.. an eclectic folio of words and images
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So apart from occasional pot luck successes it’s better to have
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But if it’s a choice between
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and
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there has to be a pretty good reason not to just
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Following on from “Kill It Off?” – Kevin Kelly talking nearly 5 years ago about the web … mind-boggling, and now we’re way beyond this:\r\n\r\n[ted id=319]
I LOVE the crazy words of Tom Peters (sometimes? often? not sure) like this scale of 1 to 10 on the value of things we do,\r\n\r\nwhere 1 is pretty worthless\r\nand 10 is pretty extraordinary.\r\n\r\nIt goes like this:\r\n\r\nGive it a 1 – it pays the rent but nothing else\r\nGive it a 4 – we do something of value\r\nGive it a 7 – it’s pretty damn cool (and definitely subversive)\r\nGive it 10 – we aim to change the world.\r\n\r\nThe measure of success is: Does It Take Your Breath Away\r\n\r\nAs this is Tom Peters it’s backed up with a few poster sized quotations from stars:\r\n\r\n“Astonish me” said choreographer Seigei Diaghivev\r\n“Build Something Great” said Nintendo’s Hiroshi Yamanchi\r\n“Make It Immortal” said David Ogilvy\r\n\r\nHow to achieve it in others?\r\n\r\n“Reward Excellent Failures: Punish Mediocre Successes”\r\n… said Phil Davik in the Tom Peters Seminar
There’s a conundrum built into the process of renewing small Church of England congregations in urban and suburban areas. It’s centred on inexperience verses experienced leadership.\r\n\r\nWhen Curates finish their training they need to move to manageable congregations as a Post of First Responsibility.\r\n\r\nLarge churches are inappropriate environments for inexperienced incumbents. There’s to much at stake. Which leaves small churches. To be specific, this year’s curates have been advised that a an appropriate church for a first post is not more than 140 people give or take.\r\n\r\nBut smaller churches often have inherent problems such as …\r\n
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\r\nIs this a job for a newly trained incumbent fresh from a curacy? For some characters maybe yes, they would thrive on this, but they are probably in the minority. What many of these churches really require is a more experienced person to guide them into renewal and make them effective. Someone who already has experience of leading congregations into growth, dealing with difficult characters, used to backing themselves in a conflict, able to build trust through times of hardship.\r\n\r\nBut here is the second problem. Small churches don’t attract the best and most experienced clergy.\r\n\r\nThis leadership conundrum raises two questions:\r\n
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\r\nThe team ministry may offer a solution. Rather than being seen only as a way of saving salaries, one of the strengths of the team ministry is that it offers scope for involvement of clergy of various levels of expertise and experience. Large churches know this already and often they operate as a collection of ministries under the banner of a church rather than a benefice.\r\n\r\n(PS Is this only specific to urban churches? Possibly not, but different factors affect rural churches and chaplaincies)
Growth isn’t from everywhere. Its from specific places.\r\n\r\nIf your hand-printed silk head scarf sells at £400, your market consists of all those who haven’t bought the scarf already and are most probably women, glamorous and wealthy … or their partners and friends.\r\n\r\nYour market is not everyone in the world, or even all women in the world, or all wealthy people in the world.\r\n\r\nHeadroom is the gap between those who have already bought the scarf and those who are most likely to do so.\r\n Headroom is not the gap between those who have already bought the scarf and everyone in the world.\r\n\r\nThe market is specific, and knowing this allows you to develop a marketing strategy that reaches probable buyers more often.\r\n\r\nTo put it differently,\r\nHeadroom does not include the market share you will simply never get.\r\n\r\nAnd to put it in other words,\r\nHeadroom is the room in which to manoeuvre, position and pitch for growth.\r\n\r\nSo to invest well it is important to know, where is the Headroom?\r\n\r\nWhich brings us to churches who write strategies for growth without any concept of Headroom.\r\n\r\nLet’s consider two typical areas – Evangelism and Youth Work.\r\n\r\nIt is right to say that everyone in the world (let’s say parish) should have the opportunity of knowing and responding to the Gospel, which is uniquely designed for everyone in the world. But not everyone wants to hear the Gospel, or wants to respond, or feels they need to hear the Good News, or they simply don’t believe it. Not today, anyway.\r\n\r\nSo although the offer is suitable and appropriate for everyone (in the parish), the reality is that the size of the group who are interested and likely to respond is much less due to the self-determination of members of the group itself.\r\n\r\nIn this case, Headroom is the space between those who have already accepted the Good News and those who have not but are willing to consider it. Growth will come from making sure those who really want and know they need Good News get to share in it.\r\n\r\nYouth Work is different. There is no compelling Biblical description for youth work ministry in church, but we believe it’s a good idea. And others do it, so we think we should too. We believe that the Headroom in this case is the space between those young people already coming on a Friday night and those (in the parish) who don’t come yet.\r\n\r\nBut it’s not. As in the first example, there will be those who opt out because they simply won’t be interested in coming. Growth will come from making sure those who really want to come to a youth club for the benefits it offers.\r\n\r\nBut unlike the first example, youth work is a product not a truth. And unlike expensive scarves, the product is not a finished object but a set of relationships and experiences within a community of particular people. This means that the quality of the ‘product’ is not based on remote manufacturing processes somewhere else, but on the resources and competencies of the people running the ministry there and then.\r\n\r\nSuddenly the idea of Headroom changes. If the resources are inadequate and the competences are poor, the headroom for growth becomes those not already involved, who would be interested in coming, and who can tolerate embarrassing incompetence.\r\n\r\nAnd that’s another truth. Bad products have little Headroom for growth.
