How To Make Your Next Big Idea A Success
POST IN 10 SECONDS:
If you want to successfully launch an idea, remember:
-> Mechanics (Do it right)
-> Consistency (Do it repeatedly)
-> Intensity (Do it bigger)
Ever wonder why some of your best ideas flop?
The pattern is often the same:
You come up with an idea that gets your whole team and board excited
You are certain this new ministry/outreach/event/discipleship model will be a hit
Tons of energy and resources are poured into preparing to launch the new thing.
Then the big launch happens and…
(insert the sound of a balloon deflating)
Your idea eventually ends up in the church storage closet next to all the other “big ideas” that have came and went in your church’s history.
So why do good ideas with great launch strategies fail so often?
Because in our excitement to go big with our ideas, we often skip some essential steps in making our ideas a success.
I’m a big Cross-Fit guy. A core fitness tenet that our coaches always teach us is that mechanics and consistency have to come before intensity.
In other words, before you can full-send a workout, you need to master the mechanics of every movement and practice that movement consistently enough for your body to build up the underlying strength it needs to sustain that movement when you start trying to go faster or lift heavier.
If you don’t, you’ll likely injure yourself.
So the formula is:
-> Mechanics (Do it right)
-> Consistency (Do it repeatedly)
-> Intensity (Do it bigger)
I’m a big believer in piloting an idea before ever launching it more broadly.
When a church I worked for wanted to take a more “gifts based” approach to leadership development, we started by only leading our pastors and a handful of key leaders through the 6 month process.
This gave us the chance to nail down our mechanics and make sure our development process was solid.
It also meant that by the time we started to roll it out in our community, we had already been consistently using that language and process with our team for over half a year, so it was becoming a part of our identity.
I recently worked with the leadership team of a rapidly growing church hoping to launch 4 new locations in the next 10 years. It’s an exciting vision but we talked about how if they want those new locations to be successful, they'll need to start with mechanics and consistency.
Mechanics: They are reviewing everything they are doing at their current location to identify areas of dysfunction and address those.
Consistency: Then they are going to spend time consistently running their improved systems to build up organizational muscle memory so that this new process becomes their default way of operating.
Intensity: Only when those pieces are in place will they hit go on launching those new locations
I’m as guilty of any one of wanting to rush a good idea out into the world. It’s just so exciting!
But if you want your idea to be a success, remember:
Mechanics -> Consistency -> Intensity
It’s the surest way to keep your next great idea from becoming a flop.
