To Be SENT Forth

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the SENT Ventures Summit in Denver. The Summit is an annual event that brings Catholic builders (business and ministry) together to share, learn, and encourage, along the way to building world-class ventures that blend operational excellence with living Christian values. This year’s event encompassed keynotes from leading voices on numerous topics – AI, organizational leadership, faith and family, meaning and purpose, finance and investment – as well as opportunities to meet and mingle with faithful strivers from around the world. The Summit did not disappoint. SENT Ventures CEO, Nick Madden, kicked-off the Summit by sharing some of the origin story of SENT. John Cannon founded the organization to inspires entrepreneurs through the lives of Saints like Frances de Sales and Mother Cabrini who built ministries that not only served the world, but were world-changing in scope and scale. Madden characterized the Summit as not only a place to learn, but more importantly, an opportunity to experience “holy collisions” with other builders and faith-filled leaders working to change the world through their particular mission field in business or direct ministry. Dr. Jonathan Reyes, Founding President of the Augustine Institute opened by framing our movement into modernity over the last 200 years as a shift from societies ordered to relational principles to societies ordered to functional principles. This movement toward technology and productivity, massive cities, and centralized institutions has created significant isolation as human beings moved from being valued for who they are to being valued for what they can produce. Reyes presentation wasn’t so much a critique of history as a call to business leaders to put relationship over function in the organizations they are building. Author Patrick Lencioni followed with a discussion on Working Genius, his model for team development and collaboration. Lencioni described the six forms of “working genius”: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity. Each of us is strong in two of the categories, competent in two of the categories, and weak in two. In this case, strength and weakness are more about the things we do that are life-giving versus those things that drain us. Really interesting aspects of his model are its independence from role and its process orientation – it gets to the heart of creating a high-performance team by having the right combination of types of genius collaborating. Louis Kim facilitated an interesting AI discussion with panelists Taylor Black, Vincent Higgins, and Matthew Harvey Sanders. The title of the session was AI, Technology, and the Human Person. A core concern of these leaders was the centralization of power in the hands of a few AI powerhouses – not only the direction and development of the technology but also the processing power itself, as the biggest organizations buy-up available processing capacity, thereby pushing out competition. Panel members also referenced “new” and “old” paradigms of work and the role of human beings, suggesting that the very idea of work and career were rapidly changing as the capabilities of AI-driven machines evolve. There was way too much to tackle in a few sentences, but I walked away both troubled by AI trends and hopeful in the massive opportunity to harness this technology to augment individual human beings in helping humanity become more human. A conversation for another post. I had the opportunity to introduce Arthur Brooks on the second day of the Summit and he did not disappoint. Author and Social Scientist, Brooks walked the audience through what he sees as an “age of emptiness” and the opportunity for each of us to find meaning and purpose. His book, The Meaning of Your Life, provides the details but his was an entertaining journey through updated discoveries on left and right brain thinking, the doom loops we find ourselves in, the dangers of our phones and distraction, and mechanisms for transcending yourself. There are two particularly compelling insights he shared during his talk and in his book. One is how he characterizes the differences between complicated and complex problems. Complicated issues are the ones we solve through effort, structure, design, intention – left brain thinking. Complex issues are right brain challenges that are not things to be solved but things to be contemplated and lived – relationships and mysteries. He argues that distractions keep us from shifting into the deeper, more transcendent, right brain thinking that helps us come closer to finding our meaning and purpose. The other compelling insight he shared was around two questions he likes to ask students: Why does your life matter? (Why are you here?) and What would you die for? Brooks has found that many of his students are unable to answer these questions in any meaningful way and even those who can answer one of them often struggle as they really contemplate the other. Beyond the obvious (my children, my spouse, etc.) what would I die for? These questions get to the heart of meaning and, having spent some time honestly reflecting upon them, I have found them to be great starting points for firing-up some right brain thinking. Obviously, there was far too much to effectively summarize in a few paragraphs. However, this post offers a few breadcrumbs for those who may feel compelled to dig a bit deeper into some of the topics and speakers. For me, many holy collisions occurred at meals, in hallways, during Mass, and in the unexpected moments of encounter that mystically happen when we put ourselves in such places. My main takeaway was that, despite the many discouraging elements of our world and the culture of division that seems to dominate headlines and newsfeeds, there are many, many, people who are working to live faithful, hopeful, and world-changing lives in their mission fields of business, ministry, and charity. And I find that truly encouraging.