Visions of Possibility
Or Thinking Different
I recently read the new book Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue. Stick with me if you are here for faith or theology. The book is a fascinating and glorious trip through the history of one of the most influential and profitable companies in the wold. Pogue got access to history. people, and artifacts encompassing the entirety of Apple’s history to the present. I remember the wonder of seeing and using an Apple II and of the moment when computers became more than a curiosity when I sat down in front of a Macintosh for the first time. Our first family computer was a Commodore SX64 (an ostensibly portable C64), but my first personally purchased computer was a Macintosh and I have owned Macs since 1990. I even had Macs during the dark days of head scratching models and the constant obituaries of the company.
Apple has always been a company that focused upon making technology usable for everyone. Their innovation was not always in being first to do something, but in making that something “insanely great.” Many times Apple leapfrogged competitors by choosing to remove features that relied on old technology to introduce a better way of using that technology. One of the very first instances of this was the original iMac that excluded a floppy drive. Apple was right, floppies had their day and by the late 1990’s it was time to move on. I wonder what the critics from them would think of modern MacBooks that rely solely on solid state memory.
While the quantum leaps of the first decade of the twenty first century are no longer the norm, Apple still finds ways to innovate and do things differently. And that brings me to a personal story involving Apple, vision casting, and the frustration of thinking in the past. I will use a personal story to explain this and show how easily we can get trapped into thinking that strategies and behavior will not change. Apple has also done things that people claimed would fail. The Apple Store idea was panned by most, but it is incredibly successful to this day.
In 2010 when the iPad was first announced, I was I.T. Director for a regional non-profit. One of my responsibilities was peering into the unknown and seeing where we might be in the future. What tools, applications, and technologies would support and enhance our mission was something always on my mind. I spent time with the various departments and types of work in our organization so I would understand pain points, how systems worked, and how people used the tools we had. That was also a way to understand what tools we may need in the near and even distant future.
One innovation was standardizing on the iPhone for employees because we could take advantage of the breadth of applications and communication tools present in iOS. We also had PDAs and rugged devices for specialized work, but the promise of the iPhone was less friction and more connectivity. That could be a good and bad thing of course, but communication was enhanced with that decision. The early data plans Apple convinced AT&T to go with also saved us money by allowing for unlimited access to the network at a mice price.
Back to the iPad. When I watched the unveiling, I immediately saw the potential of the iPad for business and creation. My technology committee was made up of volunteers who led technology and consulting in many areas. The chair of the committee brought a new iPad to a meeting and I began talking about the potential. But like a wet smelly blanket over my enthusiasm, they said that the iPad was only a consumption device. They went on the say that the iPad was basically a toy and reading and web browsing were neat, but it would not be a tool. I was discouraged, but I did get some encouragement from others on the committee who could see the potential rather than assumed limitations. In fact, I work for a company owned by one who encouraged me back then.
I did not let that interaction stop me from thinking. It drove me instead. I was certain the iPad could improve on the current laptops used by our teammates who visited other agencies for inspections and presentations. So I bought an iPad with a cellular plan and put it in the hands of one of the team. I asked him to use it as much as possible and make notes about his experience. It was my small little “skunkworks” and it immediately showed promise. I won’t bore you with all the details, but all day battery life, the ability to get to information quickly, and even using the screen as a flashlight in a pinch were instant hits. Now I had to tell my boss that we had done this. He did not believe it was a great idea before I showed the experience data.
I then started work on a system to enable the iPad to capture the data we needed and get that data into our system. At the time, we had to collect the data and then re-key it into our system. My solution wasn’t perfect but we managed to find a tool that would allow us to create forms that would dump data into an ingestible format for our main operations system. Now I just needed to get funding. I worked with our grants team and sent a proposal for a technology grant to purchase several iPads and pay for the first year of data service and the third party form tool. The minute we deployed the iPads, the team reported higher satisfaction with their work and mentioned how it freed them up to do the relational part of their jobs. The iPad became a tool that improved work and the impression of how the work supported the mission of the organization.
I had taken a position at another non-profit when the annual technology meeting for my then former non-profit’s national organization happened. But the manager of the team used my presentation plan to show others like our organization what we were doing and it was one of the most popular sessions. Several others adopted a similar set of tools. All centered on a product I was told was simply a toy.
Sometimes, I feel like churches fall into the same mindset as that technology committee chair. We get so blinded by the way things have been done or successful strategies from the past that we keep trying to use them and we don’t see the potential for different ways of doing things. I’m not arguing for doctrinal innovation, but I am saying that the ways we present and engage our faith can be innovative and creative. What worked in the past may no longer be relevant. When we keep looking back we risk becoming frozen in time. When we reject actions because “we’ve never done it that way” we may just miss seeing the way others are drawn to faith. True, faith is not like technology, but the principles of vision and creativity work regardless. These are the things I think on when reading books like Andrew Root’s Evangelism in an Age of Despair or Ryan Burge’s The Vanishing Church. We are doomed to repeat failure if we keep going back to what may have worked ten or twenty years ago.
Maybe we need more dreamers. Or maybe we just need people o do as Apple dared us in the late 1990’s to “Think Different.”