Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs)

I have been awakening this last month by a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (BHAG) pushing up out of my creative unconsciousness and literally nagging me from sleep. Seeing as I’m 78, it’s not only a BHAG—it’s ridiculous, absurd, annoying, and not only audacious but seemingly impossible!

Big, hairy, audacious goals are a planning process that evolved out of the corporate business community to challenge teams of workers to set goals so large they couldn’t be accomplished in the near few years. A really great BHAG is one that a business team wouldn’t see the culmination of in this near decade but in some three decades going forward (thirty years)!

Seeing as I am in that stage of living where I’m echoing the words of one of my literary heroes, Peter Pan, it seems totally incongruent that I am being nagged every night (yes, every night) by this particular BHAG. Fans will remember Pan’s cry when faced with life-threatening adversity, “To die will be an awfully big adventure!” I definitely am feeling the same way.

These are all the reasons why this particular BHAG is absurd:
1. First, I am 78 and wondering when senility (or dementia) or crippling arthritis will destabilize me.
2. Second, I am 78 and need to be thinking about clearing out the piles and files so my children don’t have to sort out the folder labeled “Trip to Bulgaria” or the African notes, or my mother’s box of legacy items that mean something to me but certainly won’t to them since they depend upon some kind of memory bank. There’s more (much more) in this category, but you get the idea.
3. Third, David and I need to plan our funerals so our kids don’t have to gather together two memorial programs at a time of grief and mourning.
4. Fourth, this BHAG is going to need a team of people to design, administrate, and implement. Mainstay Ministries has one part-time (very part-time) employee beside David and me.
5. Fifth, some fund-raising probably will be entailed to carry this out. Ech-h-h-h-h. I have been raising monies since I was eighteen. And God has always been faithful to supply our needs, but I’ve rarely been in a financial position to know that the needed funds are already in the bank.
6. Lastly, I have two books I’m in the middle of pulling together. One is titled Uncommon Goodness: How Renegade Leaders Create Virtuous Circles That Defeat the Vicious Cycles of Poverty, Ignorance, Disease and Division. This book’s proposal and a couple of chapters are written and ready to send out to publishers. The second book plunges into the lessons of listening I’ve learned from leading some 250 Listening Groups over a decade or so of my life.

However, desperate to get a full night’s sleep, I finally said to that relentless Divine Nag, OK. OK. I get it. I GET it! You want me to spend some of my precious last days pulling this concept together, finding the people who are proficient in concept organization, who understand communication theory and marketing principles, then are able to help launch a major national—maybe international—platform that will energize the whole scriptural concept of practicing hospitality globally! I’ll do it!

When Open Heart, Open Home was published, it was the only book in the religious marketplace that dealt with the theology and function of scriptural hospitality. And it remained so for decades. However, after researching the marketplace recently, I’ve discovered that a good dozen-or-so titles have now been published and released; these all have a Christian, faith-based understanding of this remarkable and much-too-infrequently practiced gift.

Simply, the practice of hospitality—of welcoming, inviting, including and sheltering—is the one act that quickly portrays the nature of God in an alienated, frightened, all-too-lonely, segmented culture. So I am thrilled to know there are many more voices speaking about opening hearts and homes.

I love the story a pediatrician told at a conference, years back when I was speaking on this topic. I had invited the participants to tell one story about how hospitality had changed their life. One woman told of a family whose child, ill with a life-threatening disease she successfully treated, were grateful for her healing care and invited her to dinner. She summarized her story thus: “The love and beauty I experienced around that table was overwhelming. I can say truthfully that I wasn’t a Christian when I entered their house. But I was a Christian when I left it.”

So here’s what I understand that I must do if I am going to get any sleep at night (and if I am going to be obedient to that inward prod).

- Number 1: I must contact all the authors who have written on hospitality and present them with the vision of a national platform to which we all contribute in still-to-be-defined ways.
- Number 2: I need to gather a group of hospitality “addicts” who feel strongly about the Scriptural injunction to practice this gift and invite them to be contributors to an open-sourced platform on the varying kinds of hospitality that are practiced, e.g., church-based hospitality, home-based hospitality, foster care for disabled children, retreat-center hospitality, etc.
- Number 3: I need to get my mind around the wiki technology that allows for multiple contributors, around the creation of ideagoras (marketplaces where new approaches and emerging systems are freely shared), around the concept of peer production in the launching and maintaining of digital-based, Internet-centered platforms. This is all outlined in the book WIKINOMICS: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. And I need to re-read my highlights on the pages to make sure that I (older woman that I am with limited tech skills) understand, at least on a surface level.
- Number 4: And I need to pray in a team of proficient, eager, organized, detail capable folk who “get” the concept of a national base that explains, encourages, highlights, rejoices in, expands and exposes the variety of means and places and ways that hospitality can be practiced.

So. Perhaps YOU are looking for a BHAG outreach, something that challenges and stretches you and at the same time provides a place among a working team of people with a vision for changing our world. This may be your chance to get in on the ground floor of something that has the potential to do God’s work in this day, leveraging contemporary technology that provides us with forums and formulas we never before dreamed possible.

I have this great idea, a BHAG idea. I’m temporarily calling it the O2H2 CAMPAIGN: Leveraging Scriptural Hospitality to Open Hearts and Homes to Heal the World.

Let me know if you would love to be a campaigner at Karen@hungrysouls.org.

Karen Mains

Reminder!

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Karen Mains

BOOK CORNER

Wikinomics:
How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams

Sample quotes from back-cover blurbs:
“Wikinomics heralds the biggest change in collaboration to date. Thanks to the Internet, masses of people outside the boundaries of traditional hierarchies can innovate to produce content, goods and services. In order to understand the opportunities this presents for companies, read this book.” —Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

“Wikinomics illuminates the truth we are seeing in markets around the globe: The more you share, the more you win. Wikinomics sheds light on the many faces of business collaboration and presents a powerful new strategy for business leaders in a world where customers, employees, and low-cost producers are seizing control.” — Brian Featherstone, chairman and CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide

“Knowledge creation happens in social networks where people learn and teach each other. Wikinomics shows where this phenomenon is headed when turbocharged to engage the ideas and energy of customers, suppliers, and producers in mass collaboration. It’s a must-read for those who want a map of where the world is headed.” — Noel Tichy, professor, University of Michigan, and author of Cycle of Leadership