Leadership Summit - a producers view (pt 1)

Just finished up 2.5 days of an awesome leadership conference that was put on by the Willow Creek Community Church (www.willowcreek.com) My church, Granger Community Church, aka GCC, (www.gccwired.com)is and has been a satellite church for this conference for the last 4 years. We're just one of many churches worldwide that provides a satellite connection to this incredible conference. It's focus appeals to not only church leaders but has application for business leaders as well. The list of speakers at the Summit includes not only well known people from churchs across the world but also leaders well known in business and acedemia.

I have been the producer at GCC for the Summit for the last 4 years. What does that mean? In some aspects its like being a project leader. Pre Summit responsibilites include a myriad of administrative tasks including a retreat at Willow Creek, lining up technical people at our site, ensuring that we have vocalists for live worship, printing and distributing copies of the order of events among others. Additionally, I am in ongoing email contact with the lead technical person for the Summit, Shana, to ensure that this variety of tasks are done our side I'm one of many "go to" people for GCC on the satellite side of things.

During the Summit my role transitions from the administrative to more of the producer side of things. I call cues to lighting people to ensure that the lighting effects match the mood of the current conference activity. For instance, when Willow Creek is showing a media we want our shades down (which I control anyway) and lights to be minimal in our auditorium so that the picture is clearly visible. But when a speaker is on we want house lights up, not full, but enough so that participants can take notes. I also am in contact with media operator and cue them for things like powerpoint slides that go up on our screens directing people to break areas at the designated break times throughout the conference. Because most of the sound is coming directly from Willow Creek I don't have much direction to relay to our audio board. I am periodically in contact with them when our host needs to be on the stage to ensure that the host's microphone is functioning as it should.

In conjunction with performing all of what I just mentioned above, during the Summit I am also in constant contact with Willow Creek. We're required to be on a confernce call with Willow 10 minutes prior to the start of every session. I think there were nearly 100 satellite sites for the conference this year...talk about a confernce call! During the call we're walked through the elements of the session (intro music, medias, speaker introducitons...etc) and advised of any schedule changes to that session. During the sessions we are also required to be on Instant Messenger to Willow Creek so that any unexpected events can be communicated.

What unexpected events could possibly happen you may wonder..............W E A T H E R! A wide band of severe storms worked its way across the midwest the first day of the conference this year. I believe at one point there were 8 midwestern satellite sites that had gone down because of weather. One site on the Indiana/Illinois line was even preparing themselves for a tornado evacuation. Instant messaging allows us to have quick communication with Willow in just these situations. Fortunately there is a back up plan, web downstreaming, for the times when the satellite does go out. And although it is delayed it still permits those people who paid for the conference to continue to reap the benefits of it until the satellite comes back up.

I'm not much of an instant messenger at home. But when you get people from around the country in a chat room the conversations seem to be unending, including mine. This year, and I think last year as well, Willow instituted another chat room 'summitchat' so that the representatives from churches around the country could talk to each other without clogging up the 'summitcues' chat where important things needed to be communicated.

About 2 years ago, I made some friends while chatting during the Summit who were from a church in Grand Rapids. We've stayed in contact during the year and often will meet for dinner or just infrequently email. I always gear up with Gail and Paul a few weeks before the Summit via email. We always have a ton of fun instant messaging back and forth. Because 'summitchat' can get so conjested with chats going on from around the country, we always make our own chat room so that we can talk and discuss the Summit while its happening.

So this year I had two screens atached to the laptop on the producers desk, with at times, 4 different chat rooms scrolling down the pages. I had to pay attention to 'summitcues' for any vital information that may come through from Willow. 'Summitchat' is often very entertaining and catches my eye. And, I'm always watching for a update from my friends in Grand Rapids. This year I had yet another individual chat going on with a person from a church in Ohio who had questions about how we do church at GCC and was talking with him about that. All of this in addition to calling the cues when needed, being on a the phone when required and trying to get value from the speaker who was currently on the screen.

On Saturday, the final day of the conference I arrived much earlier that I needed to mostly because I am a morning person. It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining brightly in a cloudless blue sky. I went and got some coffee from our cafe and came back to the production booth to get my chats logged on and my service order laid out for the morning. I got 'summitcues' and 'summitchat' up and running fine. Not much later I got my chatroom invite from my friends in Grand Rapids and when I brought up the window for their chat I lost 'summitchat' and couldnt get it back. I decided that the best thing to do was to re-boot the laptop I was using and start over. However, it was almost time for the first conference call so I elected to wait until that was over and then clean things up. (Take note that the laptop on my producers desk is, I'm fully convinced, the SLOWEST laptop ever made.) We were released from our call so I started my re-boot procedure. I had no more than just clicked on restart when our satellite feed went out. "Whats going on!" I thought, theres no bad weather. Of course, now I had no instant message to Willow because the laptop was only crawling its way back to being fully functional. One of the things we're suppose to do is immediately let Willow Creek know if we lose our satellite feed and the most efficient way is to instant message. Not for me now! I picked up the phone and scrambled through the papers I had laying on my desk for the emergency phone numbers to Willow. I never thought I'd need to use them so I didnt have them in a convenient place. I finally found them and dialed with desperation. In the meanwhile, our AMAZING tech guys has sprung into action, and about the same time that Willow answered my call web downstreaming was on our screen. Willow advised that it was a glitch on their side and at that all sites had gone down. "Didn't you see the message in 'summitcues?" the Willow rep inquired. Sheepishly, I replied that I was re-booting my laptop because I couldn't get into 'summitchat' an essentially non-essential chat room. It was all good though as moments later the satellite feed was up and all systems were go.

Temptations to chat and all the other things that you have going on when you're
a satellite Summit producer can often make gleaning things from the speakers a
real challenge. I know for me, I have to be intentional about doing that as I can be easily drawn away into cyber chat land. I enjoyed many of this years Summit
speakers and you can see my comments about them in my post entitled "Leadership Summit - a producers view (pt2).