Faith & Leadership
MANAGEMENT, STRATEGY, EVALUATION & ASSESSMENT
Dave Odom: Name your mission, develop strategies and then evaluate impactName mission, develop strategies, and then evaluate impact
CLARIFYING MISSION IS ONLY THE FIRST STEP IN THE PROCESS
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Clarifying mission is just the first step. Leaders must then align strategies with the desired impact, writes the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
The question, “What is your mission?” sends waves of panic through many Christian congregations and other institutions. Why? Do we not know what to do? Are we so confused by the rapid pace of change that even our basic purpose feels unsettled?
Many congregations are caught between finding meaning in the worship, study, ministry and missions that have sustained faith through several generations and addressing the concern that young people are not coming to church. We read about the rising number of people with no religious affiliation (the “nones”), and many of us realize that our grandchildren and their friends are not in church.
This situation leaves many with doubts about what our congregations are doing. We wonder whether the church down the road has things figured out.
The vocabulary also trips us up, with people using “mission,” “purpose,” “vision” and “strategy” to mean different things. The simplest approach defines “mission” as the completion of the sentence, “We exist to …” Mission is action-oriented; purpose is more about being. The two are closely connected.
Another challenge is that a clear mission does not always result in a specific strategy. The mission of a congregation might be to “make disciples,” using the phrase from Mathew 28’s Great Commission. The statement is short, memorable and rooted in the Christian tradition. Unfortunately, it does not indicate to a congregation how or whereto do that work.
Seminaries also have this challenge. At one level, the mission of a seminary could be simple: “We exist to train pastors.” A denominationally owned and operated seminary trains pastors for that denomination’s congregations. The denomination wants the education to be accredited so that students can get federal loans. The accrediting agency determines the objectives of the curriculum through its standards. The seminary hires a faculty that meets the standards of both the denomination and the accrediting agency.
But what happens if congregations don’t need as many pastors? What happens if congregations decide to train their own leaders? What happens if the cost of education is beyond the ability of the students and denomination to pay? In light of changing conditions, seminaries are revisiting their missions and strategies. Everything is getting reshaped.
Effective strategies are focused on activities with specific people and places. But determining and following those strategies can be a challenge. The ways that we have lived out the mission don’t seem to be having the same impact as before. We feel a need to do something different, yet many of our current strategies have meaning for us and our communities.
In some ways, congregations have the most complicated challenge. Congregations exist to bear witness to God’s love shown in creation, the gift of the Son for salvation and the Holy Spirit. Communities need that witness, but in the current moment, the witness is not systematically welcomed.
What do we do when the ways that we witness bring us comfort but no one outside the church is paying attention? How does it affect strategy when the mission is clear to us but those outside don’t understand it?
Along with this concern, the fact is that changing a strategy in a congregation is very difficult. Every single element of the strategy includes choices made at some point in the congregation’s history. Every strategy includes activities that are meaningful to some of the members. All the choices took time to become habits. Members feel loyalty to one another, to the place, to the activity and to their experience of the activity over a lifetime. It is challenging to help them learn to see how an activity affects those outside the congregation.
Rather than wringing our hands about the clarity of a mission statement, we might make more progress by discussing the impact of our strategies. How do we know that we are bearing witness to the Triune God? What is the evidence? If it takes a long time for the evidence to show up, what are the signs that are early indicators of the evidence?
These questions require conversation among the leaders and members, along with people outside the church. Do principals, teachers, judges, public health professionals, police officers and social workers see the evidence of your congregation’s impact? If not, why not? Who outside the church should be noticing the impact you have named?
With the mission in mind and the impact articulated, the most difficult challenges are ahead -- imagining new ways to increase the impact, giving less effort to activities that are contributing less and staying consistent on activities that are making a difference.
The art of leadership lies in discerning when to press for the new, when to maintain speed and direction for the established, and when to let go of the no longer effective -- and then bringing others along in executing these moves.
Circling around and around a mission statement is a way to delay all the other important conversations and decisions. For Christians, mission statements matter, but from a human standpoint, faithfulness is measured by our deeds, our impact in the world.
Read more from David L. Odom »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: MAKING AN IMPACT
Faith & Leadership
What difference do you want to make?
MANAGEMENT, STRATEGY
Nathan Kirkpatrick: What difference do you want to make?
Bigstock/iqoncept
Congregations and institutions must name a vision and choose priorities that support it. Otherwise, they risk muddying their missions, weakening their impact, and confusing stakeholders, funders, and staff, writes a managing director at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
“What is the most pressing issue that we, as people of faith, should be working on in our community?”
The question was simple to understand but difficult to answer, and that was precisely the point of this congregational listening session.
A community partner had asked our congregation to identify the issues we felt most needed the collective response and advocacy of our county’s communities of faith. Our congregation named nine distinct priorities, ranging from affordable housing to health care to advocacy for victims of sexual assault on college campuses to the removal of the Confederate flag from all government property in the county.
