[This is Part 1 of the vision we are casting here for our Sunday Feast development. Here we cover the theoretical aspect. In the next few posts we’ll drill down into the specifics of what we are doing here.]

If you were to ask all the people at the Sunday Feast what “the next step” was, the next step to take beyond the Sunday Feast if they wanted to get more involved, a large number of them would simply admit that they didn’t know.

Of those who professed to be in the know, you would doubtless find a number of different ideas about that next step, each of them presently impractical for most of those people, who obviously haven’t taken it yet.

If you were to ask the devotees who preach at the Sunday Feast, you would probably encounter a similar situation of lacking or mixed understandings.

The problem arises from lack of a clear strategic focus. (On the other hand, if everyone does know, but there’s still no movement then your strategic focus needs adjusting). Here’s what to do about it.

Step One: Make a strategy. Work out what the next step is. It has to be easy and strategic. In other words it has to be possible and practical for the majority of the people coming to the program, preferably for close to 100%, and it has to carry them along in a process of guided steps that take them to where you want them to be.

Get people with strategic capability to do this. Anyone can make a plan - but it takes a person with actual strategic capability to make one that will work. Use people with a track record for results where possible. A mix of propensity and experience is the best. Otherwise if you have no one else, get someone with the capability to learn on the job.

Step Two: Clarify the win. Make sure that everyone in the organization knows what a touchdown looks like. This way all your players will work together to get the ball over the same goal line, rather than running around according to where they think the goal line is. You can have a great team of relational preachers, but if you don’t make it clear to the team where the goal line is, they will all decide for themselves, and go for that. Result: Chaos.

Step Three: Make your easy and strategic step obvious. Communicate it at every opportunity through every medium and eliminate all other messages. Don’t compete with yourself. Less is More. Tell them what they need to know to go to the next step, and nothing else! Anything that doesn’t contribute to the next step is off point.

OK, I’m about to go back to the temple to give the Bhagavatam class. Here are a few lessons from one of my past lives:

Complementary team building: As the general of an invading army (ENTJ) travel with capable administrators (ESTJ). If you do not concern yourself with installing strong occupational governments you will soon find yourself fighting a war on two fronts when the conquered territories behind you rise up in revolt.

Lesson: Make sure that the programs that you start are solid and self-sustaining (including recruiting and reproducing staff) before moving on to the next one. Unsustainable expansion will kill you every time.

Dealing with ENTJs: Receive them along with their honour guard in the capital city in a parade and royal review with all the assembled citizenry raining flowers on them. Fete the troops outside the city walls with a huge festival. Immediately after the conclusion of the parade whisk the general to an emergency meeting where a particularly nasty problem facing the kingdom is revealed - a threatening kingdom that must be conquered, a rebellious region that must be subdued. Wish him God speed and good luck.

If you don’t do this it is only a matter of time before you will find yourself facing a revolution…

Today’s podcast is a conversation with Tri Yuga on Loft preaching, team-building, and personality types. This is the longest podcast yet at 25 minutes. It’s a 17MB download, which is nothing for all you broadband junkies out there. Apologies to all our third world readers with dial up.

Here are links to the resources mentioned in the podcast:

1. Tri Yuga’s summary of the 4 main Keirsey personality types.
2. Overview of the 16 Keirsey personality profiles.
3. Simple questionnaire to determine your personality type.
4. Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates.

Yeah baby, harinam rocked! Jiv Jago was there taking some photos, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some and put them up.

I heard back from Namahatta.org’s web crew today. The RSS feed for the site is here. I’ve added it in to ISKCON News.Net

The main thing about Harinam is that it should be sweet and that people should become happy hearing and seeing it.

I share your concern for the presentation of the harinam. I have gone out every week since I got here, with only a few exceptions, and have built up a relationship with the regulars - the cafe staff, the doormen, the turkish kebab guy, the people in the food court, the people coming home from work. We need to be very careful to cultivate long term relationships with them all, such that they become enlivened seeing us and look forward to the harinam.

This amplification will not be too loud for people. It is just a little bit to make it easier for the kirtan party to hear, and for the singer to chant without blowing out their voice.

I think the main thing we need to be careful of are the cartals, they are often played too loudly, so much so that you can’t hear the chanting, and they are overpowering for the public.

