Catalyst West Labs Recap

So today began Catalyst West 2010 with their Labs day. I didn't get the chance to do this last year, so decided to do it this time and had a great experience. Just hard to decide what 3 sessions out of 18 to attend as they all sound excellent. So here's my attempt at a recap of the sessions that I attended today.

Session 1
Jud Wilhite, Mike Foster, Tony Wood
People of the Second Chance

Jud and Mike have started a movement called People of the Second Chance: Radical Grace in Life and Leadership. People fail and have crisis but how do we act towards these people whether it be in the church or outside the church. Jud and Mike propose a radical approach that is definitely not common but I believe has merit. It's all about giving people a second chance, a chance to trun from their mistakes, learn from them, grow in light of them, and hopefully help others because of they've been through it. They propose this three-step process when it comes to dealing with failure and crisis:

1. Own it
2. Ammend it
3. Reinvent it

You must begin with owning your mistakes, and owning them 100%. You can't hold anything back, even if there's something so minute that you don't think matters, it's what they call a ticking time bomb and it must be dealt with also. Restoration can not even begin to happen if you haven't owned it. They said this is the step that people are most afraid of, and rightly so, because it requires transparency and complete telling of the truth. Not something that's easy to do if you've made a huge mistake that has massive ramifications.

The second step is to amend. Amending of relationships, positions of leadership, jobs, etc. They mentioned that the traditional route is to just fire the person involved, but instead a position of offering radical grace to these people may be a better route, because if you take away the one thing that gives them life, they may never recover. In the context of being leaders, they said that we should always be seeking out the prodigals and bringing them back and standing by them as they go through the whole process and past that as they go through out the whole journey of amending.

Lastly is reinventing. Tony presented this part and took it from a personal side of what happened when he and his wife went through this type of experience and what it came down to is that our lives need to be reinvented in Christ. He said that you can't reinvent something if you haven't been reinvented first. He read Proverbs 28.13 which says,

"Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy."

He also said that we as leaders must deal with this also, we need to be changed by Christ, we need to forsake or shed off those things that are still concealing us, and be honest before we can authentically take this message to others.

Session 2
Michael Hyatt
Platform: What Is Is, Why You Need It, and How You Build It

Michael brought us a message aspects of Web 2.0 and how to be an influence in this technological age we are in. We as leaders can use this to our advantage to influence those that we interact with social media mediums. He began by saying that "Good leaders influence their audience, but great leaders influence the world." We have the potential to influence the world, but first we need a platform. We grow our platform with these three things:

1. Establishing a command center
2. Setting up embassies
3. Developing an intelligence agency

The command center is our home-base where we put our content, like a blog. Content is the most important thing to have. You could have a great looking page, but if you don't have anything to say, people will not look at it. The embassies are places that help give you a presence, get you out there. These are your social media sites like twitter and facebook. The intelligence agencies are what help you take part in the conversations that are happening through your platform. Programs like google alerts. He said social media is about gathering like minded people. In the right context, blogging can actually become a dialogue instead of just a monologue. He also said that in his life he has lots of real-life relationships happen because they were first connected through social media. He ended by saying that without a passion and a vision, technology is useless, but with a passion and a vision, technology is priceless. (you can find Michael's slides from his presentation at his blog at michaelhyatt.com)

Session 3
Scott Belsky
Making Ideas Happen

Scott is all about helping others in the creative world make their ideas happen. He said that most ideas never happen because we constantly have this struggle and the odds are against us because:

- we love to keep coming up with ideas
- we have a lack of organization
- we have a lack of accountability
- we have a passion or emotion that is interfering with judgment
- we have a lack of leadership capability
- we have disorganized and isolated networks
- we have a lack of feedback exchange

He said that making ideas happen = creativity/ideas + organization/execution + communal forces + leadership capabilities. So much great stuff in here and not sure how to post it all, but in regards to organization, it's so important. He says that creativity x organization = impact. We also need to be able to prioritize our projects. We also need to be able to share our ideas/projects because along with getting feedback it also produces accountability. We as leaders need to share ownership and allow other to speak first when gathering ideas. We want to develop others through appreciation of their ideas.

Closing Session
John Ortberg
The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God's Best Version of You

John says we live in this gap between the person we are and the way that God wants us to be. Only God can see the full version of who we are. He talked about spiritual transformation, different from spiritual formation because our spirits can be formed by just about anything, good or bad and not always things of God. Transformation can only come through the gospel and grace. Grace is not just the offer of free forgiveness for sins, but also the power of God for Him to do within us what we cannot do ourselves. This growth that He is doing in us is hand-crafted, it's not mass produced. His plan for me won't look the same as the next persons. Most importantly, is that to live in this grace we must first surrender our lives to him.

It was a great day at Catalyst, and hopefully you found something in here, if you made it all the way through this post, that you can take with you, even though you aren't physically here at the Catalyst Conference. Look for most posts over the next two days as the main conference starts.