Low-Hanging Fruit, Moonshots, and Coffee: Dreaming Big Within and Beyond Our Limitations
Intersections No. 59 · Spring 2024
Vocation must be perpetually discerned. In today’s culture of constant change and pivoting, this discernment work is often bypassed as a quaint but pointless roadside attraction alongside the freeway towards progress/sustainability/innovation/retention (you pick!). Our team at Augsburg University’s Christensen Center for Vocation takes that roadside attraction very seriously. We design and lead transformative learning experiences for leaders intended to help them not only discern their organization’s calls but also take action that affirm these calls. Those learning experiences are only transformative if we create and facilitate the space for these leaders and teams to reflect on how the experience has impacted them. To do this, we have implemented an efficient and effective process. This article is a summary of that process and is shared here as a tool you can use with your teams when you find yourselves at a crossroads, when you have completed a workshop or continuing education experience, when a busy season or large event has come to an end. It is a process designed to help you listen to and trust your collective wisdom as you wonder what your next steps might be. It begins with the contemplative practice of the awareness examen, move into naming the low-hanging fruit that can be accomplished quickly and easily, invites you to dream big about the moonshots your team might take, and then lands with you naming the next few people you need to invite into the conversation.
Awareness Examen
The first step in this process is the Awareness Examen. The Examen was originally a part of the spiritual practices of Ignatius of Loyola. It was intended to be practiced at the end of the day as a way of reflecting back over the day, looking for moments of both desolation and consolation. Moments of desolation are moments when you experienced or encountered anxiety, fear, brokenness, etc. A moment of consolation is a moment in which you experienced peace, hope, healing, etc. Allowing your team to share their experiences of desolation and consolation during an event is a form of program evaluation, a way of relationally processing the experience together, an opportunity to develop trust with one another, and an important step towards allowing the collective wisdom of the group propel you work forward. Here is how you practice the Awareness Examen.
“Allowing your team to share their experiences of desolation and consolation during an event is a form of program evaluation, a way of relationally processing the experience together, an opportunity to develop trust with one another, and an important step towards allowing the collective wisdom of the group propel you work forward.”
Sit in a chair with your spine straight and your feet flat on the floor. Or find any position that is comfortable and possible for you and your body. Place your hands on your legs with your palms either up or down. Do a brief scan of your body from your scalp down to your feet. Notice where there is tension or discomfort. Do what you need to do to relieve that tension or discomfort—stretch, wiggle, crack, twist, etc. Then take three deep slow breaths in and begin to center yourself. Allow yourself to become aware of your breath and your body. Close your eyes and then reflect over the experience you want to process. Allow yourself to become aware of moments of desolation in this experience or over the particular time you are reflecting on. Once you’ve identified a moment, examine it. What was happening? Who was present? What were you feeling? Why would you categorize this as a moment of desolation? After sitting with it for a while, take a few more deep slow breaths and release the memory of that experience. When you are ready, allow yourself to reflect once again over the same period of time or experience. But this time, become aware of moments of consolation. Once you’ve identified a moment, examine it. What was happening? Who was present? What were you feeling? Why would you categorize this as a moment of consolation. After sitting with it for a while, take a few more deep slow breaths and release the memory of that experience. After completing this reflection, take some time to allow each person on your team to share both their moments of desolation and consolation with the team. Allow them to simply share what came to them without any judgment or commentary. Just let their words about those moments stand on their own.
Low-Hanging Fruit
After you have processed and shared your own experiences with an event you are then ready to begin looking forward. We always start this by asking teams to brainstorm what they think the low-hanging fruit might be for them. Low-hanging fruit are practices you and your team can implement almost immediately through minor changes and with the resources already at hand that could result in important and beneficial gains for the work you do. For example, at the end of a day long event focused on sustainability one team identified a quick and easy low-hanging fruit. They could add a “Support Our Work” button to their website where interested parties could simply make a financial donation. It would take one person about ten minutes to implement this low-hanging fruit. I tend to like to phrase the question this way, “Given the desolations and consolations we have heard from one another, what might be some of the low-hanging fruit our team can implement easily that would have a positive impact on our work?”
