Let's Talk About It | Saul Kaplan | May 6, 2020

You're tuned into Made for Mondays with Justin Lester. Justin Lester is an average guy who refuses to let Mondays control him. Justin is a husband, dad, pastor, student, and Jesus follower. He's done a lot, he's learned a lot, and he wants to see you at your best. Let's win Mondays. Hey, Justin. What's up today?

Well, hey, everyone. Welcome to Made for Mondays Today. Today we're blessed to have a very special guest and Saul Kaplan from Business Innovation Factory. As we discuss being identity, healthcare, and innovation in the midst of all of this crisis going on in our country, we pray that this will bless you and enrich everything inside of you to be the person that God has called you to be. Now, this conversation was recorded on Zoom, so the audio quality is not perfect, but. But the content is great for you. Now, let's jump into our conversation today.

Well, hey, everyone. Justin here. So I'm so excited to welcome today Mr. Saul Kaplan. Mr. Saul is my wife's boss, but before that, I knew about him and heard about you and learned a lot about you from, I think it was the Storytellers conference and things like that you guys did at bif. My wife had seen it just a long time ago and just talked constantly about how much of an amazing leader you are. And so I was really happy to meet you, whether it's in this capacity or another one. And so I'm really happy to welcome to talk about in our first leg of Family Matters, Mr. Saul Kaplan from Business Innovation Factory. Welcome, Saul.

Great to be with you. Justin. Let me just first say how much I love working with Courtney. It's been fantastic to have her on the team. Of course, she joins us right as the COVID 19 crisis is on us. And thank goodness, because she's been great. I'm also really impressed with the work you're doing at Conye Street Baptist Church.

Thank you.

Everything I hear, everything I see, you really got it going on. We're learning from you, my friend.

Oh, thank you. And I'm not gonna lie. The BIF and you have in the background and the Storytellers, we were gonna have our first Storytellers conference this year at our church. Literally, my wife was just enamored with the first time she saw and heard about it. And so I'm not gonna lie, we were gonna copy it. And she absolutely love. And I'm happy that she's there. I'm happy she's happy working with the basement factory. So, Saul, the reason I had you on here. So our congregation and the people that I lead. We're growing. And what's awesome, we have six generations, a part of our congregation. And so we go. Our oldest number, I think, is 94, 95, all the way down to. We had a newborn a couple weeks ago. She's part of Luna Youth, had a newborn a couple weeks ago. And so we have babies all the way to seniors. And in the midst of all of that, we have a lot of students, millennials, Gen X, boomers, and all of that. And what I notice in our community and our culture in general is that there seems to be a divide between whether it's cultural, whatever it is, just between baby boomers and millennials. And as I saw a lot of the things that you were writing about in terms of living life after COVID 19, what it means to even see what's going on with seniors in nursing homes now. And as the son of a millennial parent, my wife is the daughter of a boomer parent. My wife is a daughter of a Boomer parent. I'm trying to see how we can restore this. And one of the first places I think, is looking at health care. And when I saw your care for it, I wanted to approach that today. And so I guess, first of all, why is this topic in terms of health care for baby boomers, even now, even when you mentioned professors? We'll get to that later. But like baby boomers now and looking towards the future, why is that so important for us to address in the midst of COVID 19 and anticipating the future?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's always been important. And as it gets personal for me as I age, both my wife and I in her early 60s, so we're right in the boomer generation. So we have a vested interest in aging and watching it. We also have one remaining parent living. We're very fortunate. My wife's mom lives around the corner from us here in Rhode Island. She's about to be 90. And so, of course, it's a blessing to be living nearby and to be close. So not six generations, that's impressive congregation, but four generations.

Right.

My mother, we're grandparents. My daughter lives around the corner, and she has three granddaughters. So we have four generations that were really fortunate to be close and to be interacting with each other. So I really find the intergenerational and the connection between and amongst generations to be really interesting. And that was before COVID 19 hit. When it hit, everything took on a whole new perspective around generations and around health. And so we can dive into that a little bit more. It Started primarily with our mom, who will be 90, who we heard and began to see as the crisis hit, were the most at risk. And so a lot of it became every day, how do we make sure that we're protecting her? How do we make sure that we're rallying around her? The idea of her becoming more and more isolated in the context of COVID 19 really concerned us. So how do we keep her health central in our thinking? But then it also translates down to each generation. You know, for us in our 60s, you know, a lot of talk about us being more at risk than generations who came after us. How do we look after ourselves and how do we all support each other? So how do the younger generations, you know, actually rally around each generation and not get into this trap of each generation for itself, which is just wrong on so many dimensions. So I'm interested in all of it, and you can unbundle it. And we're still learning every day. And all COVID 19 did is amplify it, make it urgent, and make us a little more reflective about those.

