Naming Stuff

At Elevation, we place a high priority on naming stuff. Events, Meetings, Teams, Rooms, People who need new monikers, we name them all. It’s part of who we are, and we have fun doing it.

For a season I ate lunch every week with our lead staff. I didn’t just call it Lead Staff Lunch. No siree, I called it XLC. X-treme Lunch Challenge. Our strategy meeting that took place right after lunch was called CN. What that stands for is confidential. Now the meeting is called Preview. Before CN it was called something else, I can’t remember.

Just now, before writing this blog, I spent an hour trying to come up with a tagline for our Code Orange Revival. That was after a whole long segment of a meeting where we banged our heads on about 20 taglines that didn’t work. Coming up with the name Code Orange Revival itself was a whole other, multi day on and off process. I used two pages of research to nail that one down.

Maybe this seems eccentric, but I won’t even commit to doing something until I can figure out what we’re going to call it.

The upside is that this helps me think about an initiative at a vision level before I get all bogged down in the details.
Asking the question: What are we going to call it? helps me make decisions about who is it for? What should it feel like? How big will it be? Before we ever roll it out, and get it in the works.

There is creative power in our language.
Put a little extra thought into naming the stuff you’re responsible for. It might make more difference than you think.

Genesis 2:19-20
Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.

(It only took me about 5 seconds to name this blog entry, ironically.)