Perhaps you’ve had an experience analogous to this one:
Client: “The word ‘Blog’ sounds too alien. (Does an impression with his arms) ‘Glip glorp zoop blog, I am a martian’, if you know what I mean.”
Me: “Um, I guess I do, sure.”
Client: “There’s no humanity in it! I want people to associate our company with humanness.”
Me: “So you want to remove the blog page?”
Client: “No, keep it. But can we call it our ‘feelings and opinions space’ instead?”
Me: “Sure. The only thing is, it’s on a ‘blogspot’ subdomain.”
Client: “Just change that to a ‘feelingsandopinionsspot’, sub-dome-whatever. Easy, see? You just have to start thinking like me!”
Me: “…”
According to U.S. Army Gen. James Dubik, nothing like this would happen in the Army, not because they're not in the blogging business (they aren’t), but because officers who work together, even of different rank, education and experience, understand enough of each other’s work to collaborate effectively and creatively.
As Dave Odom suggests this week on Call & Response, the breakdown can happen when the young and newly educated are in a situation in which they’re required to oversee someone with loads more experience, much like the relationship between a young lieutenant and an experienced sergeant in the Army.
That last bit -- “Easy, see? You just have to start thinking like me!” -- gets to the heart of the issue Dave raises. Often the challenge isn’t that the young and the old have a different skill set. That may be part of the issue (as it is with the web expert and client) but it’s not the whole of it. “You just have to start thinking like me.” There’s the rub. The biggest challenge to collaboration is clashing imaginations.
Which is why understanding the mindset of an officer two ranks above and below you is so important in the Army. You don’t have to do their work or have their skills, but you need to be aware of what they’re facing and what they’re responsible for. You don’t need to know how to set up a subdomain, but you do need to know your team member can’t simply change one.
The question seems to be how we make our denominations, churches and organizations into learning environments so we know enough of each other’s work to allow creativity and collaboration to happen. Dubik has some good ideas about that.
Benjamin McNutt is the editor of Call & Response. You can follow him on Twitter at @benjaminmcnutt.