We just need to be two things:

Sensible and Sensitive

Then there will be minimal problems. Amplification in itself is not a problem. As you mentioned, Braja has his little amp. Those Christian boys had their stereo system at King George square for a while. There is even a guy outside Borders singing with an entire P.A. lately!

The main thing is to keep the whole harinam party attractive to the public. As soon as the focus goes off making it attractive to the public and starts going onto some other consideration that the devotees might have - like making it fun for the devotees in a way that ignores the sensibilities of the public, then it’s no longer preaching, it’s sense gratification, and it will be a problem.

in service,
Sita-pati das

This weekend we have scheduled a meeting to discuss the development of “the study guide”.

The study guide discussion is driven by two things:

1. We need a structured study program to help drive knowledge acquisition and values formation by our staff.

   At the moment the program is simply self-motivated and self-monitored reading.

   Some people work better when they have a structure to follow, with clearly defined expectations and goals. Without these they tend to drift, or not perform at their optimum.

   We need guidance on how to structure our time. We need to decide how much time needs to be dedicated to studying, and we need to factor that into our planning.

   Finally, with measurables we can help people in setting and achieving goals.

2. We need a structured program to drive knowledge acquisition and values formation in the expanded community space as we create it.

   At the moment because our team is small it is relatively easily synchronized. As it expands further and further the culture will dilute. We need to formalize and package processes in order to be able to reproduce in a predictable manner.

We also want to make it values-based, with a clearly defined purpose. There are many people who have a whole lot of disconnected facts and figures in their head, but are lacking a clear purpose in their life.

We have already developed one study guide for The Science of Self Realization.

A important factor in designing the study guide is how it is integrated into life. The study guide above was designed as part of an “Each One Teaches One” program, where one person mentors another. At present this has been pretty impractical. We may design the next one to be used in a closed small group that runs for a predetermined period in order to complete the study.

With individual mentoring it’s hard to get enough time, because you also need time for small group and large group meetings, which means you’re at three meetings per week. If we integrate the study guide with a small group experience we can reduce that number. A small group environment can also impart more momentum than a one-on-one arrangement.

Alison is leading this project, so I will meet with her on Saturday to discuss this.

Tri Yuga (website here) has now joined the blogging legion, and his feed has been added to ISKCON News.Net.

The vision of ISKCON News.Net is “More nectar than you can drink”. A person sitting in front of their computer screen reading nonstop will not be able to process all the nectar coming out. At that point we will use ontologies and expert systems to filter and organize the data to allow people to process it and get what they need.

On the Covey Time Management course the other day there were some statistics on a short video that was playing as everyone left. One of them was: “Every day 240 million words of information are produced. It would take a person one month reading continuously to read all of that, and by the time she had finished she would be 5.5 years behind.”

Candidasa wrote to the ezine list the other day about some guy’s idea to record all presentations given everywhere in the world, and archive them on the Internet. Heh heh heh. In the Covey course there was another stat: 80% of the information you are saving will never be looked at again.

What’s that saying? “Less is More.”

I can imagine a scene in a movie:

“Some say that Less is More. Well I say…”

(produces huge gun)

“That More is More.”

Props to Tri Yuga. More is More.

I got a new accordion yesterday. Ramananda dropped off his Baile. It’s more like the one I had in New Zealand. It’s bigger than the Hohner and louder. I’ll retire the Hohner for travelling and use the Baile in Brisbane. The Baile is a chinese made accordion. The Hohner is German.

The Baile seems pretty solid. It has more keys than the Hohner. This afternoon we will also be utilizing the new amp and headset mike on Harinam.

I just stumbled across ISKCON’s Congregational Ministry Bhakti Vrksa weblog, run by Kaunteya das.

I’m pleased to see that. I wrote to Kaunteya to request something like this last year:

What I really have a burning desire for now prabhu is get a weblog together for the Bhaktivriksha community. One of the big problems is that there just isn’t enough feedback between different preachers to learn quickly from each other’s experiences. We are all struggling in our own little corners of the world with no development lists or websites where we can share what we are doing and what we are finding out, where we can share resources, swap techniques and technologies, reuse resources etc…

We have CPJ, but not many devotees get it, and it doesn’t come out regularly enough. There is still no 2nd edition BV Manual with the success and failure stories.

