By: Jennifer Eckert on February 14, 2024
In her book, Leader-Smithing, author Eve Poole uses quirky wit and humor to put a new spin on the idea of leadership as a craft to build muscle memory or templates [1] for how to handle things through real-time on-the-job training. While the topic of leadership is non-novel, Poole labels it a movement bearing responsibility…
By: Graham English on February 14, 2024
“Leadersmithing” by Eve Poole follows a refreshingly practical approach to leader development. I didn’t grow up in the church. I became a follower of Jesus when I was 19. After sensing a call to ministry a few years later my wife, Wendy, and I moved our family from Vancouver to Regina to attend Bible…
By: Adam Cheney on February 14, 2024
Ca. Richard Smith is a no-nonsense kind of fire captain. He is tough but fair. The kind of fire captain who will take his crew out at 2am to drill if there was some sort of mishap on a 911 call earlier that day. His crew was straightlaced, polished and always striving to be the…
By: Debbie Owen on February 14, 2024
My violin teacher threw a pencil at me. I grabbed it in mid-air. “Nope. You caught it. Try to catch it.” I was confused. “But I did catch it,” I protested. “I want you to TRY to catch it,” she repeated. She threw the pencil at me again. It twisted through the air as it…
By: Pam Lau on February 13, 2024
“The Tendency to avoid problems is the primary basis of all human illness.”[1] M. Scott Peck I started this doctoral program with many questions. One particular question on my mind was, what, if anything, about the way I lead with my voice today needs to change for me to be my most vulnerable, courageous self…
By: Glyn Barrett on February 13, 2024
I spent much longer reading Leadersmithing by Eve Poole than I had initially planned. Not that I was not intrigued by the book’s title, but that my time commitments were severely restricted due to travel, sermon preparation, leadership teaching sessions, and Conference attendance. However, once I began my elementary and inspectional reading, I had to…
By: Kally Elliott on February 12, 2024
In their book, Exploring Wicked Problems, What they Are and Why They Are Important, Joseph Bentley and Michael Toth explain the difference between “wicked problems,” those that are “complex, messy and unpredictable” and “tame problems,” those that have solutions and can be solved.[1] Using climate change or global warming as an example for a wicked…
By: Ryan Thorson on February 12, 2024
The older I get the more I realize how smart my parents were. So much of what they did, and didn’t do, as parents, shaped and formed me into the person I am today. While they will admit, and I have come to realize, they are not perfect, but the positive role models of love,…
By: Tim Clark on February 12, 2024
I like setting up chairs. At our church I’ll sometimes go into a room that’s being prepared and help set up the chairs. Our operations team must think I’m a little bit obsessive about how those chairs get set up for meetings, but the truth is, I just enjoy doing it (I tell them that,…
By: Jeff Styer on February 12, 2024
Dr. Eve Poole in her book Leadersmthing: Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership provides readers with a list of seventeen Critical Incidents. These are based on asking “board-level leaders: What do you now know as a leader that you wish you had known ten years ago?[1] I looked over the list to determine what areas…
By: Joel Zantingh on February 10, 2024
This is a late post, because I had a severe sinus cold and throat infection this week. So, if you want a few podcast recommendations on leadership or dementia, private message me. But I also finished a series on Netflix called “Painkillers”, exploding with insight for this week’s post [spoiler alerts]. In order to retain…
By: Noel Liemam on February 9, 2024
With regard to this week reading, “How to make the World Add up,” by Tim Harford, it is very interesting how he used those real-life stories to make his points how information can be twisted into different meanings, or to one’s advantages. I like the way he used real stories to bring out is point,…
By: Jana Dluehosh on February 9, 2024
Do you know what cancel culture is? Have you been mysteriously ghosted after a night out? Have you had a long-lost relative jump out of the woodwork and begin to attack your latest post? Well, The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott may be the book for you. Lukianoff comes…
By: Kari on February 9, 2024
I love numbers. Numbers make sense. Numbers add up. Numbers give objective data. Numbers do not lie. People on the other hand do lie. People do not always make sense nor add up. People often hide or lie about things, including numbers. These are principles I live by and found myself teaching to my employees…
By: Erica Briggs on February 8, 2024
I don’t like numbers, but not because I loathe math. For me, numbers are those random roots that pop up in the middle of a hike and trip me up. It’s not the fault of the roots, they’re simply existing as they were designed. Nevertheless, I judge and blame them for being in my…
By: Daren Jaime on February 8, 2024
As sports fans have their sights on Super Bowl Sunday in Las Vegas this weekend, one of the components that brings heightened anticipation to America’s most watched sporting event is the week preceding kickoff. Everyone, from football die-hards to non-football viewers, finds some way of getting in on the action. Watch parties, food, drinks, and…
By: Chad Warren on February 8, 2024
We got a puppy this week. A routine trip to Walmart resulted in some potato chips, toothpaste, shampoo and a 9 week old Mini GoldenDoodle named Sullivan that we purchased from a nice lady in the parking lot. In light of reading How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford I decided to…
By: Jennifer Eckert on February 8, 2024
My professional career was launched at a state-level public health agency where I was part of a small team that led Oklahoma’s anti-tobacco movement. For thirteen years, I worked alongside thousands of allies to collect and analyze data to pass public policies that would reduce tobacco use and improve health. In How to Make the…
By: Akwese on February 8, 2024
In a world where we tend to be either overly suspicious or not suspicious enough of the research and statistics at the core of many of our beliefs, Tim Harford’s “The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics” offers a solution for how to find a healthy balance where we learn to…
By: Elysse Burns on February 8, 2024
As I mulled over Tim Harford’s How to Make the World Add Up, I was transported to my undergraduate classes when I was a naïve business student. Sitting in a business law class, we had just finished the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and I felt physically ill from the information learned.…