So what would you say to. So I want to get to. What would we say to. What we could say to millennials, but what would you say to your own generation? So the people in your age group about, like you talk about just about care, like, being open to the conversation I forgot about. I didn't think about the fact that, yes, we could have. You would have parents that would be still living or could still be living that would be so at risk for. But what would you say to people in your age group in terms of engaging with this conversation on healthcare before not just it gets too late, but one of the rules I have in my church is I will never do a GoFundMe funeral. I just won't. And we will not just fund a funeral at the end. And it's unfortunate. We've had situations where we've had to go into our own pocket at the church and fund things because we didn't prepare. But I don't. I want to think way before funerals and just care, self care, mental care, relational care, all of that. How. What would be something you could say to boomers in terms of opening up these type of conversations with either children or people the same age as them?

I think it starts with just having this intergenerational perspective.

Right.

So the first thing I mean, what we always say at BIFF is one of our core principles is let's catalyze something bigger than any of us.

Right?

So, you know, have a lens that you're not thinking about yourself, you're not thinking about your generation, you're thinking about those around you. So as I said, the first inclination for us was if we're. If you're lucky enough to still have parents that are living right, let's first be in service of them. Right? Before I ever started thinking about my own health in this crisis or thinking about aging, and we'll come back to boomers and aging, aging in place, right. We started hearing those stories about the risk of the elder community, right? And then it got worse and worse. And still the stories I hear today about in nursing homes, elder individuals that are in congregate care, which by definition means they're in close contact with lots of other people, you know, in these closed environments. Right. The numbers are alarming, mildly, of what's been happening in this environment. So we were very fortunate, right. Our mom lives at home. She lives. She's in place. We had to make some accommodations to that. And we're fortunate to live around the corner, be very attentive, and to visit.

With her a lot.

This generation is really vulnerable to loneliness and isolation. The medical research is very clear about the health consequences of loneliness and being isolated. That only is made worse in this crisis.

Yeah.

And so we started thinking about that generation and what could we do? How could we make sure, you know, that we were staying connected, we were staying engaged? You know, in our mom's case, she's not, you know, on. She's not doing zoom calls. So to be able to stay connected, we had lots of doorstep visits, right. We were comfortable. We very cautious about who we were going to have be in contact with her, all the warnings that we said. But we wanted to make sure we were really working on that isolation aspect of being elderly. And then all of a sudden, it started to come down to our own generation, because now we start to hear about ways we're going to open up our communities and our economy again. So you hear lots of stories about who's safe, who can start to interact in constrained, limited ways with other folks. But there's always a caveat at the end of that. When we hear from our leaders that says if you have underlying conditions or you are elderly, and we hear lots of different definitions about what that means, but it starts pretty close to home. You start to hear rhetoric that says we young people can go back into the community, right? And you old people, you know, have got to remain isolated. And then when you tie it back to the health consequences of isolation, you start to get Concerned. So I think first and most important thing here is to be cognizant of this, to have empathy for that right, to pay extra close attention to your friends and your family, to be sensitive to people. I know you were in a hurry to get back to work and I understand. But let's have a bit of empathy for those that might be more at risk and includes many boomers that as the world starts to get back and recover, which is great, right? How do we remain empathetic to and connected to people that are feeling more and more isolated in order to protect their own well being really important and not, not a technically hard thing to do.

Right.

You don't need to invent anything. We just need to be more human and pay attention to those relationships.

That's so true. There's a. I was reading something that the grace of humanness, right? Just the importance of seeing grace, extending grace, being a grace filled person in terms of understanding and owning our own humanity. And I guess that even speaks to like the next question I was going to ask for you then. So that generational divide when it comes to. So for example, in Florida when this all first hit, the first thing that happened was, okay, so whole generation Gen Z, not millennials, Gen z, but these 24 to whatchamacallit down to 18 year olds are running to the beach for their spring break or these 16 year olds are running to the beach for their spring break and it puts others at risk. And then all of a sudden when millennials did start getting hit and Gen Z did start getting hit with COVID then it was oh my gosh, like it is a young person's disease too. It's virus too. It's not just an old person's thing. How do we begin to, in a health way or in a healthy, in a well way, begin to mend that divide in an empathetic and human way? Because like you said earlier, so yes, there is the doorstep visits that you had. And even now as it is like, okay, so people go back into the world. That doesn't mean everyone can't. Right? And that's because some people are more prone to certain things, things like that. And I've seen a lot of race stuff, but I don't want to get into that. I want to mainly just generationally, how can we as millennials as you, or if you were talking to me or someone in a place I'm open to the conversation, right. How can we be cognizant and human like you said, in the midst of caring for community, by caring for our community. That makes sense.

