When Failure And Instability In A Church Is Good

“Traditional approaches to strategy assume a relatively stable world…But globalization, new technologies, and greater transparency have combined to upend the business environment.  Sustainable competitive advantage no longer arises from positioning or resources.” – Martin Reeves and Mike Deimler from the July-August Harvard Business Review.

What made you successful today will not keep you successful tomorrow.  Typical strategies for business and ministry are no longer effective in these volatile and unstable times.  Whether you are a church or business, adaptability is required to effectively navigate continual changing waters. 

This creates tension when it comes to strategic planning.  We all know a failure to plan is a plan to fail.  However, traditional approaches are no longer effective because they assume stability.  We must create new assumptions.  Here is what Reeves and Deimler state are necessarily elements to adaptive strategic planning:

• The Ability To Read And Act On Signals Of Change – Church leaders, do you have a high churn rate in your congregation?  Do you recognize the signals and understand the reasons why?  Do you have a way of capturing this information?  Leaders are responsible for what they know.  Are you then willing to act on it?
• The Ability To Experiment Rapidly And Frequently – As a leader, do you play it safe?  Does your church have a R&D Department?  Are you comfortable as a church with failure or are you focused on maintaining your reputation?  The most effective churches understand there are times when it is necessary to produce failure.  It is in the experimentation process that greatness is produced.
• The Ability To Manage Complex And Interconnected Systems Of Multiple Stakeholders – Is it easy for people to connect and engage at your church?  Do conversations consistently take place about how to best break down barriers to ownership of the vision?  Does your church have superior flexibility and a rapid mobilization that brings people and their giftedness together?  Or do you have a factory environment that is homogenous and treats everyone the same?
• The Ability To Motivate Employees And Partners – Does your church provide “knowledge flow, diversity, autonomy, risk taking, sharing, and flexibility?”  Do you cultivate and encourage an entrepreneurial spirit for those in your church?  Or does your church place an unhealthy amount of energy and effort in authority and control? 

Whether you lead a business, sports team, or church, leaders must think differently about strategy.  It must be adaptive.  Strategy now follows the organization.  Organization no longer follow strategy.

To get future posts on leadership sent directly to you, please take advantage of the many subscription offers on this site.