All nine were important, deserving substantive and sustained Christian witness. But given limited community and congregational capacities (the limitations of time, if nothing else), we had to prioritize further.
The facilitators invited each of us to vote for our top two issues, and affordable housing and health care emerged as the most pressing challenges for our community.
Yet as soon as the voting process ended, our unease set in.
To prioritize those two issues would mean that an identification project for undocumented immigrants would have to wait for our support. So would lobbying around land use and sustainable development, faith-based advocacy for the victims of sexual assault, and a prophetic call for a public exploration of the effects of race and racism in policing and prosecutions.
None of us felt good about the trade-offs inherent in our choices, but we had been told that we had to choose: What is the most pressing issue or issues that we, as people of faith, should be working on?
Identifying a single priority -- or even a constellation of priorities -- is a frequent struggle for congregations and institutions, not just my own. Of course, it isn’t just that there are too many issues that deserve our response or too many opportunities and challenges before us.
It is also the case that prioritization can lead to feelings of “winning” and “losing” among stakeholders as particular agenda items are elevated as the central focus of our work and others must recede. For leaders who are driven by pleasing others or who are conflict-averse by nature, this is a particularly unpalatable part of prioritization, especially if it means disappointing an outspoken stakeholder.
Indeed, many congregational and institutional leaders just keep adding priorities to already-lengthy lists. The result is not hard to predict. With an ever-diffusing focus, congregations and institutions risk muddying their missions, weakening their impact, and confusing stakeholders, funders and staff alike. The old adage is right: an organization that wants to be everything to everyone becomes nothing to anyone.
In his 2014 book “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,”(link is external) Greg McKeown offers a curious linguistic historical note. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the word “priority” began to appear regularly in its plural form. Until then, there was a shared understanding that for a given entity, there could be only one priority at a time. One thing was named as the “priority” to the exclusion of all other things. Yet in the mid-20th century, we began speaking and writing about “priorities” -- plural -- a shift that announced a coming multitasking, multifocused world.
If your congregation or institution is one of the many that need to reduce priorities back to something manageable and meaningful, how might you go about that work? My congregation’s listening session is one model; it’s certainly a relatively efficient approach and provides some meaningful data.
My preference, though, is for congregational or institutional discernment that unfolds in a different way. Rather than using existing stated priorities as the starting point for your discussion, why not begin the conversation with the larger missional question of telos, the end of your work?
Imagine the conversation about priorities beginning with a discussion about the difference you feel called to make in your community and in the world. What you and your colleagues in ministry envision then becomes the guidepost against which you weigh all possible priorities: Would adopting this priority move us closer to the vision we have discerned?
One note here. Congregational or institutional mission statements once offered some help in this regard. Unfortunately, many mission statements are now too clichéd, too ambiguous, too broad or too generic to orient our work. The articulation of a clear-eyed, Spirit-led vision of the world that your work seeks to create can become a new means of discerning priorities.
Even if your organization has already done the hard work of narrowing your focus, sharing a conversation about the difference you feel called to make in your community or in the world can be a renewing and life-giving moment in your work together.
Read more from Nathan E. Kirkpatrick »
What type of visionary are you?Visionaries are in high demand. They have been for quite some time now, to the extent that supply and demand has impacted the visionary role of leadership. Organizations demand visionaries, and leaders in the marketplace have learned to supply organizations with their greatest desire. The other day I was sifting through a set of profiles for a leadership position and over one-half of the potential candidates presented themselves as visionary leaders. The problem is that we are still viewing all visionaries alike, while multiple visionary styles have emerged among the leadership. We have asked for visionaries and we have received them. But, do we know what we have? Increased supply has led to dilution of meaning and ambiguity of understanding. Perhaps it is time to sort out this whole visionary genre just a little bit. In this article, I present six styles of visionary leadership. I encourage you to read on to see what type of visionary you mirror or what type of visionary you need for your organization. But first, allow me to surface a working definition of the terms vision andvisionary.
A vision is a picture that we can see in our minds. The Bible is full of dreams and visions. Dreams occur when we are sleeping and visions occur when we are awake. Both present us with a picture of something that we do not need to be physically present to “see.” The primary task of a visionary, then, is to see what others cannot see. Visionaries portray a picture that we have not seen ourselves. To be a visionary leader, however, the visionary must also be capable of transferring the picture in his or her mind into the minds of others. Thus, in my definition, visionaries can not only see the picture in their minds, but are capable of revealing the picture in such a way that we are able to see it as well. What type of pictures do visionaries depict? The answer to that depends upon the type of visionary revealing the vision. But one thing is certain. Visions are not rare; they are unavoidable.
As it turns out, we are all visionaries in terms of how our human brains function. Jeffrey Hawkins’s research on the human brain suggests that the primary function of our cortex is to make constant predictions about what will occur next.1 If this is true, then we cannot help but see into the future. Whether our brain’s predictions come true or not determines the next set of predictions. Predictions formed from inveterate patterns create strong, difficult to change blueprints in our minds. That is why it is much easier to say the alphabet forward rather than backward. Our brain is telling us what to expect next.