Yeah. And I would say a lot of this comes from this. This compulsion with wanting to segment populations. Right. Even this rhetoric about what generation, and now I can't even keep track, dividing the younger generations even further, subdividing. Right. And that's what it does. It divides us. Right. It segments us. It says, you know, and rather than saying, wait, we're part of a community, we're part of a family. Right? Which is the way we should be thinking about it. Right? Because those pictures you're talking about, right? You can imagine what folks in my generation or older when they saw those folks on those beaches, or you see folks coming back out of it in some states sooner than others. And despite all of the leaders that are talking about social distancing, people are starting to crowd back into locations again. That might be okay for younger folks who even if they get the virus, have a really good chance of having it be mild or certainly not having it be life threatening, but they go back out and interact with other people, it becomes life threatening for folks that have underlying conditions or are elderly. So instead, thinking about us as segmented slices of the population, why aren't we thinking about the family, the extended families, and by definition thinking about that across generations and not allowing our identities to become branded by marketers that are trying to market products to us by labeling us a particular slice of the population. Or, you know, we can talk about racial differences, which is another way to divide us. Huge disparities in our experiences, huge disparities in healthcare outcomes. If we talk about healthcare, it's one of the saddest parts of this whole crisis is something a lot of us have known for a long time talking about. But all of a sudden it seems like people are surprised when data comes out, say that these of our population are bearing more of the brunt of what's happening with this. Like, no kidding, that was existing way before. Maybe we'll actually pay attention to it now. Same thing is true on generational divides.

So with that, I guess one of the things I'm looking to. So with all of that together, nonprofit management for me is going to sh. Just being leading a church. Like, I'm thinking about the future in terms of. Like, I recently finished reading this book by Kevin Kelly and I talked about the 12 technological forces that are gonna shape our future. And it rested my mind to begin to think about trends. And I'm trying to think about the things that are gonna be important and the things that aren't. Gonna be important. Right. So I know, for example, as a pastor, our congregation probably will not see our full force again for at least one to two years. Right. Just because people that want to come back, people that won't. Our church is growing. So people not want to be in a closed, congested space with only like three exits. Right. And so. And two bathrooms. So it's going to be difficult, different to even imagine church. But I'm also thinking about the spaces that are really going to matter and be enriched. And I'm curious your thoughts too, on the trends for nonprofit management. Because I feel like a lot of the care, the social movement, social justice, food justice. Like, I'm thinking about food deserts even. Right. Like, so it's amazing what food is available on grubhub in certain zip codes. Right. Like we live in Central Falls and we're lucky that there's a Chipotle in Attleboro because if not, you know, we wouldn't. We wouldn't have access to any of the good but fresh stuff that's in the center of Providence. And if we don't have a car or even the resources, we'd really be just out of luck. So I'm curious your thoughts on like, the trends for. Because of social activism and civic engagement, social political engagement. What are trends you envision or might happen in nonprofit management and for the future?

Well, I think leadership completely shifts whether you're a nonprofit or you're running any organization. And I think this crisis only shines a big spotlight on that. First of all, bestow my heart any reverend who cites Kevin Kelly. Okay. In this innovation junkie's book.

Yeah.

No, it changes everything. I always talk about leaders less as managers and more as catalysts. Right. More as being in service of others and creating the conditions and environment, you know, for people and communities to be their best selves. Right. And you get me started on organized religion, whatever, you know, religion we're talking about.

Right.

And all the wonderful things that organize religion, if I could just unbundle it.

Yeah.

And recombine the parts. Right. More in service of human flourishing for the individual. And about the structure, the. What I call the industrial error aspects of organized religion. It's a church, it's a synagogue temple, It's a community. It's a way to connect people. It's a way to work on that isolation and loneliness that has bad health care outcomes. It's a way to focus on the principles that if we really live them, not only would we be healthier and our well being would Improve, but we would be in service of helping others. And we'd be thinking more about the community and about ourselves and our generation, but everybody who lives in our community. And so I think leadership in that context takes on an entire new role. You've been working really hard within the constraints you were working on it before the crisis to use technology to enable human and to enable humanity. Right. So that gave you a head start when this crisis happened. I watch a lot of the things you're doing in congregation, but in the absence of being able to convene in the physical place, the church. Right. I don't think you've missed a beat in terms of looking for ways to create that connectivity, to keep people engaged, to keep conversations moving, to keep people helping themselves, their families and their community. And so I think that's the biggest change that's gonn.

Right.

