I started reading an amazing book today, The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter, by Juanita Brown. Within only a few pages I came across this quote:
It’s never enough just to tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it in a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people’s heads, you need to help them grind a new set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way. (John Seely Brown, Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation)
I’ve just finished the nearly year-long development of a conference with an amazing team of people at Mars Hill Graduate School called The Leadership Crucible. It’s all about this! We created an experience for people so that they could learn about leadership with “power and possibility” rather than just “pouring knowledge into people’s heads.” And this before I’d ever read this quote!
It was amazing to see this really work – to watch people experience something in others and themselves that was so far beyond what we could have possibly taught, told, lectured, or displayed.
And now I reflect again on Jesus. Isn’t this what he was all about? He knew that there was plenty of knowledge being poured into people through the religion of the day, not to mention through many other venues. Everything about him was experience. Everything about him was evoking. And in the midst, people learned…we continue to learn. What if we stopped being so concerned about the specifics of what we teach and preach and instead were just really passionate about the experience of each and every day – with an attitude of learning from every encounter, every scene, every conversation? Wouldn’t that make a difference? Wouldn’t our experiences change? And maybe even more importantly, wouldn’t others’ experiences of us change? I think so.
I’ll keep reading Ms. Brown’s book – and God’s. Indeed, I want to have conversations (and experiences) that matter. May it be so.
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