It’s a delight to watch teams get clear on the future. But it’s a fright to see that hard work of visioning go south when it comes to execution. If the work of visioning can be compared to taking a journey, there are six mistakes I see most:

#1 Spinning Wheel Decision-making. Sometimes a team can have a great vision process only to get bogged down in complex or ineffective decision-making after the fact. On a car ride of a thousand miles, the spark plugs fire a thousands times each mile. If the little steps to make the vision happen don’t fire, you’ll only putter along.

#2 Courage-on-empty: Clarity is no good if there isn’t courage and conviction to act on it. Sometimes the team or the point leader get fired up about the next ministry chapter or new direction only to hit the brakes if a few people push back. This lack of courage may be just another way to describe approval addiction.

#3 Ego Side Trips: Sometimes a team of strong leaders create sideways energy. Maybe two senior leaders have different operating philosophies. Or, maybe youthful vigor on the team insists on going in its own direction. Sometimes leaders gets distracted with building their platform outside of the organization or use a ministry position in a way that promotes personal hobbies and interests. While I don’t often run into ill intent in ministry, I do see lots of strong egos that don’t harness together well.

#4 Communication Breakdown: The best vision in the world will die fast if people are left out of the loop. Meaningful connection to the vision must be sustained by dialogue, vision-soaked media, and vision dripping from the core leadership. After you map out the vision, make sure you map out your communication processes and systems.

#5 False Start: Every now and then, I see a team so anxious to execute that they move to quickly. It may be inexperience, or over-optimism. Sometimes a leader grows to or moves to a larger organization, where implementation requires more steps and nuances to bring everyone along. Sometimes a leader has a mountaintop experience and fails to get the key lieutenants together and on board for a great start.

#6 Running Too Hot: Having clear vision is one thing. Getting there in God’s time is another. Sometimes leaders have the right vision but want to achieve it too fast. In their drivenness, people suffer from burn-out. In times of stress and extreme performance other temptations come to the table. It’s critically important not to let the work for God hinder the work of God in the personal lives of the team. God’s vision should never eclipse the godliness of the visionary.

Last week I was completing the Vision Frame with a church in California. They could feel the removal of what one pastor  called their “invisible walls.”  It’s an interesting comment given the fact that its a very effective church.

What is an invisible wall? It’s something your eyes can’t see that keeps your team from working better together.

• Mistrust
• Missed time
• Misalignment
• Misunderstanding

Every week brings a fresh truckload of glass bricks for your team to stack.  Busy week after busy week leads to busy semester after busy semester. No one has ill motives. No one intends to build a wall. But the walls go up without conscious notice.

The good news is that it’s NOT rocket science to take down a wall. Haven’t you noticed it’s easy (and usually fun) to tear stuff down anyway? What we need are some sledge hammers to take down this hard-to-see  barriers.

Weekly, I watch leadership teams tear down their invisible walls.  Keep in mind, I am talking about effective teams, not broken ones.In Auxano’s clarity process, teams feel like a team at a whole new level. Even though the meeting room looks the same, the real albeit unseen barriers have been removed.

How do you demolish those walls? Try these five things.

• Give permission to identify walls.
• Beyond permission, shape  a culture of authentic dialogue by how you give and receive feedback. Telling people that you are open to honesty and “push-back” isn’t enough. Permission has not truly been given until it you have done. Keep in mind if you don’t receive it well, you’ll shut down the sharing next time around.
• Schedule time dedicated to strategic conversations. Most teams don’t create enough space for important, non-urgent dialogue and decision-making. At Faithbridge over the years, the team has regularly “parked” (sometimes monthly) conversation topics for scheduled “strategic-stuff-only” meetings.
• Schedule margin in the calendar for “drop in” conversations. With the speed of ministry, it goes a long way to touch base for no “necessary” reason. It says you care. It says you are available to listen. It provides an opportunity to remove a glass brick, instead of adding one. Yesterday, I challenged a staff member pretty hard in a consulting meeting. Today I stuck my head in her office to check in and mentioned, “Hey, I pushed you pretty hard yesterday and I just wanted to acknowledge that it might have been a little too hard.”
• Make one bold feedback question a standard part of your team culture- “Have I done anything lately that has diminished the trust in our relationship?”

