What needs to change in your church or organization right now? I suspect you could list several things. Some of the issues you are facing don’t have clear solutions. Many do, though.
What’s keeping you from implementing these solutions? What’s keeping you from fixing the problems?
If we sat down together, you’d offer plenty of reasons the solution cannot be quickly executed. After all, if it were an easy fix, it wouldn’t still be a problem! But you feel somewhat held back, don’t you? You know how to fix the problem—or you at least know how you’d like to begin fixing the problem. But it feels impossible to move forward. Why is that? What’s holding you back?
It’s rare to see only one element hold leaders back from making progress. It’s most often a combination of issues. Let’s look at four:
Your Organization
Organizations are designed to organize and orchestrate what is in place today. But not necessarily tomorrow. There is an instinctual tension that exists between the management of a machine and the innovations required to make it better.
When you look around your company, church, non-profit, or whatever you call it, how much time and energy is spent orchestrating what is? Organizations are designed to do this and are incredibly adept at it! By default, every organization works against progress because progress creates chaos and adds complexity—the enemies of effective and organized orchestration.
Question: How and where is your organization working to maintain what current is while resisting what could become?
Your Strategy
I am a strategist at heart; therefore, I spend much of my client time working on strategy with senior leaders and executive teams. After reviewing dozens and dozens of business strategies, one thing is blatantly apparent:
Every model is built for a moment.
Think about it. Strategies are always formed for momentary realities. When a company, church, or organization forms a plan, it’s predicated on the time of its formation. This is how strategies are designed.
One of the most famous approaches is the SWOT process. To form a SWOT-based strategy, you consider your organization’s current internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. This is a tried and true mechanism for developing a strategy, and the outcome of a SWOT analysis can be precisely what’s needed at that very moment.
But what happens when an internal strength ceases to be a strength? What happens when a key (i.e., strong) staff member resigns? What happens when the community changes? What happens when culture shifts or customer preferences change?