Moonshots
When we begin with low-hanging fruit we allow our team to honor its very real limitations as well as the assets they already possess. This next step, moonshots, invites your team to move beyond their current limitations and assets. A moonshot is exactly what it sounds like. The phrase originated from NASA’s Project Apollo from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. It literally meant an attempt to land on the moon. It figuratively means a radical proposal or solution for a very challenging problem. For example, at the end of a DEI training a member of one leadership team said, “Rather than reading a land acknowledgment statement at the beginning of every large event on campus, what if we started a conversation with the local indigenous leaders in our area about what actual reparations might look like.” This is a moonshot. Again, I will often phrase the question this way, “Given all that we have seen and heard and shared here, what are some moonshots we might just dare to take?”
Coffee
After orbiting around our moonshots for a while, we invite teams back to terra firma. We know how busy we all become upon arriving home after an inspiring but exhausting team experience. We also know how lonely it can start to feel when working to implement some of the changes we dream of making. So the last step we ask teams to take is the naming of a few people with whom they each need to have a cup of coffee and a conversation regarding the low-hanging fruit and moonshots. These might be with high-level administrators who can make or break an idea, or they might be with the movers and shakers on campus who really know how to make things happen, or they might be with those naysayers who you know will be suspicious of whatever you propose. Naming these people together helps the team identify key people who need to be part of the movement. It also creates some immediate accountability. Now you each have someone you must reach out to and everyone on the team knows you have agreed to do this. Having these conversations helps to keep the momentum your team developed at the event and it helps build a coalition of people who will help lease the work.
“We also know how lonely it can start to feel when working to implement some of the changes we dream of making. So the last step we ask teams to take is the naming of a few people with whom they each need to have a cup of coffee and a conversation.”
Even though we talked about moonshots, we know this is not rocket science. What we are proposing is nothing amazing. Yet we have seen it be both an efficient and effective way for a team to wrap up their time at a shared experience together that helps them reflect upon the experience and identify some immediate and lofty goals. We often lose the insights we gain from a team experience when we transition away from them without pausing to reflect. This process has proven to be an effective way to honestly celebrate, lament, and move forward from an event with a community of collaborators and a sense of call to action. We hope it helps you do good work and love the work you do.
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Editorial
From the Editor: Vocation as Action in the Affirmative
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes frames vocation as practicing “at the borders of our incompetence” — every small yes to the callings we experience, every effort made in the direction of life, is action in the affirmative — and previews the issue’s essays on diversity, transformation, AI, championship team culture, and dreaming big within and beyond our limitations.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Navigating Affirmative Action, DEI Policies, and Lutheran Vocational Identity
Lamont Anthony Wells
Wells surveys the converging pressures on NECU institutions — the unsettled landscape of affirmative action, political and academic scrutiny of DEI work, and the preservation of distinctively Lutheran vocational identity — and previews how the issue draws on affirmative practices, sociological viewpoints, and theological responses to navigate a path forward.
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Article
Forming the Division for Access, Equity & Belonging at Susquehanna University
Amy Davis, Dena Salerno, María L. O. Muñoz, Nina Mandel, Scott Kershner
Five Susquehanna University colleagues trace the institution’s 166-year arc from a Missionary Institute founded to remove barriers to education through the formation of a new Division for Access, Equity & Belonging in 2023, arguing that access rooted in Lutheran origins must continue to drive policy revision, infrastructure, and belonging for minoritized communities today.
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Article
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
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Article
What Our Lutheran Heritage Entails for Lutheran Colleges and Affirmative Action
Mark Ellingsen
Ellingsen argues that the Lutheran Two-Kingdom Ethic — far from leading to political reaction — supports the church-relatedness of ELCA colleges and obligates them to keep affirmative action alive, even reading a Chief Justice Roberts “loophole” in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as an open door for Black community partnerships, ELCA congregations, and Lutheran colleges to act in the affirmative.
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Reflection
On the Power of Transformation and Becoming Human
Ken Yanai Flores
Flores, a Cal Lutheran sophomore, reflects on personal and institutional transformation as the slow work of shedding the armor of trauma responses, engaging discomfort rather than turning away, and trusting that the work of becoming more human — more empathetic, knowledgeable, and free — will be reflected in our institutions as well.
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Article
The Critical Role of Lutheran Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Jose Marichal, Maya Goehner, Tyler Haug
A Cal Lutheran political science professor and two of his students draw on Rooted and Open to argue that Lutheran higher education is uniquely positioned to stake out a middle path between AI utopianism and AI doom — cultivating a “healthy sense of human limit,” resisting data colonialism, and forming students to see the neighbor rather than the enemy as the world becomes increasingly synthetic.
