How Now Shall We Work - Faith@Work Summit 2016

It's the final day of the Faith@Work 2016 (#FAWS16) Summit in Dallas, Texas. I am attendng through the gracious invitation of my friend, Devin Marks. What an exciting few days it has been gathered there with about 400 others from around the world to explore the implications of faith AT work with some of the best and brightest minds and most compassionate hearts.This convocation is specifically exploring the Christian faith at work since this is a gathering of Christians or Christ-followers (the identity I prefer.)F@W16  has included plenty of rousing presentations from the stage in aTED-like format of 15-minute talks from a variety of presenters each discussing an “idea worth spreading.”  These talks sparked plenty of stimulating conversations during the breakout sessions, in the halls, and spilled over into dinner and late night discussions.Here am I at 3:30 Saturday morning when I should be sleeping and instead, my mind is overstimulated from the discussions of these past few days and dozens of thoughts running through my mind.At times like these when sleep evades me, I find it best to get up and write. To wrestle these ideas to print.John Beckett, in the opening talk of the Summit, talked about the challenge of Greek dualism from the secular/sacred divide that is a root of the problem for so many when it comes to Faith@Work. I experienced this years ago when I worked for an entrepreneur who was new to the faith and very vocal about it…well, at least on Sundays. Yet as a new believer, his faith had not yet impacted many of his questionable business practices. It was those sketchy business practices the other six days of the week that troubled me most.These issues came to a head, and finally, I inquired about a couple of his most egregious practices. Now, some 30 years later I still vividly recall his response, “Oh, that’s business!”He lived in that dualistic divide and unfortunately, never managed to bridge the gap.Unscrupulous practices like that illustrate another dimension to the dualistic split. We must cross the chasm between right thinking and right doing on the topics of F@W. Right thinking, or what might be labeled orthodoxy and then there’s the right doing or orthopraxy. It’s what Lisa Slayton of the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation alluded to when she said,

Faith@Work must become a movement of the heart, not just the head.

For the F@W movement to thrive and truly have the impact in the marketplace that we want it to have, we must marry right thinking and right action. We must embrace orthodoxy and orthopraxy.And that is what has me wide awake this Saturday morning. Perhaps, others are still gathered somewhere having these conversations, and if I knew where they were, I could join them. Instead, here I sit in my hotel room, thinking out loud.So, I do what I know to do when thoughts like these lock in head and sleep evades me. I get up and write.If…or perhaps the better way to frame the question is when we are serious our Faith@Work, how does that manifest? [clickToTweet tweet="When we are embracing orthodoxy and orthopraxy about #FAWS16, what is different in our workplaces?" quote="When we are embracing orthodoxy and orthopraxy about F@W, what is different in our workplaces?"]What is different about:

The culture of your workplace?

The way you design compensation and benefits packages?

Your hiring practices?

Your approach to employee evaluation?

Your approach to talent development?

Your approach to leadership and leadership development?

How you handle difficult situations and crucial conversations?

What’s different about encounters with customers and the customer experience?

Amy Sherman of the Sagamore Institute issued a threefold challenge to:

Cultivate the creational purpose and intent about work.

Restore what’s broken in the workplace. 

Imagine what the ultimate future of work looks like and yank a foretaste of that into the now. 

[clickToTweet tweet="When we cultivate, restore, and imagine F@W, we will then know, how now shall we work. " quote="When we cultivate, restore, and imagine a thriving F@W world, we will then know, how now shall we work. "]Fortunately, we are not without exemplars and examples of Faith at Work. There are bright spots from which we can learn.If you are wondering how might your culture be different when faith is at work, what if you too adopted a no-gossip policy as they have at Ramsey Solutions (Dave Ramsey)? That shows up in the conversations over coffee and at lunch.On the topic of customer experience, look at Chick-Fil-A and how they are as relentless about innovation as they are hospitality. They are at the forefront of excellence in customer experience and being the premier restaurant for families. CFA provides free ice cream to award customers for digital-distraction free dining. Restaurant patrons, especially those with young children can order ahead using the app and have their meal ready when they arrive and have it delivered to their table to enhance the dining experience for eating out with your young children.  That is a result of F@W.I don’t know the answers to all of these questions. But hey, this is F@W16, and some of the best and brightest minds, the luminaries of the F@W world are here. As we move forward on this journey, I am confident that we will see companies answering these questions and finding myriads of ways that combine the best thinking and the best doing of F@W.If you are not able to attend in person, you can join in via the live streaming for the final day of discussions.