Because our brains cannot avoid predicting the future, visions are ubiquitous. Minute predictions are occurring hundreds of thousands of times a day in each of our brains. We all have a vision of what will happen next. When we walk into a sanctuary where we have worshiped before, our brain predicts the next person around the corner, the next word on the bulletin board, the next smell from the candle, the next note in the music, the next tone of the speaker. While some of us may be reluctant visionaries; we are all visionaries. Our brains present each one of us with an image of the future.
The role of a visionary then is not to envision while the rest of us sit idle. As we have discovered, it is impossible to maintain a blank slate or idle picture of the future. Left alone with our predictable patterns, we erect an enormous amount of inertia. That is why it is so difficult to go in new directions. As Ronald Heifitz suggests, “There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results that it currently gets.”2 Thus, the role of a visionary is to pay attention to the little predictions that are naturally occurring within their brains and search for alternate pathways into the future. We have appropriately reserved the term visionary for those individuals who can portray unique or creative patterns of the future. While visions are inevitable, visionaries who can lay aside the dominant patterns and discern more creative, capable, and productive patterns are quite rare. Visionaries are artists. and like artists, they come with many pallets and procedures.
Can all of these people claiming the visionary mantle these days truly see what others cannot see? Are they really more admirable and capable than their dewy counterparts? I would suggest that the answer is “yes,” with one qualification; not all visionaries see into the same types of gaps or form the same types of rapier patterns. The demand for vision has surfaced multiple visionary styles. There are more visionaries than there used to be, but not all visionaries are alike. Just as several persons who witness the same event may draw differing conclusions regarding what just occurred, it seems that we have developed multiple visions of visionaries themselves. Now that we better understand the role of a visionary, it is time to explore some varying types of visionary leaders.
The first type of visionary is the vision composer. Some visionaries are not only capable of, but also prefer working with a blank canvas, creating a new type of organization based upon the gifts of the persons within, the challenges of environment without, and the opportunities betwixt the two. This is probably the most prevalent image that we have of a visionary and in my experience, the rarest of visionaries as well. Very few leaders can create a totally new way of being or compose a completely new score for congregational activity. Creating from a blank canvas takes great skill in training the brain to disregard all of the predictions that are bubbling up and all of the suggestions that are being received in order to create a new form for the organization. In a research study by Adair Lummis at the Hartford Institute, she discovered that while local church search committees (with congregational polity) talk about visionary leaders, the preference for an entrepreneurial or transformational style of leadership was nearly last on the desired skill set of most search committees. And if the person with such skills is called to provide pastoral leadership, be careful what you wish for. Vision composers do not fit neatly into the culture of most congregations.
As we look around, there are very few new models of being church. The vast majority of church leaders embrace similar patterns of worship, discipleship, education, and outreach. One might even be tempted to ask the question if this type of visionary can survive as a congregational leader? With momentum for a particular direction fully ensconced and resistance for change squarely present and operative within the resident leadership, can the blank canvas visionary survive in this type of context without throwing the entire system into a swivet? The answer is probably “no,” at least not without other types of visionaries present to complement his or her skills. It may be that a local congregation with a rich heritage is simply not the best fit for a vision composer. New church starts or new ministries that explore new territory for existing congregations may be more appropriate and less parlous contexts for vision composers. But, as it turns out, there are other types of visionaries well suited for service in existing congregations.
A second type of visionary leader is the person who can work within an existing framework to get the most out of the organization. I call this type of visionary a vision facilitator. A vision facilitator does not work from a blank canvas, but rather from a given pallet of colors and probably within a given context or genre, and uses these assets in a way that others cannot see themselves. A portion of this leader’s vision may simply come from the leader’s panoptic view, but it is still a perspective unique within the life of the organization. While we may be less likely to have considered this type of leader a visionary, I believe that the function of this visionary fits the definition of seeing unique patterns that others are not seeing. Additionally, this skill set, in my experience, is much more widespread among clergy, and one that is growing in popularity through training and development. The vision facilitator works to surface a collective vision from within the congregation. While the sought after source of any visionary product for a congregation should be God, a vision facilitator gets as many stakeholders as possible involved in the discerning process. This type of visionary is not seeing the product of the vision so much as seeing ways to involve everyone in the process, but they are discerning new patterns. Vision facilitators can often see people using gifts that they are even unaware of possessing. The vision facilitator is still seeing things that others do not see, but people, more than ideas and ministries, create the horizon of this visionary’s sights. This type of visionary fits well into many congregational contexts, especially those with less hierarchical structures.