The blog is up now. I’ll generate content for it, but I think we can generate even more momentum, faster, with a distributed system. I kind of had this realization late last year when I wrote the following to Kaunteya:

My idea is to have an online website that is an aggregated blog that is dedicated to Network-centric Preaching, with blog feeds from Preachers such as yourself and others who are fired up and doing things. This way we get inspired, get ideas, can direct newcomers to a resource where they can tune in to our group think.

That website is ISKCON News.Net. The mission of that website is “to generate forward momentum in fulfilling the 7 purposes of ISKCON”. I am adding the Bhakti Vrksa web log feed.

Hey, it was the first birthday of the Virtual Pen two days ago, on the 26th of July.

We’ve stayed pretty true to our mission, expressed in the first post:

Welcome to my new blog. I will keep this blog up to date with information about what I am doing, for those who are interested in that, and also what I am thinking, for those who are interested in that.

Word. All birthday presents graciously accepted.

I wrote this article over a year ago, and I’ve read a lot and had a lot of further realizations since then. Especially I read “Creating Community - 5 steps to creating a small group culture“, by Andy Stanley, which introduced me to “closed” and “open” group models. This article has a questionable layout, but a great summary of some of the information in that book. The Bhakti Vrksa model given in the manual is an “open group” model, which leads to the schizophrenic weekly meeting that I identified in my article.

I personally feel that the following, which appears late in the article, is one of the crucial points in the whole equation:

The Bhakti-vrksa system, although it would like to pass itself off as something characteristically ISKCON through it’s name, appears to be an attempt at a straight rip from Christian congregational development innovations. Nothing wrong with copying a good thing; however, in the attempt to position it as something unique to ISKCON, BV 1.0 may have overlooked unique characteristics of ISKCON that make it different and distinct from Christianity, and necessitate modifications in the architecture. For one thing, Christianity is a middle Eastern religion that was made European, and has shown itself open to further cultural adaptation or abstraction. Like it or not, Krishna Consciousness is still very much culturally Indian. This introduces complications. Do we find BV 1.0 to be more successful in regions where people are more culturally predisposed to Krishna Conscious (Indian) culture, or where there are less cultural barriers for them to cross? Without proper reporting it is hard to say.

As Hamsa Avatara points out in his comment, Bhakti Vrksa preaching is going well in India and in the Middle East amongst ex-pat Indian populations (refer to the book Free to Preach by Prema-padmini devi dasi). From what I can see (and as I mention above, no-one can quote the statistics), it is not doing well in the West. The target set in the Bhakti Vrksa manual in 1998 for the year of 2004 was 5 million devotees, so we could say that we’re a little behind…

I am not advocating necessarily changing the culture, I am signalling that perhaps additional bridging is necessary that is not needed or found in the Christian models. Therefore a direct rip will not be effective, except among culturally Indian populations. This seems to be the case.

Here’s what I said about this last year:

However the diagram on page (xxinsert page here) may not the best model. The diagram has cold public entering the Bhakti-vrksa group as new members. Is this practical? Is this a barrier to growth? Might it not be better for these people to pass to warm persons, and then enter the Bhakti-vrksa group? What might the mechanism for this be? The discovery mentioned above [from Larry Stockstills’ book “The Cell Church“], a development made over time from practical experience and with demonstrated results, may present a possibility.

Here’s today’s podcast on Tactical Adaptation and Time Management, which covers some further commentary inspired by the Sampradaya Sun article and by my attendance in the Franklin Covey FOCUS Time Management course yesterday.

It’s 13 minutes long and about 9MB. I recorded it as I walked to the train station, so I’m a bit out of breath at times. Tomorrow I’m going to see if Tri Yuga and I can sit down and discuss a little about his visit here, which is drawing to a close.

Here is an interesting Bhakti-vrksa resource that I found. Bhakti-vrksa is an attempt to implement networked small group preaching of Krishna Consciousness in ISKCON. I’ve not seen a raging success yet. It’s still in the early, experimental stage - the kind of stage that someone like me would be interested in….

Here’s my first podcast kicking it in the house. It’s a commentary inspired by an article on preaching that I read on Sampradaya Sun. Here’s the article, which is by Dasanudas Vanacari, well known for his flute recordings and his book on the Science of Ragas and music - Spiritual Music Manifesto.

Dasanudas’ article, and a conversation the other day with a Loft preacher in New Zealand, made me aware of some missing material from a similar article that I wrote last year, which you can view here. I recorded the podcast at the train station this morning. Make the best use of time. Today Param and I are doing the Franklin Covey FOCUS time management training course at my work, so I thought that I would get something out today via podcasting.