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Article
Team Culture is Key to Success: Learning from Student-Athletes
Colleen Windham-Hughes
On a December weekend in “Championship City” Salem, Virginia, both California Lutheran’s Women’s Soccer Team and St. Olaf College’s Men’s Soccer Team won NCAA Division III national titles. Windham-Hughes talks with coaches, faculty mentors, and student-athletes about how off-the-field team culture — built on trust, relationships, and shared why — translates onto the pitch and into liberal arts and sciences education.
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Article
Renewing a Sense of Vocation at Lutheran Colleges and Universities: Insights from a Project at Valparaiso University
Marcia Bunge
No. 14 · Summer 2002
Bunge, director of the process for writing Valparaiso’s nearly two-million-dollar Lilly grant on the Theological Exploration of Vocation, argues that contemporary culture’s reduction of vocation to either paid work or self-fulfillment requires Lutheran institutions to renew attention to a rich theological concept rooted in Luther’s expansion of vocation beyond the priesthood. She outlines eight low-cost “doorways”—caring adults, prayer, worship leadership, music and the arts, service, cross-cultural experience, church camps and wilderness, study and reflection—and describes Valparaiso’s two-program structure: a Campus-Wide Program weaving vocation into Freshman Core Courses and chapel life, and a Church Vocations Program for students considering full-time ministry. She closes with four troubling questions for any institution carrying out such a grant: what faith traditions can learn from one another, how to involve parents, whether faculty and staff have space to reflect on their own vocations, and whether daily institutional practices—family policies, treatment of low-paid staff, environmental responsibility, obligations to the wider community—actually reflect a commitment to love of neighbor.
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Article
Work Works
Julius Crump
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Crump argues that in an era of class-stratified careerism and the “ruins of neoliberalism,” commencement-speech rhetoric about heroic vocation will not resuscitate vocation — instead, professors embodying vulnerability, extemporaneity, and contemporaneity in the classroom can show students that consistent work, embodied as service to others, is itself worthy.
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Article
A Lutheran Learning Paradigm
Paul J. Dovre
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Drawing on Hughes and Adrian’s Models of Christian Higher Education and on Ernest Simmons, Darrell Jodock, Tom Christenson, Robert Benne, and Richard Hughes, Dovre sketches a Lutheran learning paradigm shaped by four deep narratives—the biblical, the confessional, the theological, and the vocational—and traces their implications for curriculum (the study of scripture, theology, and vocation), for the religion faculty’s college-wide responsibility, and for pedagogy (moral deliberation, dialectic, paradox, the engagement of faith and the secular disciplines).
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Reflection
Confessions of a Collaborator
Chuck Huff
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Huff of St. Olaf offers a tongue-in-cheek public confession of his lifelong sin of collaboration—from elementary-school reports on dinosaurs and Cliff notes on Faulkner, through high-school algebra and college group projects, to borrowed syllabi, group work imposed on resentful students, tutorials, independent studies on every form of self-reliance, and circulated drafts. Even this confession was collaborated on, and (he confesses) he enjoyed it.
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Article
Semper Reformanda: Lutheran Higher Education in the Anthropocene
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Simmons enumerates the ELCA initiatives over the past twenty years that have helped Lutheran higher education retrieve a Christian understanding of vocation, then argues that the looming reality of human-caused climate change — the geological epoch of the Anthropocene — now requires Lutheran liberal arts education to prepare students for “planetary citizenship” as sustainability leaders, drawing on the classical Trivium, Luther’s panentheism, and a quantum-physics-inflected theology of divine entanglement and hope.
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Article
The Idea of a Christian University
Richard Hughes
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Hughes’s lecture at the inauguration of Andrew K. Benton as the seventh president of Pepperdine argues that a Pepperdine-wide “strategy of community-wide conversation,” carried by the new Pepperdine University Center for Faith and Learning, can sustain the school as a Christian university by leaning into the paradox of Christian particularity rather than around it. Drawing on the incarnation, the Matthew 5 and Luke 14 teachings of Jesus, the Quaker and Cane Ridge (Joseph Thomas) abolition traditions, Galatians 2 and Romans 8, and Luther’s simul Justus et peccator as the gospel that frees the scholar to be wrong, to doubt, and to confess “Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” he mines the Churches of Christ heritage—Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone, and John Rogers of Carlisle, Kentucky—as a unity-and-freedom tradition that grounds both diversity and academic freedom.