The Difference Between Planning and Serving
17/02/12 05:36
Back in the 1970’s I was appointed to a planning team in our Seminary that was called the “President’s Commission on the Future.” The group was composed of directors, administrators, faculty and a couple of token students. We employed a consultant to guide us through a strategic planning process. Strategic planning has been around for a long time. Some claim that the Greeks invented the process. Most agree that its roots are in military planning. The process reflects the hierarchical values and linear systems of traditional organizations.
The process involves several key components. It begins with defining the vision and mission of the organization. This process often involves some brainstorming and thinking out of the box. It often involves setting high and lofty goals. One of the common pitfalls in strategic planning is confusion vision and mission. They are really quite different. The vision outlines what the organization wants to be. The mission defines the fundamental purpose of the organization. Once a Vision Statement and a Mission Statement are defined, some planning consultants proceed directly to the setting of strategies to move the organization toward its goals. This truncated process, though very common even today, misses a key component of the process – the understanding of the values of the organization. Beliefs that are shared among the stakeholders of an organization are critical. Values drive the organization’s culture and priorities and provide the framework in which decisions are made. Understanding the core values of an organization is critical to the success or failure of specific objectives.
In strategic planning, goals must be clearly defined and achievable. They must have assigned responsibilities, necessary resources devoted, and clear benchmarks for evaluation.
It is actually pretty rare for any organization to follow all of the steps and to be successful with strategic planning. At the time I first encountered the formal process back in the 1970’s, it was just beginning to move into nonprofit organizations. The process was very popular in business organizations in the 1950’s following the Second World War. During the 1960’s and 1970’s it was highly refined by the Rand Corporation as part of the Vietnam War effort. The late 1960’s and 1970’s saw corporate America obsessed with strategic planning. It was touted as the solution for almost every corporate problem.
In the next couple of decades strategic planning, by then mostly abandoned by business organizations except for a few specific and narrow contexts, began to gain popularity in nonprofit organizations. Its use began to wane in the 21st century in nonprofit organizations for the same reasons it is less popular in corporations: it has only limited success. To be more blunt, it rarely works.
Visionary corporations have often shunned strategic planning. Henry Ford was said to have opposed asking people what they wanted, preferring to stay ahead of demand. He is reported to have said, “If we had asked people what they wanted, they would have told us to build a faster horse.” During the technology boom of the 1980’s and 1990’s corporate culture shifted so dramatically that traditional models of planning were too slow and inefficient to keep up with technological changes. Corporations such as Microsoft and Apple invested in visionary leadership and devised ways of operation where meetings were avoided and the entire corporate focus was placed on product development.
But there are vestiges of strategic planning in many places. I still hear it proposed in nonprofit corporate boards from time to time. It is true that nonprofit boards often stray from the vision, mission and core values of their organization. Engaging in a planning process can be very helpful to focus the organization’s leadership. Sometimes it is good for an organization to take time to examine its operation and make changes.
But nonprofit organizations are not businesses. Volunteers are not employees. The most successful of nonprofits are not hierarchical and their tasks are rarely linear. Grassroots mission and ministry resist planning.
So over the years, I have read a lot of books on management, planning, and organizational strategy. About the time I moved to Rapid City, Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Dimension: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization,” was very popular. I read the book and found elements that were useful in the early stages of building my relationship with this new congregation. The model of pastor as teacher and congregation as learning community resonates with Biblical descriptions of Jesus’ way of working with his first disciples.
Books on leadership, however, continue to assume a hierarchy in an organization and a linear direction to its mission. While this may be true of many areas of church life and several denominations, it is not true of congregational churches. We are not top-down organizations. In order to open ourselves to being Spirit-led, we must be more responsive, and more flexible. Our movements are rarely linear. In order to be faithful to our core values we must listen to individuals and respond to the marginalized.
The Bible presents two major styles of leadership that are most often intertwined. The first is that of a visionary prophet. The prophet listens carefully to God’s call and communicates it to the people. The call of God often is for radical change and dramatic new directions. Prophets are, however, few and far between. After the rise of Solomon to power it took over three centuries for the priests banished to Anatoth to produce the prophet Jeremiah.
The second biblical model of leadership is that of a suffering servant. The leader is the one who serves the people even to the point of taking on their punishment and pain. You can see the suffering servant in the book of Isaiah, the book most quoted by Jesus in the gospels. You can see it in Jesus’ life and ministry.
A suffering servant is in some ways the opposite of strategic. The servant simply does what is needed without any thought to glory, recognition or worldly definitions of success or failure. Often what the world sees as failure is the deepest success of faith. Read the Gospel of Mark. On the way to his resurrection, Jesus is crucified.
