Barnabas File

“Creativity is the power that generates innovation.”    At the beginning of The Creative Mindset , authors Jeff and Staney DeGraff define the interplay between these two processes.  Creativity is coming up with a great idea; innovation is making it happen.  Both are necessary to impact our world.  In this book, the emphasis is on developing a mindset and the skills for creative thinking that will result in innovative ideas that one wishes to pursue.   Since I have taught seminary classes involving creativity and innovation for several years, I am pleased to find this “toolbox” of tools and techniques to enhance the creative process.  The authors’ process is clear and easy to grasp:   Clarify--getting the challenge right; Replicate--mimicking and reapplying ideas; Elaborate--multiplying ideas by adding new ones; Associate--connecting ideas with analogies; Translate--creating stories from ideas; Evaluate--selecting the best ideas...

As usual, I attended a satellite location of the Global Leadership Summit this year.   I heard some great speakers and will share more about them and the Summit in a subsequent post.     In this session, I want to share the books that I bought as a result of hearing several speakers and why I purchased them. The first is Never Split the Difference:  Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator and CEO of the Black Swan Group.   After serving with the Kansas City, Missouri, police department, Chris Voss joined the FBI where he moved from SWAT team member to hostage. Negotiator.  He eventually became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator.  What caught my attention in Voss’s interview was the intersection of negotiating and coaching.  He talked about actions such as being genuinely curious, asking “how” not “why” questions, using open-ended questions, and “mirrori...

"We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color." --Maya Angelou Diversity is something of a buzz word today.  Most often it refers to a racial and ethnic mix, but it can also be applied to any number of other categories.  Diversity recognizes the reality that society itself, as Angelou noted, is a tapestry. Although there may be similarities, no two people are exactly alike, not even identical twins.  We are part of a rich and variegated society. Perhaps the greatest gift that diversity provides is the opportunity to learn from others and to create a stronger society, organization, church, or product by incorporating the unique experiences and abilities that each person brings to the table. We make efforts to create diversity by reaching out to individuals who are unlike us, but inherent in any group is a thread of div...

In regard to Stephen, theologian N. T. Wright comments, “You never know, once you lay hands on people and pray for God to work through them, what new things they will get up to, or rather what new things God will do through them.” In Acts 6:8-15, the ministry of Stephen, a deacon (servant) in the church at Jerusalem, expands.  He moves from administering aid to the needy to healing and teaching.  As Wright notes, once the Spirit starts to work in a person’s life, you never know what will happen.  When Stephen saw need, he responded.  He saw the sick and, through the power of the Spirit, offered healing.  He saw spiritual ignorance and responded with teaching about the Messiah.  As he did so, he was raising the profile of the Way and the church as well as himself.  Throughout Christian history, there have been men and women like Stephen, who saw a need and responded.  They saw sickness and started hospitals.  Th...

Once or twice in a generation, a uniquely creative talent comes along in a discipline.   Steve Jobs was such a person in consumer technology.   He was able to conceive, develop, and sell products that people did not even know they needed.   Although there were personality traits in Jobs that we might not admire, we can learn a great deal about developing a creative mindset from him.  In an article in Fast Company, writer Derek Doepker identifies three prompts for us from the practices of Steve Jobs. First, pursue diverse interests.  Jobs quit college to pursue things that interested him more, such as calligraphy.  What does this have to do with computers?  According to Jobs, one of the reasons behind the development of the Apple computer was to create more beautiful typography.  Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty...