by Eddie Pipkin

Image by AstralEmber from Pixabay

It’s the 20th anniversary (more or less) of the invention of the Like button, the thumbs-up graphic used by Facebook and other social media platforms to show approval of a post.  It’s hard to imagine a world in which we lived without an instantaneous, one-tap shorthand for our enthusiasm and endorsement of a person, idea, or event.  (Of course, that means it’s also the anniversary of the Unlike button, by which we can instantly show our disapproval and disdain.)  Such a powerful, popular tool was immediately implemented when first conceived, right? No, it was not.  It took years for the idea to come fully to fruition, and in that truth is a lesson for ministry leaders: even the most successful ideas sometimes take a while to germinate.

There’s a new book about the creation and evolution of the Like button from Matt Reeves and Bob Goodson (who first sketched a crude thumbs-up concept for Yelp back in May of 2005 that harkened all the way back to the days of the gladiators).  The restaurant review site did not seize the moment.  As reported for the Associated Press by Michael Liedkte, It took a while for the simple idea to find its mojo:

Although Facebook is the main reason the Like button became so ubiquitous, the company didn’t invent it and almost discarded it as drivel. It took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the symbol on its service on Feb. 9, 2009 — five years after the social network’s creation in a Harvard University dorm room.

As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity, but it wasn’t the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it.

“Innovation is often social, and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this to happen because it has a culture of meetups, although it’s less so now,” Reeves said. “Everyone was getting together to talk about what they were working on at that time, and it turned out a lot of them were working on the same stuff.”

Innovation is often social.  That’s a key concept to keep in mind as we build teams and facilitate their work together.  It’s not just the lightning bolt moment of a new idea landing in one brain that inspires culture-changing developments.  It’s the exchange of ideas, with people egging one another on, poking holes in concepts and then suggesting changes, improvements, and variations.  It’s collaboration and fearless experimentation.

We should do everything in our power to encourage the exchange of ideas and exploration of concepts and strategies.

Sometimes the best ideas take a while to bubble up to the feasibility stage:

  • Timing.

An idea may be ahead of its time or just not right for its time.  What won’t work in one season may be the perfect plan in another season.  (Of course, there is also the thing where churches try to fall back on ideas that worked in another time that is never coming back – we have to be honest about that, too.)

  • Resources.

An idea may be epic and exciting in conception, but we may not be equipped to commit resources to it.  We can table that idea until we are flush with resources, or we might try to recruit the resources to support the idea if it gets enough people excited or will bring enough value to our organization.

  • Personnel.

An idea might be great on its face, but we may be lacking the right fit for the human talent we would need to make it happen.  This kind of conundrum shows up most often for worship leaders when they have a concept for changing music ministry, but they don’t have the right personnel in place to make that concept happen.  If we believe in the idea strongly enough, we can work to recruit the right people for the project, and we can wait to launch the project until we have the right people in place, and this is true whether we need key paid staff or key volunteers.

  • Refinement.

An idea may come out of the oven before it’s fully cooked!  The concept may be intriguing, but the person bringing it forward may need some help thinking through the details.  We can help them get connected to people with more experience who can help them parse the possibilities and consider the tripwires.  Then they can come back with a more fully formed formula for success.

  • Boulders.

Sometimes we can have the right idea, adequate resources, the perfect personnel, and the right timing, but there can still be one seemingly immovable obstacle standing in the way.  The exact consistency of the bothersome obstruction will vary from local context to local context, but when these impediments arise, it takes a focused effort to remove them.

If we launch an idea when any of the above conditions are not auspicious, the idea can fizzle or fail.  Often this marks the premature death of an idea.  That idea is buried in an early grave, and no one wants to resurrect it even if the conditions change.  It is tainted.  It would be far better to think about a fizzled or flailing idea as shelved for now, but available for future use as conditions change.  By writing ideas off forever because they are not instantly and resoundingly successful, we can give up on great ideas that might eventually reveal their genius.  Let’s not be afraid to revisit concepts, as long as we’re clear that we can identify what has changed that might make them work this time around.

Also, it’s worth noting that it’s not always the head guru in the room who comes up with the most fruitful idea, so it’s worth paying attention to where an idea comes from.  We work in ministry in environments in which considerable deference is paid to the words and whims of lead pastors, for instance, and they surely have wisdom to share and visions to embrace, but their ideas should be subject to the same analysis and evaluation as anybody’s ideas – if we have good metrics for predicting the success of an idea, ideas should function within that meritocracy.  It’s the same criteria that we hold a “nobody’s” ideas to.  It’s the idea that matters, not its source.  So, we should neither overly weight an idea from an insider or casually dismiss an idea because it comes from an unexpected source.  Ideas can defend themselves given a level playing field and adding conditional vectors as noted in the bullet points above.

Of course, we would be ignoring the dark underbelly of this story if we didn’t acknowledge that that many social scientists bemoan the advent of the Like button as the real beginning of our technologically supercharged dopamine addiction.  Just because an idea has some great aspects does not mean it does not also have negative consequences or side effects.  Alas, this is also true in ministry.  We should always be careful to monitor the changes we implement, even when they are greeted by a groundswell of support and enthusiasm.  If someone we respect or someone with intimate exposure to a new development is communicating warnings to us that there are problems associated with the implementation of a new idea, we should take those seriously.

How do you and your team do about giving ideas a chance to cook on the slow burner?  Do you abandon ideas willy-nilly if they aren’t instantly implemented, or do your provide a means for discarded ideas to be revisited and reborn?  Do you take the ideas of all people seriously, or do you favor the thoughts of a select few?  Share your stories and successes and the surprises born of patience in the comments section below.