Enjoy!

Here’s my podcast RSS feed.

I got the RSS buttons on the left from here.

I’ve got a new site design, which comes courtesy of Justin Baeder of Radical Congruency.

My previous template rocked because it was very simple and direct. Easy to read. This new design is a little more complicated, a little more busy, but it has a few things that I really wanted:

1. Wordpress 1.5 - better spam protection, so I stop getting hundreds of bogus messages a day.
2. Amazon plugins that work, so I can easily link to books that I am reviewing
3. Bust out the comments on the front page so that you don’t have to go searching through the articles to find them

Let me know what you think of the new design. You have to read it, so your opinion is important to me.

ISKCON News.Net is running in third place behind ISKCON.com on Google at the moment.

This comes via a comment from Jahnava devi dasi.

For those interested in this sort of thing, check out also the Bhaktivedanta Leadership Newsletter.

“Dee Hock’s Trillion Dollar Vision”

Associates

Choose your associates first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity, fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent, without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaning-less; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

Employing

It is essential to employ, trust and reward those whose perspective, ability and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance and wisdom.

Compensation

Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality. As Napoleon observed, “No amount of money will induce someone to lay down their life, but they will gladly do so for a bit of yellow ribbon.”

Form and Substance

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral. Failure to distinguish clearly between the two is ruinous. Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future. Preserve substance; modify form; know the difference. Form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income.

Leadership

Invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself – your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers. Use the remainder to induce those you “work for” to understand and practice the theory. Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.

This is a great book by a deeply devoted and passionate career preacher, Bill Hybels. Bill Hybels is a man who has a deep love for people, and a heart for serving them.

The main contribution of this book, among many contributions, to me at this point, is an expansion on the four leadership aptitudes explained by John C. Maxwell. In this book Hybels explains no less than 10 different leadership aptitudes. These aptitudes are a combination of skills or styles, and situations. For example: one leadership aptitude is that of recovery or turnaround leadership, rescuing a crashing ministry and executing a turnaround. Another is start-up leadership, initiating a new project. When I read this section and began to look at myself, I could see that I function best in this situation.

Hybels also has deep insights into what it takes to be a leader over the long haul, discussing his experiences, failures and realizations about doing the necessary / working within your strengths, balancing ministry and family commitments, and developing others. As one reviewer said: “Hybels writes with a confidence born of successful leadership…but is at his best when admitting his struggles and mistakes.”

I also read Hybels’ Volunteer Revolution, which I will write up later. There are many nectarean things that have come from that book that I would like to share with you.

I just did the “9 Roles of a Successful Team: Discover where you Excel” training. It’s based on the Belbin team role inventory.

Here’s what my fortune cookie says:

Yours is essentially a pioneering profile. Your best line of work is one in which you are required to explore possibilities and to take advantage of new opportunities. You have some features of the visionary. But take care you do not become isolated from others and resistant to the contributions they can make to the development of what is new.

The implications for career development are that you need to steer yourself towards areas where change is highly valued. That would provide an environment in which you could flourish. Paradoxically, the best opportunities may lie in a very conservative organisation that is now ripe for change. To take advantage of this you would have to take care on how you proceed, for otherwise your non-conformist approach could land you in trouble. Do not try too many new things at once. Some people in well-structured jobs might feel threatened when you are around. Therefore it is important that you should not allow your innovative tendencies and interests to unsettle others.

You must learn to manage your own career and self-development in a well thought out way. You are likely to contribute most during the initial stages of a project. Thereafter your interest may fade rapidly and you could find subsequent consolidation tedious. For you above all others, it is best to establish the moment of exit. Do not outstay your welcome. Make sure that you appreciate the work of others in putting into effect what has been started and then move on in search of greener pastures.

Your operating style is that of one who always seeks to be on the cutting edge of change. So remember this is a hazardous spot to occupy. You will need to respect others of more traditional habits if you are to win respect yourself.

Heh heh heh - “I wonder how accurate it is…”

Management is about perceiving the external needs and the internal resources (the people you are working with), and matching them up to come up with a response to the present situation.

Leadership is about seeing the futuring and positioning the organization through change to be able to meet that future head on.

- from a conversation today with another Loft preacher.