Growing health and effectiveness

A blog centered around The Addington Method, leadership, culture, organizational clarity, faith issues, teams, Emotional Intelligence, personal growth, dysfunctional and healthy leaders, boards and governance, church boards, organizational and congregational cultures, staff alignment, intentional results and missions.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

The Twitter principle: Simplify, clarify and focus

The twitter principle is powerful when it comes to bringing clarity, focus and simplicity to almost any endeavor. The challenge is to clearly state your case in 140 characters or less. That forces one to simplify, clarify and focus!

Take, for instance the mission I lead, ReachGlobal. With 550 personnel working with scores of partnerships that touch nearly 100 countries there is obviously complexity involved. Yet we can clarify our purpose in the space of a tweet: We develop, empower and release healthy national leaders in order to see transformational churches multiplied. 

That simple statement sums up our philosophy (it is not about what we do but what we help others do), our goal (transformational churches multiplied) and our method (we develop, empower and release). In addition it touches on our culture of health since only healthy personnel can develop healthy national leaders.

Can your church sum up its philosophy, goal and methodology in a tweet? Chances are it it cannot it is too complicated and many even in leadership cannot easily remember or communicate what is truly important.

If you preach or teach, can you sum up the big idea in the space of a tweet? If not chances are that you are not clear on the essence of what you are communicating. And if you are not, neither will your listeners. How many left church today not totally sure what the message was about?

One can take almost any endeavor at work and ask the question, can we explain our mission in 140 characters or less? If so you know where you are going and if not probably not.

No comments: