Will Mancini » AUXANO

Great Vision, Bad Execution – 6 Common Mistakes

Will Mancini — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:08:18 +0000

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.

Removing the Invisible Walls on Your Leadership Team

Will Mancini — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 21:44:10 +0000

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?

Start Reaching Real Lost People Not Church Shoppers

Will Mancini — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 02:23:09 +0000

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!

The Main Thing the Church can Learn from Steve Jobs

Will Mancini — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 20:58:11 +0000

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?

Top Ten Church Logos for Telling Story through Design

Will Mancini — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 21:02:25 +0000

My favorite mantra for branding is “communicate vision visually.” Of course that is an important but not the only consideration for great logo design. Here is an example of some church logos by Auxano Design with a little explanation of how the design connects with the church’s story and vision.

LOGO #1: This congregation declares, “We are God’s Foundry to transform all people into faithful servants of Christ.” The logo creates a dynamic and memorable experience when you see the “molten pour” created by the white space of the mark for the first time. The process of transformation “being poured from God above” is strongly and uniquely visualized. This UMC church connects its identity back to Wesley’s first congregation that literally met in a foundry.

LOGO #2: The Met’s mission is to connect people each day to the real Jesus in a real way. The logo uses dot’s to represent people connecting. The busyness and sometimes fragmented activity of suburban living is reflected through the asymmetric circle pattern, inspired by the church’s Kingdom Concept. Yet a cross is revealed in the midst of life’s connections. The tagline of the MET is Live for More.

LOGO #3: The mission of First Baptist Spartanburg is to encourage complete and courageous living in Christ. This distinct cross emblem is a visual representation of “encouraging courage” utilizing a combination of a heart shape (encouraging) and a shield design (courage). The emblem creates four sub-icons for FBS’s strategy – the heart, the shield, the cross and a hidden icthus in the image. You can see them on the website.

LOGO #4: The Kingdom Concept of Neartown is to bring the whole gospel to busy young dad’s who are moving back to the city, signified ultimately by a deep experience of the peace of Jesus. The engaging and symmetric design is a unique, stylized cross connoting peace. Yet the cross also resembles a mix-master as a symbol of busy, city life. The beauty of the mark and subtle reference to a highway interchange creates a dynamic conceptual tension to highlight the mission. A masculine color scheme was chosen to resonate with the target audience.

LOGO #5: The mission of CFBC is to make sense out of life through Christ centered living. Instead of creating a cross “directly” with design, a cross is formed by the white spaced between the “random” placement of different size and color rectangles. The pieces of life don’t always seem fit but when Christ is seen at the center, life makes more sense. The unexpected placement of the typeface reinforces the distinction of the entire logo.

NEXT > See Logos 6-10

Clarity Comes By Working Not Waiting

Will Mancini — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:26:40 +0000

Dennis Easter is a friend of mine who is deeply rooted and widely connected as a catalytic leader in the Foursquare Church. As a Church Unique Certified denominational leader, he appreciates all things vision and passed along this great quote from Steve Pavlina:

“If you aren’t yet at the point of clarity, then make that your first goal. It’s a big waste of time to go through life being unclear about what you want. Most people wallow way too long in the state of “I don’t know what to do.” They wait for some external force to provide them with clarity, never realizing that clarity is self-created. The universe is waiting on you, not the other way around, and it’s going to keep waiting until you finally make up your mind. Waiting for clarity is like being a sculptor staring at a piece of marble, waiting for the statue within to cast off the unneeded pieces. Do not wait for clarity to spontaneously materialize—grab a chisel and get busy!”

My favorite line is, the universe is waiting on you. What phrase struck you the most?

6 Signs that You Are Coasting on Original Vision

Will Mancini — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 22:41:06 +0000

I was recently dialoguing with a very successful pastor about the ten-year vision horizon of the large church he pastors.

He made a striking comment.

“I don’t want to coast on original vision.”

It made me wonder, how do you know if you might be coasting on a vision that “used to be?”