A third type of visionary is the vision adapter. This type of visionary can see how a new trend or a new resource might fit into their local context. This visionary leader is still envisioning something new within the life of the congregation that others cannot see, but the new thing is often clearly defined. Some artists have great skill in introducing new techniques into age old contexts. In recent years, vision adapters have included those who have made use of the emphases on missional church, blended worship, and seeker services and often work best in more hierarchical structures where more authority for change is positioned in the leadership office. These adaptations typically run their course in due time, but add a great deal of energy and direction to the life of the congregation while present. Rather than completely fading away, some adapted trends and techniques become subsumed into the values and life of the congregation as it moves forward. The skill of this type of visionary lies in fully understanding their context and in knowing how to introduce and adjust the new technique so that it is accepted, embraced, and celebrated within the life of the congregation. This type of visionary sees elements of the context that others do not see. A keen sense of timing is also a key device in the toolbox of the vision adapter. Upon implementation, indeed many proclaim, “I never would have thought that could work here, but it did!” Vision adapters are able to implement ideas in places where few others would have even tried.
A unique type of visionary that often surfaces during the crossroads of a congregation is thevision selector. The vision selector can preeminently see the implications of several different scenarios facing a congregation at a critical point in their history. A vision selector can introduce wisdom into the frenzy accompanied by a group of well-meaning vision promoters. Vision selectors help congregations both avoid disastrous decisions and embrace unique opportunities. Vision selectors have helped congregations reach out into the surrounding neighborhood, merge with another congregation, create a unique job description for an additional staff person, or build physical structures at the opportune time. Certainly, not all of these types of decisions are made with such vision and wisdom. Indeed, many congregations could have benefited from the skills of a vision selector only to discover that their move to the suburbs was a mere pipedream. Other congregations sit entangled with cumbersome, threatening mortgages on all-purpose facilities, new gymnasiums, expansive sanctuaries, or quaint chapels that were never able to achieve the visions of their builders. Truly some building additions simply live out their utility into the next generation, but there are other decisions made that are never able to carry the kind of benefit espoused by their vision promoters. Vision selectors, who have an exceptional ability to see how multiple options might play out in the life of a congregation, can play a key role in helping the congregation discern its best choice from an array of alternatives.
Another desirable visionary in many situations is the vision detailer. Clearly, this type of visionary works best in tandem with those visionaries who hold differing styles or patterns of visionary leadership. They might work in concert with other visionaries to expose a new, more effective pattern or product. These visionaries see a level of detail that others just do not see. Years ago, when I took a car in for minor repairs, the auto body expert said, “For another $100, I could make this car almost unrecognizable. I just love red cars, but red cars are meant to shimmer, and this one is not shimmering.” I’ll admit that I was as reluctant as I was intrigued, but skeptically forked over the extra $100 dollars. It turned out that the money was well invested in this visionary detailer. I was startled by the results. Frank is an artist and a visionary. He was able to see the shimmer that I could not see and had the tools to draw it out. These artists are vision detailers, but visionaries in their own right. They can see the detail that others cannot see. They are unique, with the ability not only to see the big picture represented by other visionaries but also to improve upon it. They see logistics and laborers, plans and possibilities that others cannot. With pallet and major portions of the vision already in hand, they can still astonish the appreciator of art and vision.
The sixth type of visionary that I have witnessed in recent experience is the vision emulator. The most notable example of a vision emulator is the leader seeking to set up a satellite location for a parent congregation. As Rex Miller reports, there are now more multisite churches than megachurches.3 Multisite and satellite settings are surfacing a new kind of visionary, the vision emulator. Vision emulators can see the once created vision at a different stage of development. They can see what a congregation has become and help a merged or fledgling congregation realize similar results. Unfortunately, there was a time when several vision emulators sought to impose their borrowed vision upon an existing congregation by trying to force a congregation with a long and complicated history into an unwanted model. One can never force a vision upon the people. “Crash and burn” stories abounded in the last generation as vision emulators worked in misplaced settings. I am happy to see an appropriate context emerge for this unique and effective form of visionary.
Visionaries come with varying tools and techniques, patterns and possibilities, but there is one thing they have in common: they can see what others long to embrace and make those visions accessible to others. I am grateful for visionaries and the gifts that they bring to congregations. But, as we have seen, not all visionaries are alike. Congregations seeking a visionary leader might consider doing some homework in order to discern the type of visionary best suited for their unique situation and set of circumstances.
Discussion Questions: 1. What type of visionary are you?
2. How many different visionaries have you seen in your congregation or community?
3. Which visionaries does your congregation or community need the most?
4. How could all, or even just some, of these visionaries come together to minister to the congregation and the community at large?
Notes
1. Jeffrey Hawkins, On Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 2004).
2. Ronald Heifitz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009).
3. www.mulitsitesolutions.com
In his role as Associate General Secretary for Regional Ministries for the American Baptist Churches, USA, C. Jeff Woods serves as a resource person for the 33 regional bodies throughout the United States. His numerous publications include 3 books published by the Alban Institute. He has delivered presentations on leadership and organizational development in nearly every state and province in North America as well as internationally.
