is being descriptive. “This is the pattern I see around me and how it is working. These are the statistics that show this. Live the dream.”
He manages to say something completely revolutionary in the space of 4:39 seconds! 4 minutes and 39 seconds!!!
Good answers. I hope and pray that one day I may begin to see a glimpse of the qualities you describe begin to grow within me.
well you seem to be agreeing wholeheartedly with me and your last sentence expresses humility bordering on self flaggelation (which is bad. Stop it) so glimpse away.
flaggelation good =D