A lot of the models that we lived and worked in, whether it's religion or any industry you work in, it could be healthcare. You know, healthcare takes place in a doctor's office, in a hospital. Takes place in the State House. No, it doesn't. It takes place in the community. Takes place in the community. And how do we as leaders act as the catalysts that create the conditions for what I would call more organic engagement. Right. And connecting people in community, that becomes a lot more purposeful.

Wow. Yeah, that's. Wow. That gives me a lot to think about. I know this will be a blessing to our. Because we have some amazing leaders in our congregation and even like the people that listen to our podcast that are really great people that are great leaders. And I think just the. I think what I guess I'm challenged by. I'm so a lot of things in my head. I have a lot of questions because I'm like, I'm writing my dissertation currently on gamification and gamifying the local church and this whole notion of human focused design. And I'm curious, it's shifted. Like I literally before the COVID I had a certain picture of what human focused church look like.

Right.

And so now after this happened, I'm like, human focus, like, what is designing in gamifying a church? Gamifying? Just spaces really look like in terms of human focused design instead of like you said, like, I guess, bottom line design. Right. I think confronting our own institutionalized sin in spaces that are supposed to be, you know, all of that I think is very interesting. So thank you so much for this. I think this, this is so helpful for me and I know it'll be Helpful for our congregation and to all our podcast listeners too. I think it'd be really great and thankful if you can share just a little bit. My wife tells me about it, but I want to, I guess, for us to kind of get out there because you guys have. BIF has been to the church before and if you could just share with us a little bit about, like, what is BIF and what was your motivation? I guess what motivates you to continue this? I think for me, what is a great organization, what is it? And what is the kind of the core motivation behind continuing to push the innovating that you guys do?

Well, thank you. I'll just give you the short version of it is a nonprofit that is trying to help leaders to make transformations easier to manage. And what I mean by that is it's human nature. Everybody says they're innovation, you know, they're about innovation. I always say everyone loves innovation until it affects them. And then. Right. And so we focus on not just small incremental change. Like this is the way the church works today. How do we treat? Make it a little better. You should do that, make it better every day. But we focus on what would it look like if you transformed it, what would it look like if you designed it from the congregant and their experience and their pain point what they're trying to do and then without constraints, right. Determine what does it take for you to add value, to catalyze, you know that, you know that individual, the family, you know that community, and can allow yourself the freedom to imagine a different way of it working. And can you do lots of small experiments?

Right.

So we're very big on like coming up with a concept, not overthinking it. Right. Trying to design it quickly. Like I always talk about napkin sketches to design something new. Don't need to study something, you know, for a year. Like we don't need to analyze something forever before we act. Right. We can come up with a different way it might work. And then can we actually render it in the real world at a small scale? And we try it. Like the technical term for it is try more stuff. Right. And so that's what we do. We've done that work in education, in public service, and in healthcare. Right now we're working specifically in healthcare within maternal health, you know, trying to shape a transformational approach to put well being more in the center and to put the woman more in the center of her own pregnancy. And Courtney is playing the role of the well being coach. And it's amazing what she's brought to this party. And every day we get to work with pregnant women in our community that I don't need to tell you how frightened they are right now given crisis. So it's a blessing to do this work, and it's making a real difference in people's lives. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about our work. It's the same idea that we talked in the context of organized religion. How do you shift, see it through the lens of a human that you're trying to support or help you design a different way to change that experience for the better. And then how do you render it in the real world so that you can start to help more people?

See, I love that. And I could talk all day. I could ask you so many questions because for me. But I save it for another day because I guess, like, it's amazing. I remember when I was interviewing at not this church, but other churches, and the first thing was like, we gotta be like Transformers. We gotta innovate. But that just means, like, adding a social media page, right? And it's so much beyond an app and social media. There's, like you said, human focused, intentional work that comes with knowing folks, hearts and minds. And even when I pitched my dissertation to my professors, they couldn't believe that we're talking about a church that's not going to, you know, be looking at a bottom line immediately, but about, like you said, human focused work.

And that's.

That's amazing. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna end the recording in a second. So everyone, thank you guys for listening in. Sal, if we wanted to get in contact with you or find you on, like, Twitter or all those different types of things, how can we find you?

I'm very easy to find. I leave a lot of digital crumbs on Twitter and sk85. And it's not hard. It's not hard to find me. And I thrive on reactions. Good, bad, you know, everything that helps me to learn faster and to try more stuff is always helpful. Awesome.

Well, thank you. I'm gonna just end this recording.

This has been made for Mondays with Justin and Lester. Be sure to follow Justin online at Mr. J Lester and online at www.jlester.com. see you next week. Go win. You were made for.