The Incubator
Has God given you a vision for a future Create Community or Team? Are you wondering how to bring that about, but just don’t have all the details squared away? Welcome to The Incubator.
The Incubator is created specifically for you – where your questions find answers and your aspirations take root and grow. Designed around specific principles and values, rather than a curriculum, the Incubator is an on-site coaching, mentoring, and team-building program designed to develop new Create teams.
Time to Embark!
If you’re ready to get this conversations started, you already know how best to talk to us! But if you’d prefer to email us to get going, you can us the contact form here as well.
The Seedling
Deep in the mind, your team’s story has already begun. Like a seed quietly planted, this is the conception stage – a time of exploration and ideation, for seeking the Lord for council and wisdom.
Teams come about in a variety of ways, but what is always consistent is that God is involved. He’s given you a vision, a goal, or an idea, and that has begun to grow in your heart. If this is you, we’d love to hear about that! We love hearing what God has put on our staff’s hearts, and we’d love to encourage and pray for you!
Our Job: Facilitating the dreams
The Seed Takes Root.
Here, your vision sprouts. The Seedling stage is about laying the groundwork for what will become a thriving team – trust in a big God with big plans!
Technically, because The Incubator is an in-person program, this stage really happens before becoming involved. That said, we would still love to hear what’s on your heart – we’d love to organise a few video calls where we can just dream together!
Establishing Roots
As the seedling takes root, you’re entering the growth stage – a time of creating strong bonds, of creating the structures that will keep you growing going forward.
After a significant amount of time seeking the Lord, and gaining insights from your leaders, it’s time to join the Incubator! The Incubator is an in-person program designed to give you experience in working as a team while building aspects of your team such as vision, values, goals, structure, and thematic focus.
It is intended to be done by a group of people, and over a period of time that ranges from three to twelve months.
Our Job: Providing Space to Explore
Nurturing your growth
Guidance becomes your sunlight. Seasoned mentors join the journey, offering insights that help your team blossom.
In opening the Incubator, we’re committing to welcoming you into our community here in Chiang Mai. We’ll be dedicating time to put towards team development, Q&A sessions, planning sessions. You’ll be working closely together throughout the time and we’ll organise times for you to get input from experienced Create leaders – whether in-person or through dedicated video conferencing.
Growing the Blossoms
From the awakening roots, your team has begun to grow – a time of cultivation and expansion. The once-small idea now begins to blossom.
Though it is possible to go through the Incubator with only those that want to manage the Team, we would recommend including future team members if at all possible. Though it’s not needed for the entire Incubator period, even a few weeks of dedicated time together can be invaluable.
An Open Sky for Growth
What was once growing in significant protective layers is set out into the wild – where it can grow to heights you never dreamed of.
The Incubator journey will ultimately come to an end! Our goal for the entire Incubator will be for you to get to a point where you feel confident in your ability to manage and grow a Create Team or Community. Regardless of the specifics on how long this takes each group, there will come a time where you leave Labs and get going on your own.
Why?
The creation of the Incubator really comes from two distinct areas – both of which stem from our desire to find gaps, problems, and opportunities within our global ministry.
Brand New Ventures
The first reason is two-fold, it’s an attempt to solve a possible future issue and a past speed bump. Namely, for those individuals and groups that desire to develop a team with a brand new focus, or theme, it can be difficult to know where to start, or how to go about doing something so different than their current Create work.
This has been done many times before – Taiwan, Mobile, and Seeds were all birthed from a Center (a team that worked shoulder-to-shoulder) that was primarily film-focused – and each one of these had to tackle distinct challenges to move away from that system.
Exposure to In-Person Create Teams
The second reason is due to the increasing amount of remote work being done, or more specifically, the amount of Teams that prefer this model. While we are not proposing we limit this, it does raise questions about the effectiveness of our modeling. This situation poses challenges, particularly for staff members aiming to create new teams in the future but lack experience in fostering an in-person team environment. The current Create teams, all of which originated from in-person settings, benefited from a stable community as their foundation – an aspect that is challenging for many teams primarily working remotely to replicate.
So, the Incubator was created – primarily to address these concerns. As such, the Incubator as three disticnt objectives:
Facilitate Team Development:
The Incubator will serve as a dedicated space where individuals can focus entirely on the development of their teams, encompassing aspects such as vision, values, goals, structure, and thematic focus – though, admittedly, not location.
Provide Guidance and Input:
Participants in the Incubator will benefit from mentorship and healthy input from experienced leaders (either in-person or dedicated video conferencing), enhancing their understanding of in-person team dynamics and operational intricacies.
Promote Innovation:
By encouraging the exploration of diverse themes and goals, the Incubator aims to incubate novel ideas and approaches, contributing to the overall innovation within our ministry.
FAQ
Do potential team leaders have to travel to Chiang Mai to participate in the Incubator process?
For Incubator specifically, yes. We’re wanting these potential new leaders to get some experience in in-person team leadership. Something we’re concerned isn’t happening as often these days.
Now, of course we’ll continue to assist the creation of new teams in other ways, so we’ll continue to assist from afar. But this would be a specific format to help those that really want in-person, purposeful, facilitated format.
We are also, particularly, interested in teams with new focuses. For instance if we had a group of people interested in creating a team focused on gaming, or virtual spaces, or audio-only content, or whatever is coming down the line – then Incubator would be the best way forward. Doing it from the get-go to allows them complete focus on not only team development but also working out the goals and vision of that new team.
This person is likely to be part of an existing Team, what happens with that?
The purpose of the Incubator is to allow someone, or a group of people, a way to focus entirely on team creation and development. This means that they will necessarily need to take a step back from their current Team responsibilities. That said, this is unlikely to be something that happens swiftly – as most teams will need time to shuffle responsibilities around and finish current projects. Additionally, the burgeoning team is also going to want to continue working relationships anyway – as most teams currently do work together in various ways. This should result in an environment whereby, though the individuals are taking a step back from current responsibilities, they will likely form new and unique relationships in preparation for the future.
How long would you envision that emerging team leaders would need to complete the Incubator in Chiang Mai before they are ready to be released into their new role?
Due to our own constraints the Incubator will range from 3 to 9 months. Anything shorter is probably not enough time. It would also be possible to do 12 months, but at that stage we’d be highly recommending that team members become involved to some degree.
Who would determine whether someone is ready to be released into their new role?
We don’t believe that the completion of a time in the Incubator would result in someone automatically being released. Similar to how completing an SFM in the past didn’t automatically make you staff.
We believe that the same process of raising up team leaders should continue, and not be contingent on Incubator. How we decide if someone can lead a team might change in the future, but we don’t think that should be due to the completion of time in the Incubator. This would just give us a lot more in-person time with the people, as well as give them more experience.