PSD/CCD Seminar

Yesterday and today our Communication Department had all-day meetings with the Publishing Services Department. In the coming months, we will be merging with them, so this was a “team building” experience to start to bring our 2 groups together. Together, we were about 30. Rita Daniels (from Hungary) is the head of the PSD. Our boss, Dinis (from Portugal) is the head of CCD. We are a very international group.

Publishing Services includes Translation, Graphic Design, Video and Photography, and all things relating to publishing what Communications creates. I was interested to learn that about 90% or more of the work the Translation Team (about 83 translators, and their managers) does is for SLC HQ. So we are a small part of their world over here.

Our day was filled with training, and discussion about Pres. Nelson’s vision for the future and the many ways the Lord is hastening His work here.

At the end of the day, one of the translators from Italy taught us all how to make Neapolitan Pizza. We made batches of dough, then used dough he made last night to bake pizzas in his little portable pizza oven (200 Euro for an oven that goes to 750 degrees). So we had fun with that, and ate what we made, but then it was dinner time and they had a catered Indian meal that was tasty.

We all stayed through the evening. They had games and 2 guys brought out their guitars and played great music–Simon and Garfunkle and all the oldies. They were really good and I loved hearing that music.

Seminar, Day 2

Today we talked about what they call a SWOT Analysis in the business world: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. We broke into groups and each had one of these topics. We used big post-it notes to list all of the things we could about our situation as a Church trying to communicate with the world. It made for an afternoon of interesting discussion and evaluation.

After lunch we continued by talking about how to create objectives (the what, not how) of what we want to do with each of these SWOT topics. We stayed in the same groups and each worked on a single objective to go along with our Area Goals and Purposes. Our two were: Create excitement about peace, belonging and covenant connection found in the temple. Then, Assist local church leaders to build positive relationships with community and opinion leaders.

The next step (but we were out of time) would’ve been to create action items (the how) for our objectives. This seminar will continue next month as we all continue working on the things we discussed this week.