Will Mancini

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.

Step One: Ask “Who?”

Consider who created the pattern, the model, “the how” of your particular ministry area or ministry responsibility. Did it come from a book, another church (conference), the previous pastor? Someone was the designer. Who was it?

Step Two: Ask “Why?”

Consider the motives and the intent of the person who designed the ministry you lead. Why did the originator of the ministry make the decisions they made? Why is your ministry designed the way it is? What problems were they trying to solve? What were their assumptions?

Step Three: Ask “What’s Changed?”

Somewhere between the original design or latest modification of the ministry you are leading, things have changed. Make a list of things that are different. Is your ministry reaching the same people? Who is coming now? Who has left? How has communication and technology changed? How have peoples’ values changed. What’s new in our community? Is your leadership style different now? Obviously these are a small sample of the countless questions you may ask.

Step Four: Ask “What Change Can We Make?”

After the list of what’s changed, consider how you can modify the pattern, design, for strategy of your ministry area or responsibility. What new problem needs to be solved today? What new challenge or new opportunity is most important to address? How do you need to add value? How can it be done less expensively? How can you reach more people? How can you reach different people?

In the end you want to be able to answer, “What is the most important tweak to our ministry that we can make today?”

Step Five: Engage Flux

Flux is the new reality. And flux is good. Fast Company magazine’s cover story this month is on Generation Flux. It’s not about an age segment demographic, but a way of thinking that successful people of any age must embrace.  Prepare yourself to change and to change things. Think not like a fast follower or best practicer, but like a future designer and better experimenter. This last September I released a little digital experience with Leadership Network called FLUX: Four Paths to the Future. If you want to keep thinking and pushing yourself as a courageous tweaker of ministry, I recommend that you check it out as part of the Leadia App, for iPhone and iPad.

Drip, drip, drip. It’s constant and you can’t not think about it. I know, I know, it’s a double negative. But haven’t you experienced that when you hear a drip somewhere in your house? You become obsessed with finding the source of the drip. Usually I don’t like using illustrations that have a negative connotation, but the final step to taking vision public is to drip it daily, and this constant dripping is a great way to think about it.

Near the end of Church Unique, I describe your leaders as the engine of your vision. Without leaders that are aligned with (actions) and attuned to (emotions) the vision, you’re destined for failure. How do you keep your key leaders aligned and attuned over time? You’ve got to drip vision daily in your conversations and interactions.

Here are a few simple questions to see how well you drip the vision.

• Have you drawn your strategy on the back of a napkin in a restaurant to explain it to someone in the last month?
• Can all of your key staff and volunteer leaders recite your mission and talk about why it matters?
• Have you spent time in the last month during a staff or leadership meeting to revisit your Vision Frame?

If you answered “no” to any of those questions, you need to do a better job of dripping vision daily. This is where  your Vision Frame language, tagline, and key messages can help. Start using this language all the time—in every meeting, during every conversation. This language should infiltrate and permeate your conversations, becoming a part of your normal vocabulary. By talking vision daily like this, your vision will start to become ingrained as a part of your culture rather than just some language you developed once to be framed and put on the wall.

Here are three practical suggestions for ways you can drip vision daily.

1. In the next conversation you have with a key staff member or volunteer leader, work in at least 3 phrases from your Vision frame, tagline, or key messages.
2. Add “Vision Frame Review” to your leadership meeting agenda for sometime in the next month and take 30 minutes to reflect together on one or two parts of the Vision Frame (I’d suggest reviewing your mission and your strategy).
3. Consider using the Vision Deck as a tool in your regular meetings. It’s a tool we developed with 52 suggestions for ways you can better integrate your vision into your culture during normal meeting rhythms.

The main thing you need to do is start dripping vision daily right now…if you’re not already doing it. You’ve got to be intentional about doing this at the beginning, until you develop it as a habit. Soon, talking vision should become a natural part of your daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms.

If you keep these six steps in mind: fill the pool (by articulating your vision), boil it down (by developing your tagline), describe the water (by crafting key messages), tap into the thirst (by communicating the Big Why), break out the hose (by leveraging every medium), and drip, drip, drip (by talking vision daily), you’ll have vision-soaked communication that will move your church or organization toward being more effective for your mission. And that’s the goal, isn’t it?

In the last month I have been evaluating a pretty big decision. One of those kinds where, for better or worse, my resting moments are flooded with pros and cons and “what ifs.”  Here are some things I have been been doing in the process of discernment.