What other actions would you add to demolish invisible walls?

This post is not for everyone. First, its for followers of Jesus who really want to reach messy people groups with the gospel, including some entrenched in darker darkness. Second, its for people who live within Las Vegas or a Southwest airlines trip to there at cities like:

San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Reno, Sacramento, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, etc.

Vault is one of the most unique equipping opportunities you will ever have. This mini-conference (noon to noon, Monday-Wednesday next week) will bring you deep inside the thinking and methods Vince Antonucci and Verve Church use in Las Vegas, which have led them to reach atheists, pimps, prostitutes, bikers, Wiccan witches, Buddhists, strippers, lesbians, and many more of the truly lost, the people Jesus called all of us all to reach. I have been onsite with Vince and his team two times- his church work is the real deal!

How can YOUR CHURCH go from reaching church shoppers to reaching people who don’t like church? That’s what Vault is all about, and you don’t want to miss the conversation!

This year special guest John Burke will be leading three sessions of Vault.  You may have seen John speak at Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit.  He’s the author of No Perfect People Allowed, and the church planter and pastor of Gateway, one of the most evangelistically effective churches in America. John will share principles you can use to reach people who are truly far from God.

I will be there sharing thoughts on redemptive passion and vision clarity. Most importantly I am bringing one of our Auxano navigators, Dave Saathoff, who has learned how to reach thousands of people, far from God in San Antonio, Texas.

The cost is only $125 (or $100 for groups of 2 or more), which includes three meals and book giveaways! The conference is limited to about 100 people, which provides for an amazing dynamic that promotes learning and relationships. But it also means that registration will fill up soon, so register today!

As I reflect on Steve Job’s resignation this week,  I am grateful for how his achievements inspire my own thinking. Here are some updated thoughts on a post I wrote from 18-months ago.

Whatever your opinion of the Apple products, they continue to capture the consumer imagination and bring innovation to life.  With the historic moment of the iPad’s original release, now about 18-months old,  I want to revisit some of the actual sound bites of the marketing blitz. Quotes from the release include:

• When something exceeds our ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical
• It’s hard to see how something so simple can be so capable
• It’s going to change the way we do the things we do, every day
• I don’t have to change myself to fit it; it fits me
• We decided, “Let’s redesign it all…let’s redesign and reimagine and rebuild from the ground up…”
• You get an order of magnitude more powerful
• There’s automatic orientation
• Everything gets out of the way so that you can focus on the content you care about
• We want to put it in the hands as many people as possible right from the start
• This is a new category, but millions and millions of people are going to be instantly familiar with it

What if the ministry of our local churches could reflect amazing claims like this?  Go ahead and reread the list, but this time thinking about your church.

Is there even room for a comparison of Apple’s advancements to gospel-centered ministry? I believe so and I think the magic of this tech revolutionary  has something to teach church leaders.

Listen to the linchpin strategy of Apple’s success:

“It’s built by our hardware team in concert with our software team and what that gives you is a level of performance that you can’t get any other way. Apple is the one place that you can really do this. We build battery technology, we build chip technology and we build software and we bring all those things together in way that no one else can do it.”

The singular application of Steve Job’s success to church leaders is that design from the ground up is so fully integrated, that quality and innovation are unsurpassed. In church speak, we would dream that ministry content, ministry environments, ministry people and processes are so integrated that life change and accessibility to the gospel are unsurpassed.

But often doesn’t happen. Why not?  We simply  prefer NOT to do the work of designing, thinking and building this way. We like the message of Simple Church, or Church Unique, but get stuck relying on existing models. We get weary of talking with lay leadership about real changes in ministry strategy. We get satisfied with the good results of duplicating a program rather than the great results of incarnating our own. We get so busy on the ministry treadmill that we let every staff person makes decisions based on their own “operating system.”

What would happen if Steve Jobs decided to make disciples?

How would he design the church? What adaptations would he make to your ministry design? What would he stop altogether?  How would he redesign from the ground-up?