How do you lead people who invest huge chunks of energy, emotion and passion coaching their own Fantasy Football Team and contributing their ideas, notions, and opinions about nearly everything to nearly everyone?
They blog, post status updates, make & post their own goofy 'home' videos and they opine about nearly everything in their universe in some manner for the whole world to view from cell phones, laptops, pdas, voicemail, chatrooms, text messages, forums and they call their tribe to order around a new 'cause' on Facebook on a regular basis.
These are the 'collaboratives' -- a tribe of people who are tech saavy, well-educated and love to share their strong feelings with the world -- they insist on being heard, and seen, and read, and tweeted and twittered....they wanna play, too!
What do you do with collabortives?
Well......you let em play, too.
You invite into the virtual sand box and give em places to contribute, sound off, and opine. In worship experiences you let them work with their hands and their hearts by calling them into Service Worship Experiences. You connect them in learning cohorts and small group gatherings where they participate and collaborate. They shift from consuming experiences to mashing them up on the fly with a few good friends.
You let them text in their ideas during a worship experience and then you send them a follow up series of text messages related to the message in the days after the gathering. You let them collaborate with you on creating the worship experience and give you ideas on how the central scripture impacts them and then you allow them to send in ideas for videos that you help them produce featuring you know who....them!
That's what I'm learning these days as the Point Leader of Phos Hilaron Church -- how to expand the virtual sand box and let a whole lot of people participate in the Grande Theological Discussion! (if none of this makes sense to you then chances are you are either not paying attention, or are part of an organization with an average age way over 50)
The prompt for this post came from reading our local weather man's blog about the snow / ice storm brewing in the Louisville area today. What I noticed was that over 29,000 people connected with him last evening on a live chat. That's a trend that's only gonna get stronger. Gone are the days when the Weather Man was the lone authority -- in are the days when everyone has an opinion, maybe has taken Meterology 101 so considers themselves somewhat of an expert, and they wanna play, too! When the weather man is finding ways to connect and 'play' with the collaboratives, I think I should, too!!
And, so I will. Wanna play?
I'd love to hear how you are letting the 'I wanna play, too' generation, the Collaboratives, into the sandbox in your business, club, or church.
Jeff Fuson
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