Read more from C. Jeff Woods »
Faith & Leadership
MANAGEMENT, STRATEGY
Nathan Kirkpatrick: What difference do you want to make?
Bigstock/iqoncept
Congregations and institutions must name a vision and choose priorities that support it. Otherwise, they risk muddying their missions, weakening their impact, and confusing stakeholders, funders, and staff, writes a managing director at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
“What is the most pressing issue that we, as people of faith, should be working on in our community?”
The question was simple to understand but difficult to answer, and that was precisely the point of this congregational listening session.
A community partner had asked our congregation to identify the issues we felt most needed the collective response and advocacy of our county’s communities of faith. Our congregation named nine distinct priorities, ranging from affordable housing to health care to advocacy for victims of sexual assault on college campuses to the removal of the Confederate flag from all government property in the county.
All nine were important, deserving substantive and sustained Christian witness. But given limited community and congregational capacities (the limitations of time, if nothing else), we had to prioritize further.
The facilitators invited each of us to vote for our top two issues, and affordable housing and health care emerged as the most pressing challenges for our community.
Yet as soon as the voting process ended, our unease set in.
To prioritize those two issues would mean that an identification project for undocumented immigrants would have to wait for our support. So would lobbying around land use and sustainable development, faith-based advocacy for the victims of sexual assault, and a prophetic call for a public exploration of the effects of race and racism in policing and prosecutions.
None of us felt good about the trade-offs inherent in our choices, but we had been told that we had to choose: What is the most pressing issue or issues that we, as people of faith, should be working on?
Identifying a single priority -- or even a constellation of priorities -- is a frequent struggle for congregations and institutions, not just my own. Of course, it isn’t just that there are too many issues that deserve our response or too many opportunities and challenges before us.
It is also the case that prioritization can lead to feelings of “winning” and “losing” among stakeholders as particular agenda items are elevated as the central focus of our work and others must recede. For leaders who are driven by pleasing others or who are conflict-averse by nature, this is a particularly unpalatable part of prioritization, especially if it means disappointing an outspoken stakeholder.
Indeed, many congregational and institutional leaders just keep adding priorities to already-lengthy lists. The result is not hard to predict. With an ever-diffusing focus, congregations and institutions risk muddying their missions, weakening their impact, and confusing stakeholders, funders and staff alike. The old adage is right: an organization that wants to be everything to everyone becomes nothing to anyone.
In his 2014 book “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,”(link is external) Greg McKeown offers a curious linguistic historical note. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the word “priority” began to appear regularly in its plural form. Until then, there was a shared understanding that for a given entity, there could be only one priority at a time. One thing was named as the “priority” to the exclusion of all other things. Yet in the mid-20th century, we began speaking and writing about “priorities” -- plural -- a shift that announced a coming multitasking, multifocused world.
If your congregation or institution is one of the many that need to reduce priorities back to something manageable and meaningful, how might you go about that work? My congregation’s listening session is one model; it’s certainly a relatively efficient approach and provides some meaningful data.
My preference, though, is for congregational or institutional discernment that unfolds in a different way. Rather than using existing stated priorities as the starting point for your discussion, why not begin the conversation with the larger missional question of telos, the end of your work?
Imagine the conversation about priorities beginning with a discussion about the difference you feel called to make in your community and in the world. What you and your colleagues in ministry envision then becomes the guidepost against which you weigh all possible priorities: Would adopting this priority move us closer to the vision we have discerned?
One note here. Congregational or institutional mission statements once offered some help in this regard. Unfortunately, many mission statements are now too clichéd, too ambiguous, too broad or too generic to orient our work. The articulation of a clear-eyed, Spirit-led vision of the world that your work seeks to create can become a new means of discerning priorities.
Even if your organization has already done the hard work of narrowing your focus, sharing a conversation about the difference you feel called to make in your community or in the world can be a renewing and life-giving moment in your work together.
Read more from Nathan E. Kirkpatrick »
What type of visionary are you?Visionaries are in high demand. They have been for quite some time now, to the extent that supply and demand has impacted the visionary role of leadership. Organizations demand visionaries, and leaders in the marketplace have learned to supply organizations with their greatest desire. The other day I was sifting through a set of profiles for a leadership position and over one-half of the potential candidates presented themselves as visionary leaders. The problem is that we are still viewing all visionaries alike, while multiple visionary styles have emerged among the leadership. We have asked for visionaries and we have received them. But, do we know what we have? Increased supply has led to dilution of meaning and ambiguity of understanding. Perhaps it is time to sort out this whole visionary genre just a little bit. In this article, I present six styles of visionary leadership. I encourage you to read on to see what type of visionary you mirror or what type of visionary you need for your organization. But first, allow me to surface a working definition of the terms vision andvisionary.
