Author Archives: InsideWork

May 2004

Learn Together

The point of peer to peer learning is synergy—the condition in which the total effect of your learning partnership is greater than the sum of your individual efforts. Which is to say that two people working together somehow manage to more-than-double the output of either of them alone.
How? Test these two agreements with your learning [...]

Tool Kit

You can drive a screw with a nail file or pound nails with a rock. Sometimes that’s just the fast, reasonably efficient, solve you’re looking for. We wouldn’t recommend relying on that particular set of tools if your goal is adding a room to your house.
Big jobs call for more sophisticated tools. A few basic [...]

April 2004

The Hard Parts

Most of what’s in the Bible is pretty much what it appears to be and means pretty much what it appears to mean. Don’t be fooled by people who make it seem harder than it is—especially if they’re selling something.
That said, there certainly are some hard parts in the Bible. When you come upon those [...]

March 2004

Practice Openness

Pretty much everyone agrees we ought to be honest. Assuming honesty is a given in your learning partnership, the next question is, how open do you want to be?
Openness is measured by degrees of appropriate, present-tense, self-disclosure. Most Christians can be fairly honest without being very open. Conversations about temptation and failure tend to [...]

Use Your Imagination

Whether we see it or not, there’s an element of imagination in Bible-reading just as there is in reading history, poetry and narrative stories - if we weren’t there, we can only imagine what it’s like.

February 2004

Give & Take

If you’ve ever waited for someone who was waiting for you in another location with the same name (“I’ll meet you at Starbucks”), you know how people use the same words without meaning the same thing.
The solve on that is creating feedback loops to ensure understanding:

“The Starbucks on King?”
“No, the one in the mall.”
“Oh. Glad [...]

Hands-On Learning

The best learning is hands-on. Literally. If you want to get inside a Bible text, and let the text get inside you, grab a writing utensil and go to it.

Write the text out longhand (or type it, or thumb it into your hand held device). Engaging the words and sentences with your own hands (as [...]

January 2004

Build Trust

Two or three people who trust each other become a churning, learning machine (Just look at the remarkable learning partnership between Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their Google CEO, Eric Schmidt).
But trust takes time and, more than time, intentional, generous, respect. Three thoughts about that…

Don’t compete. Listen until your partner is finished talking. If you [...]

Take Time for Reflection

Much of the Bible is as plain as the nose on your face; “…each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor…” comes to mind.
And some of the Bible is…challenging. Even a statement as clear as, “Those who want to be my disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross [...]

May 2004

Troubleshooting Your Learning Group

How can I deal with a person who talks too much?
How can I encourage a person who doesn’t talk at all?
I have a Catholic, a Baptist, two Presbyterians and a Pentecostal. Is this a problem?
There are a lot of questions here; where are the answers?
How can I deal with a Know-It-All?
What if people don’t prepare [...]

April 2004

Creating a Safe Room

Depending on where you’re from, the idea of creating a safe room may seem like a non-issue.
Depending on where people in your group come from, creating safety may be Job One.
Maybe it’s just over here where we live, but we’ve noticed a lot of power issues around religion and spirituality. A lot of folks [...]

March 2004

Three Great Questions

Drum roll, please…
Question Number One: What?
Question Number Two: So what?
Question Number Three: Now what?
Wait a minute? That’s it? What makes these questions so great?
Well…glad you asked.
What?
Every time we experience something—intellectual, spiritual, physical, social; doesn’t matter what—the instant we become aware that it was, in fact, an experience, the moment we give it our attention [...]

February 2004

How Group Learning Works

Regardless of the number of people in the room, monologue (be it a motivational speech or a father lecturing the kids) works with a learning unit of one. That’s one person listening, considering, interpreting, deciding alone (even though she may be surrounded by a thousand other learning units). That’s a desktop PC with a dialup [...]