Pastors
Creative team meetings live in a sort of dichotomy: they need to have creative freedom while in a meeting environment that meets consistently. Being consistently creative is hard, as anyone in a creative role, such as an advertising designer, will tell you. So how do you keep creativity fresh? That's the discussion for today.

Meet consistentlyYou make time for the things that you place as your priority. That true-ism about life is also true about creating consistent creative team planning sessions. The senior pastor, worship pastor, technical director and others need to carve out time every week on the same day at the same time for at least two meetings.

The first meeting is held on Monday or Tuesday to recap the previous weekend with a critical eye, to review the current plans for the upcoming weekend (tweaks and changes) and to start planning for content 30-45 days away. That's right - you don't plan week to week if you don't want to spend a lot of money. Huh? Allow me to illustrate:

You can have it one of three ways:

Good + Fast - but it's not Cheap.

Fast + Cheap - but it's not Good.

Cheap + Good - but it's not Fast.

So what I said above about planning in advance is directly related to the reality triangle. In order to do things with high quality, it's not going to be cheap if you want it week to week.

Follow up with task-check meetings

A big part of follow up meetings is the project management of holding people (staff and volunteers)accountable and tracking tasks and deadlines. The holistic approach to developing creative weekend experiences instead of stand-alone weekend services means that you must take the time to meet, plan, assign and verify.

Now I'll not give away too much about the staffing and assignments yet - that's tomorrow!

Where to meet?

It's totally fine to meet in one convenient spot for many of your meetings. But it's also important to vary the meeting space from time to time. Creative meetings need the creative infusion of fun places, so take your team to play in the park, go to Putt Putt or a host of other fun places. Creative sparks fly when we don't try to force them.

One of the best things you can do for your regular meeting space is to add a white board. A big white board. A floor to ceiling, fill-the-wall white board. Why? Because ideas are like Wacky Wall Walkers. Remember those? They used to come with cereal boxes and were essentially stick plastic balls with "legs" that stuck to a wall when you threw them against it.

Ideas are like those because some stick for just a moment but fall flat. Some don't stick at all. Others stick but then start to crawl down the wall and then fall down. But the best ones will stick and stay. Those best ideas stick around and stay.

Plus, those white boards allow for you to visually see ideas from various people written down across the board. You'll see ideas come together and have a way to document (take notes - or, if you're really high tech, use an electronic whiteboard!) the ideas.

Tomorrow I continue the discussion about who should be in the meeting and how often you should change up the creative planning team. Stay tuned. Oh, and comment below!