Leadership and Faith

The big idea doesnt come from a strategic plan

I am sitting at Sydney airport after a flying visit to catch up with a friend.

I have a lot on my mind at the moment, finding myself in a real wrestle to understand what God is up to.

I am finding that God seems to bring me books I need when I need them  which is helping with the wrestle. A friend has given me N.T. Wright’s big three volumes on theology which I have found very helpful.

Another book I am finding suprisingly helpful is “church unique” by Will Mancini.

There are a number of ideas that resonate with me. One of them is the danger of strategic planning.

Mancini says:

Have you ever put the wrong document in the paper shredder? There’s no way to get it back. You just can’t put the strips back together, not amount of time or tape will fix it. A similar thing happens to vision when you develop a strategic plan. The assumption is that more information will produce clearer direction, but just the opposite is true. I call this the “fallacy of complexity”. Too much information shreds the big picture into so many small pieces that the vision is hopelessly lost. More information equals less clarity.

His basic point is that “leaders of today must learn how to deliver meaning by distilling what they say”. He points out that at a special event to commemorate the American Revolitionary War, the main speaker, a famous orator, spoke for two hours in an address that featured 13,607 words. Abraham Lincoln’s speech was almost an afterthought following the main game. He was on and off the stage before the photographer could get a picture. His speech was just 286 words. We know that speech now as the Gettysburg address….

Mancini says:

Analysis does not lead to synthesis. In  other words the ability to break the whole into parts does not inherently help us keep the whole in mind.

Later he says:

The fallacy of complexity erroneously assumes that if we deal with the details long enough, the big idea will continue to emerge.

As someone who has had a number of attempts at strategic planning, Mancini’s words ring very true.

 

 

One Comment

  • Anne Nanscawen

    In teaching poetry it’s similar. Children can be introduced to the magic of the poem, words that take them to something larger than meaning to touch their spirits. Or the poems can be taught by conscientious teachers who take them stanza by stanza, and talk about the structure and by the time it’s all over, the poem has escaped the classroom and the kids aren’t interested. I remember a Chapter in our Book of Poems at school, “You can brush the bloom off a butterfly”. Similarly, our hearts die and we groan when we’re faced with strategic planning – until that is, we have the picture that calls us out – at that point we get down and do the planning because it’s exciting and it’s all about the vision that we’ve grasped.

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