Stategic vs. Crisis Management

Good staff meeting today. We are definitely making progress in getting away from a crisis-oriented way of running things and towards a strategic model. But, unfortunately, there is much progress to be made in various areas of the organization. The problem with making everything into a crisis that must be solved today is that it biases things towards the quick fix rather than the long term solution. It also tends to push people towards isolated "man-to-man" style defense rather than "zone-coverage." In other words, people tend to focus on problems to be addressed rather than their role in the process. When that happens, people start making decisions individually without seeing the larger picture.

The fact is that the only time you should intentionally lead with a crisis management model is when you have a genuine crisis to address. Alas, many churches (including SMM, for example) create cultures of perpetual crisis. Partly this happens because of a failure of strategic processes; partly it happens because crisis becomes a kind of drug that works as an institutional analgesic. It numbs people so that they don't feel the anxiety, pain, or loss associated with the "bigger picture." For example, churches in decline often get into a crisis-management culture as a way to avoid dealing with the reality that they are in decline. A healthier strategy is to actually address the real issues involved with some plan conceived of in a scale that matches the scale of the problem.

My general strategy at COTM at the moment is to get us out of the crisis-management place by putting in effective infrastructure that is structured around strategic goals. But that's much easier to do on the level of what happens in the building. Much harder when we are talking about coordinating volunteers. No wonder larger churches actually have a "volunteer manager" to help tame the chaos.

Still--we are making progress.

I set myself up on Facebook yesterday. That was very exciting. I've heard that most of the planning for youth events in the Diocese is done entirely in the Facebook universe.

Had a good lunch with a former parishioner at the ROM's new restaurant. The meal was pretty posh--and I do like a posh meal sometimes! I'm convinced that in a former life I was some kind of epicurean mad scientist. How else to explain my interest in fine dining and epistemology?

Speaking of epistemology--I've been doing some thinking and research about the most appropriate tools to do strategic thinking/planning at COTM. Today that meant learning about Ishikawa diagrams. This is a simple way of graphically organizing the root causes of a complex phenomenon. The first level branches could be populated with the 8 characteristics of growing churches according to the Natural Church Development project:

• Empowering Leadership
• Gift-based Ministry
• Passionate Spirituality
• Effective (Functional) Structures
• Inspiring Worship Service
• Holistic Small Groups
• Need-oriented Evangelism
• Loving Relationships.

Then you start to look at the ways that these characteristics contributed or harmed the effect we wish to examine (the declining attendance at COTM). The interesting thing about the NCD process, BTW, is that it focuses on core congregational health rather than church growth, per se.

Actually, there are number of tools from the literature on quality control that could be useful to us at COTM. For example, I'd love to do some scatter plots of things like length of time coming to COTM vs. length of Sunday drive, or how about involvement in congregational life vs. length of time coming to COTM, etc. Or even just a simple geographic scatter plot to show where people live. All attempts to get a better picture of the present circumstances....

Betsy made some flashcards to help us memorize the names and important facts about the congregation. I should make a resolution to spend at least an hour a day with them.

-t