A vision is a picture that we can see in our minds. The Bible is full of dreams and visions. Dreams occur when we are sleeping and visions occur when we are awake. Both present us with a picture of something that we do not need to be physically present to “see.” The primary task of a visionary, then, is to see what others cannot see. Visionaries portray a picture that we have not seen ourselves. To be a visionary leader, however, the visionary must also be capable of transferring the picture in his or her mind into the minds of others. Thus, in my definition, visionaries can not only see the picture in their minds, but are capable of revealing the picture in such a way that we are able to see it as well. What type of pictures do visionaries depict? The answer to that depends upon the type of visionary revealing the vision. But one thing is certain. Visions are not rare; they are unavoidable.
As it turns out, we are all visionaries in terms of how our human brains function. Jeffrey Hawkins’s research on the human brain suggests that the primary function of our cortex is to make constant predictions about what will occur next.1 If this is true, then we cannot help but see into the future. Whether our brain’s predictions come true or not determines the next set of predictions. Predictions formed from inveterate patterns create strong, difficult to change blueprints in our minds. That is why it is much easier to say the alphabet forward rather than backward. Our brain is telling us what to expect next.
Because our brains cannot avoid predicting the future, visions are ubiquitous. Minute predictions are occurring hundreds of thousands of times a day in each of our brains. We all have a vision of what will happen next. When we walk into a sanctuary where we have worshiped before, our brain predicts the next person around the corner, the next word on the bulletin board, the next smell from the candle, the next note in the music, the next tone of the speaker. While some of us may be reluctant visionaries; we are all visionaries. Our brains present each one of us with an image of the future.
The role of a visionary then is not to envision while the rest of us sit idle. As we have discovered, it is impossible to maintain a blank slate or idle picture of the future. Left alone with our predictable patterns, we erect an enormous amount of inertia. That is why it is so difficult to go in new directions. As Ronald Heifitz suggests, “There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results that it currently gets.”2 Thus, the role of a visionary is to pay attention to the little predictions that are naturally occurring within their brains and search for alternate pathways into the future. We have appropriately reserved the term visionary for those individuals who can portray unique or creative patterns of the future. While visions are inevitable, visionaries who can lay aside the dominant patterns and discern more creative, capable, and productive patterns are quite rare. Visionaries are artists. and like artists, they come with many pallets and procedures.
Can all of these people claiming the visionary mantle these days truly see what others cannot see? Are they really more admirable and capable than their dewy counterparts? I would suggest that the answer is “yes,” with one qualification; not all visionaries see into the same types of gaps or form the same types of rapier patterns. The demand for vision has surfaced multiple visionary styles. There are more visionaries than there used to be, but not all visionaries are alike. Just as several persons who witness the same event may draw differing conclusions regarding what just occurred, it seems that we have developed multiple visions of visionaries themselves. Now that we better understand the role of a visionary, it is time to explore some varying types of visionary leaders.
The first type of visionary is the vision composer. Some visionaries are not only capable of, but also prefer working with a blank canvas, creating a new type of organization based upon the gifts of the persons within, the challenges of environment without, and the opportunities betwixt the two. This is probably the most prevalent image that we have of a visionary and in my experience, the rarest of visionaries as well. Very few leaders can create a totally new way of being or compose a completely new score for congregational activity. Creating from a blank canvas takes great skill in training the brain to disregard all of the predictions that are bubbling up and all of the suggestions that are being received in order to create a new form for the organization. In a research study by Adair Lummis at the Hartford Institute, she discovered that while local church search committees (with congregational polity) talk about visionary leaders, the preference for an entrepreneurial or transformational style of leadership was nearly last on the desired skill set of most search committees. And if the person with such skills is called to provide pastoral leadership, be careful what you wish for. Vision composers do not fit neatly into the culture of most congregations.
As we look around, there are very few new models of being church. The vast majority of church leaders embrace similar patterns of worship, discipleship, education, and outreach. One might even be tempted to ask the question if this type of visionary can survive as a congregational leader? With momentum for a particular direction fully ensconced and resistance for change squarely present and operative within the resident leadership, can the blank canvas visionary survive in this type of context without throwing the entire system into a swivet? The answer is probably “no,” at least not without other types of visionaries present to complement his or her skills. It may be that a local congregation with a rich heritage is simply not the best fit for a vision composer. New church starts or new ministries that explore new territory for existing congregations may be more appropriate and less parlous contexts for vision composers. But, as it turns out, there are other types of visionaries well suited for service in existing congregations.
A second type of visionary leader is the person who can work within an existing framework to get the most out of the organization. I call this type of visionary a vision facilitator. A vision facilitator does not work from a blank canvas, but rather from a given pallet of colors and probably within a given context or genre, and uses these assets in a way that others cannot see themselves. A portion of this leader’s vision may simply come from the leader’s panoptic view, but it is still a perspective unique within the life of the organization. While we may be less likely to have considered this type of leader a visionary, I believe that the function of this visionary fits the definition of seeing unique patterns that others are not seeing. Additionally, this skill set, in my experience, is much more widespread among clergy, and one that is growing in popularity through training and development. The vision facilitator works to surface a collective vision from within the congregation. While the sought after source of any visionary product for a congregation should be God, a vision facilitator gets as many stakeholders as possible involved in the discerning process. This type of visionary is not seeing the product of the vision so much as seeing ways to involve everyone in the process, but they are discerning new patterns. Vision facilitators can often see people using gifts that they are even unaware of possessing. The vision facilitator is still seeing things that others do not see, but people, more than ideas and ministries, create the horizon of this visionary’s sights. This type of visionary fits well into many congregational contexts, especially those with less hierarchical structures.
