I’ve found when working on a new project with a group of people that it takes three cuts to get it right.
The first time around, you need to have the expectation that it won’t work well. However, the experience of diving in and trying anyway will yield some insights and show you some things that might work well.
Your team can then compile those learnings to inform the second cut, which gets you closer to what you’re aiming for. Then the team needs to go over it a third time– that third cut consists of fine-tuning and fixing more minor issues to reach a level of excellence.
I find this “three cuts rule” holds true in writing projects and in piloting new ministries. Your team must understand that mistakes and failure are part of the learning process– necessary, in fact, to getting you where you want to go.
We need to have the patience to walk through the messy parts and hang with it through to the end. That’s part of what one of my favorite books, Switch, talks about: a growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset believes, “I can’t grow. I can’t progress. If I don’t get it right the first time, I won’t be able to in the future.” A growth mindset expects, “I won’t get it right the first time, but I can get some of it right, learn from those mistakes, and press on toward improvement.”
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different […]
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