You use adjectives that position the vision as historical: original, founding, previous, last season, former chapter, etc.
You have increasing realization of how far you God has taken your ministry in the last five or ten years.
You actually feel less excited about a the ideals, aspirations, or pictures of the future you used to have.
People around you express ask more questions about the future and show increasing curiosity for things like clarity.
You don’t hear younger generations say anything that resembles the vision as it was previously expressed.
You have updated your campus or changed your key players once or twice without revisiting the vision.

The Four Biases Within Any Group (Friday Facilitation Tip)

Will Mancini — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 20:43:11 +0000

Every meeting I facilitate is unique. The primary distinctive of each gathering is not the subject of the engagement but the collective bias of the group.

You have heard of the “bias for action.” Did you know that there are three other biases? Every individual has a primary inclination or bias around the four basic personality types. And every group has a collective bias.

Why is this important to know?

If you understand the group’s bias you can adapt your facilitation style to maximize success.

The four biases are:

#1 Bias for Action: This person is motivated by getting things done. A great day is a long, finished task list. Go, do, decide!!!

#2 Bias for Harmony: This person is driven by solid relational connection with others. Getting things done in a peaceful manner is more important than how much gets done. Ask, listen, be together.

#3 Bias for Accuracy: This person senses accomplishment only when things are done right. It doesn’t matter how much gets done or how much peace is maintained; all that matters is accurate results. Define, measure, manage!

#4 Bias for Influence: This person loves to see his or her ideas and personality impact the group. Effective communication and the positive response of others is more important that productivity, peace or accuracy. Talk, discuss, laugh!!

The key to using these biases is to adapt your facilitation pace and strategy based on the make-up of the group. So next time you facilitate, try to identify what kind of group you have. It will quickly help you tweak your facilitation style.

Do we need a faster pace or more breaks?
Do we need to listen more to one another or make more decisions?
Do we need to address conflict more directly or do we need better analytics?

Remember that every group has some unstated measure of success for the person facilitating. Dramatic success requires more than just covering the right subject matter. It comes with meshing your facilitation pace, style and strategy with their collective bias.

The Six Vehicles for Church Vision: How Many Are You Using?

Will Mancini — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 17:49:34 +0000

Every pastor wants to get people excited about God’s activity in the world through their local church. But not every pastor understands how to use the multiple vehicles at their disposal.

The idea of vehicle is easy to understand. If a community is in desperate need of medical supplies, what vehicles are you going to use? A wheelbarrow or a 18-Wheeler or a C-130 cargo aircraft? And if you could, would you want five C-130’s or just one? You get the picture.

Keep in mind that the concepts we are covering are very powerful when implemented. The truth is that pastors have trucks in their fleet that have never seen drive time. The cost is high as the precious cargo of motivational kingdom fuel never dispenses to hearts and minds of their people. But get those rucks rollin and you will see things happen like you’ve never seen before!

This post is the second in a series on “Vehicles for Vision.” The first post dealt with a primary challenge on the subject- the default setting in the pastor’s mind that preaching is the primary vehicle for vision. It is the default mode because it is the easiest. After all, pastors are preparing messages every Sunday already and they don’t have to get other people involved in the delivery process. It’s simple and clean.

In that post we revealed that despite the important role of preaching, the primary vehicle is the church’s connecting environment. So let’s start there and continue our list:

Vehicle #1: The Connecting Environment. This is the primary vehicle because it is the most relationally intensive. Therefore most of the validation, understanding and appreciation takes place here. Don’t complicate this too much. If you have small groups or Sunday school or missional communities, I am suggesting that those leaders or facilitators and the environments that they create are crucial to the delivery of vision.

Vehicle #2: The Leadership Pipeline. If you understand the importance of vehicle one, you might be asking, “How does that actually work?” That’s a great question because it reveals an even more foundational vehicle. In fact, I consider it the prime mover. The leadership pipeline is the vehicle where vision is transferred from leaders to other leaders. It assumes a leadership development culture. It supposes there are time and places where only leaders meet to pray, dream, dialogue and train together.