#1 Keep it about the walk.

Whatever the decision, remember Jesus is walking next to you and your life belongs to Him. How will the decision affect your relationship with Him? This question alone should be the only one you need to ask. During this season, I have been reflecting on the pattern of big decisions in my life and relishing the memories of Jesus guiding me for 30 years. Prayer this way becomes more than an act, it’s an expression of long relationship.

#2 Don’t get advice, get better questions.

Getting advice is a no brainer. The real pursuit is getting better questions. You will have the top three or four people from whom you receive general wisdom. What about the next 15-20 who can give you special, very specific insight? With each person, ask, “What other questions do I need to consider about _________?” or “Here is an assumption I am working from, but what question am I not considering?” I have had some big explosions of insight by asking these questions.

#3 Create a tug-o-perspective-war.

It’s important to “mine out” the conflict and tension of the decision. I even imagine a tug-of-war of different perspectives. Who can you enlist to pull on the different sides by offering new perspective? Of course you’ll have to live with the internal battle in keeping the first and last “move” of this list in mind. In the last month I have different sides “winning” as I stack each side of the rope with new people offering new points of view.

#4 Travel in time, while watching time.

God gave you an imagination so that you could dream forward and exercise faith. While we can’t predict the future, you can play out your decision, and practice in your minds-eye the blessings and byproducts of your big decision. How does the decision change your life in the next year? In the next ten years? How will the tone of the hours of your day be affected? How will all of your key relationships be affected? The list goes on. Remember there are times when your creative mind is more active, like the fringes of sleep and hypnotic states, like taking a long shower or driving. I intentionally use these times. But remember to watch your time. Don’t make a decision to quickly, and don’t forget that some opportunities expire. You only have the lifetime of the opportunity to leverage the opportunity of a lifetime.

#5 Do the trust fall.

In the end, every decision is an act of trust. Remember that crazy thing you did at camp when you were a kid? You really didn’t know if your buddies were going to let you hit the ground for a laugh. But you did it. You let go. You trusted. The final act of the decision-making process is the moment of commitment. How does this act of trust feel for me? I simply tell God, “I have listened and discerned as much as possible and I am making this decision for you. If this is not the right decision, I trust you to show and to direct my path. Everything I have and I am belongs to you.”

Right now, everything you do or don’t do is guided by a set of underlying values. The same is true for your church. Culture-savvy leaders understand how to mold the invisible stuff of values to shape, like clay, the atmosphere, attitudes, actions and automated responses of their teams.

What if we were to x-ray the intuitive movements of  great values-based  leaders? What would we see?

What if we were to  make even more conscious our intentions towards culture-shaping leadership? What core practices would come to the surface?

Here are seven:

#1 Articulation: The first step of culture-shaping is to identify, name and define. That’s what it means to be human- bringing meaning through how we label and distinguish within the created world and within the world we want to create. You can’t mold in the real world what you don’t hold in the mental world. So, what are you holding? What are your top 3 or 4 culture-shaping aspirations?

#2 Imitation: You teach what you know, but you reproduce what you are. Your life is broadcasting and multiplying a values set. How is that values set being consciously transferred by you, even though the receiver may not know it?

#3 Mechanism: If you lead a team or an organization, you have the authority to create a shared experience or a roll-out a new process. Think of a mechanism as an event or process that clarifies, restores, aligns or attunes your people with an existing shared value. Think of this as a wake-up call that shakes up business as usual.

#4 Collision: Oftentimes values get clear and concrete at the very moment they are violated. Or it may be a time of testing or crisis that brings a “near violation.” Look for collisions in the past and potential ones in the future to rehearse and strengthen values. As a leader don’t be afraid to name when you missed a values-based decision or needed a realignment yourself. That may be the most important impression you ever leave.

#5 Decision: Consciously run your decisions, big and small, through the filter or your values. Most importantly combine this with “imitation” and walk through a conscious decision-making process with your team using your values. What decisions are you facing today? What are your biggest decisions in 2012?

#6 Question: Dialogue is one of the leader’s greatest tools. And dialogue works best with questions, not answers. Ask questions to clarify, to meddle, and to rethink. Pose questions for your team to answer. Specifically bring bold questions that force new thinking around the same values.

#7 Celebration: The most often cited culture-shaping activity is celebration. People repeat what’s rewarded. Make sure you take time for this. If this is one of your perpetual weaknesses, assign someone on the team to plan the moments that mark your church’s progress. Life is too short not to celebrate!