Still, as a servant of the people I am called to respond to them. When someone calls for another round of strategic planning and demands that we evaluate the employees of the church by whether or not goals are achieved, I try to listen carefully and respond faithfully. In the back of my mind, however, I carry an understanding that the goal is not glory, or recognition, or success in the eyes of the world. Faithfulness is not a strategy. It is not a destination. It is always a journey. When we walk with God, we are never alone.
The process involves several key components. It begins with defining the vision and mission of the organization. This process often involves some brainstorming and thinking out of the box. It often involves setting high and lofty goals. One of the common pitfalls in strategic planning is confusion vision and mission. They are really quite different. The vision outlines what the organization wants to be. The mission defines the fundamental purpose of the organization. Once a Vision Statement and a Mission Statement are defined, some planning consultants proceed directly to the setting of strategies to move the organization toward its goals. This truncated process, though very common even today, misses a key component of the process – the understanding of the values of the organization. Beliefs that are shared among the stakeholders of an organization are critical. Values drive the organization’s culture and priorities and provide the framework in which decisions are made. Understanding the core values of an organization is critical to the success or failure of specific objectives.
In strategic planning, goals must be clearly defined and achievable. They must have assigned responsibilities, necessary resources devoted, and clear benchmarks for evaluation.
It is actually pretty rare for any organization to follow all of the steps and to be successful with strategic planning. At the time I first encountered the formal process back in the 1970’s, it was just beginning to move into nonprofit organizations. The process was very popular in business organizations in the 1950’s following the Second World War. During the 1960’s and 1970’s it was highly refined by the Rand Corporation as part of the Vietnam War effort. The late 1960’s and 1970’s saw corporate America obsessed with strategic planning. It was touted as the solution for almost every corporate problem.
In the next couple of decades strategic planning, by then mostly abandoned by business organizations except for a few specific and narrow contexts, began to gain popularity in nonprofit organizations. Its use began to wane in the 21st century in nonprofit organizations for the same reasons it is less popular in corporations: it has only limited success. To be more blunt, it rarely works.
Visionary corporations have often shunned strategic planning. Henry Ford was said to have opposed asking people what they wanted, preferring to stay ahead of demand. He is reported to have said, “If we had asked people what they wanted, they would have told us to build a faster horse.” During the technology boom of the 1980’s and 1990’s corporate culture shifted so dramatically that traditional models of planning were too slow and inefficient to keep up with technological changes. Corporations such as Microsoft and Apple invested in visionary leadership and devised ways of operation where meetings were avoided and the entire corporate focus was placed on product development.
But there are vestiges of strategic planning in many places. I still hear it proposed in nonprofit corporate boards from time to time. It is true that nonprofit boards often stray from the vision, mission and core values of their organization. Engaging in a planning process can be very helpful to focus the organization’s leadership. Sometimes it is good for an organization to take time to examine its operation and make changes.
But nonprofit organizations are not businesses. Volunteers are not employees. The most successful of nonprofits are not hierarchical and their tasks are rarely linear. Grassroots mission and ministry resist planning.
So over the years, I have read a lot of books on management, planning, and organizational strategy. About the time I moved to Rapid City, Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Dimension: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization,” was very popular. I read the book and found elements that were useful in the early stages of building my relationship with this new congregation. The model of pastor as teacher and congregation as learning community resonates with Biblical descriptions of Jesus’ way of working with his first disciples.
Books on leadership, however, continue to assume a hierarchy in an organization and a linear direction to its mission. While this may be true of many areas of church life and several denominations, it is not true of congregational churches. We are not top-down organizations. In order to open ourselves to being Spirit-led, we must be more responsive, and more flexible. Our movements are rarely linear. In order to be faithful to our core values we must listen to individuals and respond to the marginalized.
The Bible presents two major styles of leadership that are most often intertwined. The first is that of a visionary prophet. The prophet listens carefully to God’s call and communicates it to the people. The call of God often is for radical change and dramatic new directions. Prophets are, however, few and far between. After the rise of Solomon to power it took over three centuries for the priests banished to Anatoth to produce the prophet Jeremiah.
The second biblical model of leadership is that of a suffering servant. The leader is the one who serves the people even to the point of taking on their punishment and pain. You can see the suffering servant in the book of Isaiah, the book most quoted by Jesus in the gospels. You can see it in Jesus’ life and ministry.
A suffering servant is in some ways the opposite of strategic. The servant simply does what is needed without any thought to glory, recognition or worldly definitions of success or failure. Often what the world sees as failure is the deepest success of faith. Read the Gospel of Mark. On the way to his resurrection, Jesus is crucified.
Still, as a servant of the people I am called to respond to them. When someone calls for another round of strategic planning and demands that we evaluate the employees of the church by whether or not goals are achieved, I try to listen carefully and respond faithfully. In the back of my mind, however, I carry an understanding that the goal is not glory, or recognition, or success in the eyes of the world. Faithfulness is not a strategy. It is not a destination. It is always a journey. When we walk with God, we are never alone.