The Power of Finding Your ONE Thing

Have you ever struggled to identify what’s most important now? I certainly have. If someone stopped you right now and asked you, “What’s most important now?” How would you answer?Well, you were just asked that question. Pause for a moment and ponder your answer. Got it? Tuck it away in your memory or jot it down somewhere as we will come back to it in a moment. That question, “What’s most important now?” is posted on my desk as a reminder. I posted it there more than a year ago after reading The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. Honestly, even though that reminder has been posted there for over a year, there are times that I’ve struggled to answer that question.Struggled might be understating it just a wee bit. I had used What’s most important now? as shorthand for what Gary and Jay call the focusing question.

What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

When I first read The ONE Thing, I found this question perplexing. I pondered it. What is the one thing I should do? That one question launched dozens of others in my mind.

• What do you mean one thing? There are dozens of things on my to-do list and they are all important. How can I pick just one?

• The one thing according to whom? My boss (or client), spouse, kids, parents, etc.?

• One thing? Oh yeah, win the lottery! (You do know that creates more challenges than it solves, right?)

I pondered. Made lists of possible ONE things. Pondered some more. Then I got annoyed and downright frustrated. So I wrote it on a card and posted it on my desk.Do you ever struggle to answer that question?

Confusing Urgent and Important

Ever heard of the tyranny of the urgent. If you don’t know it by name, let me assure you, you know it by experience. While Stephen Covey may be the person most often associated with the phrase, it actually originated in a little book by the same name, Tyranny of the Urgent written in 1984 by Charles E. Hummel.Hummel, and later Covey (and Roger and Rebecca Merrill to be technically accurate) noted that there are always urgent things clamoring for your attention. Here’s how Hummel summarized it,[Tweet "Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important"]It can be extremely difficult to sort out the important from the urgent.Returning to your answer to the opening question, What’s most important now? Was your answer truly addressing what’s most important now, or what’s most urgent in this moment? Your answer to that question may be dramatically different an hour from now and might even be completely different tomorrow.There is a difference between urgent things and important things. A huge difference. But most of us are caught in the tyranny trap.I now realize the tyranny of the urgent actually filtered the way I read, heard, and interpreted the focusing question. You see, I changed the can to a should and it made all the difference in the world.Perhaps, I am the only person in the whole world who ever changed the can to a should and by so doing, redirected the question to focus on what’s urgent rather than what’s important.You see, I was using the question as a filtering question — out of all of the things on my to-do list, what’s most urgent now? But that’s not the question.It was only as I revisited the content from The ONE Thing earlier this year, that I saw it in a different light.I noticed that Gary and Jay labeled it a focusing question. The question actually asks what’s the ONE thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary. Hmm.[Tweet "What if the ONE thing that could change everything is not even on your to-do list?"]

My Discovery

It was through an exercise of reverse-engineering the future that allowed me to discover the ONE thing I can do. Gary and Jay call it planning to the now. Identify your most important someday goal. Say it’s 5 - 10 years in the future.Then back it up. If that’s where you want to be in five years, then where will you be in three years? Back it up some more, in one year? In six months, in three months, in one month? And then reversed engineer it all the way back to today and right now. It’s like lining up the dominoes that lead to your future.What’s the first domino in the chain? And what can you do right now that makes the rest of the dominoes fall faster? That’s one way to identify your ONE thing. Here’s how Gary and Jay depict the power of your ONE Thing**.Remember, it’s not what should you do to get things off of your to-do list. But what can you do that makes everything else easier or even unnecessary.It took me quite a while to finally figure out my answer to that question. Forget finding the perfect answer. If you’re a perfectionist or recovering perfectionist you can endlessly over-think and over-analyze this.[Tweet "Aim for progress, not perfection!"]The ONE thing I have committed to doing is writing — every single day. Right now I’m in a 6-week blogging blitz and invite you to come along. You can find out more here.What about you? Have you reverse-engineered your future to help you identify the ONE Thing that will make everything else easier or even unnecessary? If not, why not give it a try? You just might find the clarity you seek.

Calls to Action:

• Who do you know that would benefit from reading this post? Please pass it on!
• Join the new Living Your WHY Facebook Group created just for you and people like you to explore topics like this.
• Please schedule a Quick Connect Call so we can get connected or reconnected. These are limited in number based on my availability.
• Provide your name and email address so you can be invited to the Facebook Live chat exploring how you can take action towards your most important goals.

[convertkit form=4868835]Please keep me posted on your progress by leaving a comment below.** The Living a Domino Run is Figure 25 from the book The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, Bard Press 2013. www.the1thing.com. It is shared with permission.