How do people like Steve Jobs , Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell keep coming up with fresh ideas. Harvard Business School did the research and found their five secrets of innovation here.

Obviously we don’t want to be theological innovators. However, I could not help thinking that some of these “secrets” could help freshen up our preaching.

1. Associating

“What the innovators have in common is that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations that nobody else has quite put together before.”

The preacher should try to connect texts and doctrines with real life situations and applications in ways that are not always so predictable.

2. Questioning

These behaviors are powerfully enhanced by a capacity to ask provocative, challenging questions of the world around them.”

“To improve your questioning skills, Gregersen recommends identifying a problem and writing nothing but questions about it for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. He says that over that period the questions will change, and so will your understanding and approach to the problem.”

The best exegetes of Scripture are those who ask the best questions of Scripture. We can learn better interrogation techniques by forcing ourselves to ask better questions.

3. Observing

“The way they act is to observe actively, like an anthropologist, and they talk to incredibly diverse people with different world views, who can challenge their assumptions.”

“To build your observation skills, identify a business, customer, supplier, or client, and spend a day or two watching how they work so you can better understand the issues they have to deal with.”

Preachers should learn to observe the world and interact with people outside their normal range of contact. Is it possible to spend a day with someone in your congregation as they go about their working life?

4. Experimenting

“For them, everything is to be experimented upon — for example, if they walk into a bookstore and they’re used to reading history they might try psychology.”

Why not pick a subject area – theological or non-theological – that you have not read much on and make it a focus for the next year.

One of the most encouraging statistics in this study for us plodders who are not blessed with fertile imaginations is that “creativity is close to 80% learned and acquired. We found that it’s like exercising muscles – if you engage in the actions you build the skills.”

Hope that might help some of us preachers and writers who may be stuck in a bit of a rut of sameness and staleness.

Jim Collins wrote the bestseller business book From Good to Great. Here is how he divides his time:

Scrawled on a whiteboard in the conference room of Collins’ Boulder, Colorado office is a simple formula:

Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%

Collins decided years ago that a “big goal” in his life was to spend half of his working time on creative work — thinking, researching, and writing — a third of his time on teaching, and then cram everything else into the last 20%. The numbers on the whiteboard are a snapshot of his current distribution. (He tracks his time with a stop watch and monitors his progress in a spreadsheet.)

You can read the rest of the article here. Lessons for Pastors?

Read how to get the most done in the least time.

I read this article on “The Only way to be amazingly good at anything.” The simple and unwelcome answer – lots of time and lots of doing.

Unfortunately the article has a crude reference in the last line, so if you want to be spared that then here is the rest of the article:

Very often you’ll see blog posts or books teaching you to “master” a skill in only 10 days, or 3 days … in fact, it used to be 30 days but the time frame to master something seems to be shrinking rapidly.

I’ve even seen tutorials claiming to teach a skill in just a few hours. Pretty soon we’ll be demanding to know how to do something in seconds.

Instant mastery of skills and knowledge! Hey presto!

Unfortunately, the reality is something a little less magical. Or maybe that’s a fortunate thing.

There’s only one way to become good at something:

1. First, you must learn it by reading or listening to others who know how to do it, but most especially by doing.
2. Then do some more. At this point, you’ll start to understand it, but you’ll suck. This stage could take months.
3. Do some more. After a couple of years, you’ll get good at it.
4. Do some more. If you learn from mistakes, and aren’t afraid to make mistakes in the first place, you’ll go from good to great.

It takes anywhere from 6-10 years to get great at something, depending on how often and how much you do it. Some estimate that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but I think it varies from person to person and depends on the skill and other factors.

Want to be a great writer? It’s possible to be great within a few years, if you have the God-given talent of Fitzgerald or Shakespeare, but most of us toil for over a decade and are still trying to get better. We’re still learning, to this day, and if we look back on our first few years of writing — of any kind — we’ll tell you we sucked (for the most part) back then.

Want to be a great blogger? Same deal. I’ve been doing it for almost three years, and I’m still only competent. Gruber’s been doing it for, like, 7 years and he’s still only … well, he’s pretty great by now. You have to do it, make mistakes, learn, really begin to understand it, and someday, if you stick with it, you’ll be great.

There’s no one who is great at his profession who hasn’t been doing it for at least 6 years — no designer, no programmer, no carpenter, no architect, no surgeon, no teacher, no musician, no artist … you get the point. I dare you to name one. Most have been doing it for over a decade, and are still looking to improve.

It takes desire, it takes drive, it takes lots and lots of doing.

Thankfully, the preacher also has the resources of the Holy Spirit.

This article seems to jive with my own experience.

Thanks to Tim Challies for this productivity tool. I’ll be getting it today!