Vehicle #3: The Preaching Event. Now we get to everyone’s favorite. And this vehicle is important as it carries a special authority and motivational dynamic with the congregation at large. Preaching connects the vision to the Word of God, to the act of worship, and rallies the entire body of Christ together in a unique way.

Vehicle #4: The Structural Story. This is a meaningful piece that I look forward to unpacking with you. By structural story I mean everything from staff and volunteer position titles, to budget categories, to systems. It’s everything in the background; the supporting processes of the organization. And these pieces will either make a random, static-like noise or work together to contribute to the story and the vision.

Vehicle #5: The Visual Brand. From screens and worship guides, to curriculum and websites, your church is creating visual palettes from which people are digesting information. It may be a church sign, or a e-mail from the pastor. Everything speaks. As we explore this often overlooked vehicle we will show how you can constantly reflect and reinforce your vision.

Vehicle #6 The Voice of Each One. The icing on the cake is always the word on the street. Vision transfers through people not paper. And the ultimate test is not how well vision was communicated leader to leader, but from a participant to participant. By that I mean, what does Joe attendee say to a co-workers after he’s visited your church for six months? There are important steps that you can take, to help the vision transfer on the front line. Do you know what they are?

As we continue the series we will explore each vehicle further. For now I would encourage you to evaluate your ministry. How many of these vehicles are you currently using?

The Time and Place for The Authentic Church

Will Mancini — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:50:17 +0000

I have spent my life looking for the biblical, authentic church.

When I attended VBS at a small Lutheran church in 1st grade, I was thrilled to get the little silver Bible sticker in my pocket Bible.; the kind with Jesus pictures. I always wanted to go back to that church, but we never did.

When I attended catechism at a Presbyterian church in Augusta, GA. I memorized lot’s of God statements. It felt like the right thing to do.

When I attended Young Life meetings in high school. It was cool. It was spiritual.

When I attended a EFCA church at Penn State and carried around Desiring God (by John Piper) like a sacred text.

When I church hopped in Midland, TX working in the oil field. While exploring the black gold of the Permian Basin, I searched for the true expression of God’s church.

At seminary I found a church in the black and hispanic area in which I lived. It wasn’t what I was used to so it was better.

And still I combed the spiritual classics of centuries gone-by, searching for the hidden keys to walking with God.

Finally, I found the best model of all. I joined the staff of a church that started south of Houston. We reached unchurched people like that big Chicago seeker church that had all of the answers. I got to be a part of a team that grew one of America’s finest megachurches. This had to be the model, the authentic church.

My guess is that you have been pursuing the authentic church as well. And we should. God has put the desire within in us.

How is your search going?

Ten years ago, my search ended. I found it. No, I really did find it this time. A friend and consulting colleague, Rich Kannwischer just sent these words, written by Eugene Peterson. They capture perfectly what I found:

Churches are not franchises to be reproduced as exactly as possible wherever and whenever—in Rome and Moscow and London and Baltimore—the only thing changed being the translation of the menu. But if we don’t acquire a narrative sense, a story sense, with the expectation that we are each one of us uniquely ourselves—participants in the unique place and time and weather of where we live and worship—we will always be looking somewhere else or to a different century for a model by which we can be an authentic and biblical church. The usefulness of Acts as a story, and not a prescription or admonition, is that it keeps us faithful to the plot, Jesus, and at the same time free to respond out of our own circumstances and obedience.

Peterson, Eugene H. (2011). The Pastor: A Memoir (p. 119). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

In light of Peterson’s words, I ask again, “How is it going?” Or maybe the better question to ask is “Where have you been looking?”

It’s my dream that each pastor find the time and place for the authentic church. And the amazing answer is “It’s right now, right where you are.”

If you are new to my blog, thanks for stopping by. You may want to consider a book I wrote about discovering the authentic church for your time and place. I called the book Church Unique to highlight what Eugene Peterson is talking about here. It’s really about entering more deeply into the context that God has placed you to develop your own model of ministry. It’s about faithfulness to The Plot rather than mimicking another person’s story.