A third type of visionary is the vision adapter. This type of visionary can see how a new trend or a new resource might fit into their local context. This visionary leader is still envisioning something new within the life of the congregation that others cannot see, but the new thing is often clearly defined. Some artists have great skill in introducing new techniques into age old contexts. In recent years, vision adapters have included those who have made use of the emphases on missional church, blended worship, and seeker services and often work best in more hierarchical structures where more authority for change is positioned in the leadership office. These adaptations typically run their course in due time, but add a great deal of energy and direction to the life of the congregation while present. Rather than completely fading away, some adapted trends and techniques become subsumed into the values and life of the congregation as it moves forward. The skill of this type of visionary lies in fully understanding their context and in knowing how to introduce and adjust the new technique so that it is accepted, embraced, and celebrated within the life of the congregation. This type of visionary sees elements of the context that others do not see. A keen sense of timing is also a key device in the toolbox of the vision adapter. Upon implementation, indeed many proclaim, “I never would have thought that could work here, but it did!” Vision adapters are able to implement ideas in places where few others would have even tried.
A unique type of visionary that often surfaces during the crossroads of a congregation is thevision selector. The vision selector can preeminently see the implications of several different scenarios facing a congregation at a critical point in their history. A vision selector can introduce wisdom into the frenzy accompanied by a group of well-meaning vision promoters. Vision selectors help congregations both avoid disastrous decisions and embrace unique opportunities. Vision selectors have helped congregations reach out into the surrounding neighborhood, merge with another congregation, create a unique job description for an additional staff person, or build physical structures at the opportune time. Certainly, not all of these types of decisions are made with such vision and wisdom. Indeed, many congregations could have benefited from the skills of a vision selector only to discover that their move to the suburbs was a mere pipedream. Other congregations sit entangled with cumbersome, threatening mortgages on all-purpose facilities, new gymnasiums, expansive sanctuaries, or quaint chapels that were never able to achieve the visions of their builders. Truly some building additions simply live out their utility into the next generation, but there are other decisions made that are never able to carry the kind of benefit espoused by their vision promoters. Vision selectors, who have an exceptional ability to see how multiple options might play out in the life of a congregation, can play a key role in helping the congregation discern its best choice from an array of alternatives.
Another desirable visionary in many situations is the vision detailer. Clearly, this type of visionary works best in tandem with those visionaries who hold differing styles or patterns of visionary leadership. They might work in concert with other visionaries to expose a new, more effective pattern or product. These visionaries see a level of detail that others just do not see. Years ago, when I took a car in for minor repairs, the auto body expert said, “For another $100, I could make this car almost unrecognizable. I just love red cars, but red cars are meant to shimmer, and this one is not shimmering.” I’ll admit that I was as reluctant as I was intrigued, but skeptically forked over the extra $100 dollars. It turned out that the money was well invested in this visionary detailer. I was startled by the results. Frank is an artist and a visionary. He was able to see the shimmer that I could not see and had the tools to draw it out. These artists are vision detailers, but visionaries in their own right. They can see the detail that others cannot see. They are unique, with the ability not only to see the big picture represented by other visionaries but also to improve upon it. They see logistics and laborers, plans and possibilities that others cannot. With pallet and major portions of the vision already in hand, they can still astonish the appreciator of art and vision.
The sixth type of visionary that I have witnessed in recent experience is the vision emulator. The most notable example of a vision emulator is the leader seeking to set up a satellite location for a parent congregation. As Rex Miller reports, there are now more multisite churches than megachurches.3 Multisite and satellite settings are surfacing a new kind of visionary, the vision emulator. Vision emulators can see the once created vision at a different stage of development. They can see what a congregation has become and help a merged or fledgling congregation realize similar results. Unfortunately, there was a time when several vision emulators sought to impose their borrowed vision upon an existing congregation by trying to force a congregation with a long and complicated history into an unwanted model. One can never force a vision upon the people. “Crash and burn” stories abounded in the last generation as vision emulators worked in misplaced settings. I am happy to see an appropriate context emerge for this unique and effective form of visionary.
Visionaries come with varying tools and techniques, patterns and possibilities, but there is one thing they have in common: they can see what others long to embrace and make those visions accessible to others. I am grateful for visionaries and the gifts that they bring to congregations. But, as we have seen, not all visionaries are alike. Congregations seeking a visionary leader might consider doing some homework in order to discern the type of visionary best suited for their unique situation and set of circumstances.