A retail company wanted to kick-start its expansion by trying to tempt people to ‘cross the aisle’ in its stores from food to clothing .\r\n\r\nAfter some low achieving sales figures they commissioned some research into why this wasn’t working. The research showed that people didn’t want to cross the aisle, and it was a wasted effort trying to get people to do what they were never going to do.\r\n\r\nInstead the research discovered that people were happy to buy both food and clothing from the company but they wanted more clarity. The store moved to a different strategy where they separated products into different buildings, a clearly differentiated shopping experience but still the same brand. Growth followed.\r\n\r\nIt turns out that the company had just not understood the buying preferences of their customers. What was convenient for the company (doubling up on existing facilities, maximising resources) was not clear for the customer.\r\n\r\nUp-selling and cross-selling are well tried methods of increasing sales success but we should never loose sight of the need to investigate more radical options and to invest in where the growth really is and not where we hope it will be.\r\n\r\nApplying this to the question of church growth, this might explain why so many ventures started in church simply never take off. They draw too heavily on existing church resources, hoping to give the new clip-on ministry a boost from the momentum of the church as a whole. But along with drawing on resources the new ministry also draws on the culture of the church.\r\n\r\nIf the aim is to attract new people with a different profile – for example, a younger congregation – perhaps its better to put the new ministry at arms length from its parent, with greater independence to form its own identity.
The Harvard Business Review audio library is a great resource and one I use regularly. Over the years it has been an invaluable source of ideas on organisations and personal development (explore at http://hbr.org/multimedia).
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But I was puzzled by the title of an interview given by Ken Favaro called ‘Creating an Organic Growth Machine’ (listen here – it’s worth it).
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The material was fine, and led me to rethink the way we could approach the funding of Pioneer Ministry in the Church of England (see the posts starting with Problems with Pioneers – Revex v Capex Funding). It was the oxymoron embedded in the title that caught my attention.
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Organic. Growth. Machine.
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Machines don’t grow organically. At least not the ones I’ve dealt with.
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For example, I analysed the shop floor layouts of the production lines at Transtec PLC in Coventry to see how we could reorganise the machines that produce aluminium engine parts for Jaguar cars. And another time I examined the machines that produce aluminium extrusions in a factory in Holland to ensure we could achieve the shapes and finishes we needed on a glazing contract.
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Obviously there was no possibility that these machines could exhibit any signs of organic growth.
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I knew what Ken Favaro was getting at. It was the idea that in some way we can combine two ideas into one image to give us a model for organisational development: combining the idea of a well ordered, machined process with the idea of organic growth in the natural world.
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The problem when we combine these two images is when we ‘drill down’ (there’s an irony, using an image borrowed from the oil and gas industry) into the metaphor. For example, we treat machines in a very different way from nature.
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There’s a “So what?” about all this? Does it matter? It’s just an idea.
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Well, I think it does. The images we overlay on our organisations can set the language, the pace, the values, the expectations, and the measures of success. Care is needed when handling powerful images, and it takes a high level of leadership skill to shape metaphors and images into a strong coherent narrative that doesn’t disenfranchise the true resource of the organisation – the people around whom it is built and sustained.
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