Discussion Questions: 1. What type of visionary are you?
2. How many different visionaries have you seen in your congregation or community?
3. Which visionaries does your congregation or community need the most?
4. How could all, or even just some, of these visionaries come together to minister to the congregation and the community at large?
Notes
1. Jeffrey Hawkins, On Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 2004).
2. Ronald Heifitz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009).
3. www.mulitsitesolutions.com
In his role as Associate General Secretary for Regional Ministries for the American Baptist Churches, USA, C. Jeff Woods serves as a resource person for the 33 regional bodies throughout the United States. His numerous publications include 3 books published by the Alban Institute. He has delivered presentations on leadership and organizational development in nearly every state and province in North America as well as internationally.
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Faith & Leadership
Strategy is not the same as operationsMANAGEMENT, STRATEGY
Dave Odom: Strategy is not the same as operations
BigStock / Krasimira Nevenova
Effective strategic planning requires leaders to ask big questions about the future, not about how to operationalize the work, writes the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.“Past performance is not a predictor of future returns” is an oft-repeated phrase in the fine print of investment paperwork. Yet when it comes to developing strategic plans, many organizations spend more time focusing on the past than considering the future.
Why? Control.
Strategic plans are often full of goals and action plans about things we can control -- creating staff positions, building buildings, planning programs. Yet strategy is about the future -- that which we cannot control. Strategy focuses attention on the people we wish to serve. How those people respond is out of our control and yet critical to the long-term impact of the work.
The final assignment in my doctor of ministry “vision and strategy” class has the students articulate the three most important questions that their organizations need to address. Framing the questions that shape an organization’s attention and imagination can point the way to the future by illuminating the choices that are required.
Strategy is about whom, where and how to serve, and how to determine effectiveness. Operations is about staff, buildings, programs and budgets. Strategy is about envisioning outcomes that the organization cannot control. Operations is about organizing the available resources to accomplish what the strategy envisions. Neither strategy nor operations can function alone. Each needs the other.
Roger Martin, the well-known business thinker and former dean of the Rotman School of Management, wrote about strategy in the January-February 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review: “All executives know that strategy is important. But almost all also find it scary, because it forces them to confront a future they can only guess at.”
“The natural reaction,” he continued, “is to make the challenge less daunting by turning it into a problem that can be solved with tried and tested tools.” Without a conscious effort, he said, operations “will always dominate strategy rather than serve it.”
For Martin, strategy is about revenue, which is controlled by the customer. The strategy focuses on which customer to serve, how to serve that customer and how to measure success.
This translates into the church world: Whom does your ministry serve? How? And how do you measure the ministry’s effectiveness? If your service is not tied to revenue, the interests of those providing the funding will affect how those questions are answered. As in business, no ministry controls all the variables.
Churches often say that they want more young people to attend church. Such an urge could become a conversation that raises strategic questions: Who are the young people in our community? Where do they live? How do they socialize? What are their needs?
If the church moves directly from the urge for more young people to “Let’s hire a youth minister,” the strategic conversation is short-circuited. The operational questions kick in regarding the requirements for hiring, cost and timing.
When I was a full-time church consultant, congregations would frequently tell me that they wanted a building filled with young people. I would urge congregational leaders to visit the local elementary school. They needed to see the opportunities and challenges facing the children and their families in the community they wished to serve. On one occasion, a committee chair told me that the local elementary school had closed. Even with this revealing detail, the caller insisted on coming up with a plan to reach young families and their children.
Strategy does involve dreaming about and imagining the future. But it is beyond wishful thinking. Strategy involves asking questions to illuminate opportunities. The questions lead to choices that inform actions on which operational plans are based. If you have the chance to make only a single contribution to developing a strategy, ask a question that gets at the heart of your organization’s future.
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FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
The Business of the Church: The Uncomfortable Truth that Faithful Ministry Requires Effective Management by John Wimberly, Jr.Pastors are called to be not only leaders with vision, but also managers of congregational systems, says John Wimberly in The Business of the Church. Drawing on his thirty-six years in ordained ministry, Wimberly weaves the realities of congregational dynamics and faith-centered purpose together with practical, proven approaches to business management. A student and friend of Rabbi Edwin Friedman, Wimberly builds on Friedman's systems theory as he helps readers avoid common pitfalls and put into practice effective techniques of congregational management.
The book begins with a foundational discussion of how a systems approach helps congregational managers identify areas of dysfunction and effective solutions. Managing the critical 'inputs' of people, facilities, and finances has a direct bearing on the desired 'outputs' of proclamation, pastoral care, and mission. A strategic plan, through which a congregation sets its goals and identifies and prioritizes resources, is an essential management tool for both pastors and lay leaders.
The author's conversational writing style and many real-life examples make a seemingly complicated, mysterious topic for some an engaging and easily applicable read.
Learn more and order the book »
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Alban at Duke Divinity School
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