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.

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!

Kent Shaffer at Church Relevance shares some good stuff. I appreciate the fact that they do what they do to serve the Church. And he has learned the “big official list” gets lots of attention in the church leader space. When it comes to his blog ranking lists and conference lists I am usually one of the first to read and share.

With that as background, I have to say that I’m a little confused by Kent’s recent post that shows, in his opinion, the “Top 77 Church Logos of 2011” and I thought I’d respond with a few thoughts.

Let’s start with this—the statement I like most in Kent’s post is this one: “…a good logo communicates the unique qualities of its brand.” The way we say this at Auxano Design is that your logo should communicate vision visually. Of course, it can’t communicate everything about your church, but it can serve as a visual front door that matches what people will experience once they step through that door.

Now, I’ll move on to my questions.

1. 77 top logos? Really?
I’m not sure that a list of 77 anything is all that helpful, other than as a gallery that we can all peruse and say, “Those are nice.” Especially within the context of communicating vision visually, certainly there are some among that 77 (or beyond that 77) that are more effective at communicating vision and deserve to be examined more closely. I’ll single out a few from Kent’s list below for this reason.

2. Where are the stories?
When the list has this many entries and there is very little context of how these 77 were chosen, I want to hear the stories of these churches. Why did that church choose this specific logo? What about their vision or unique calling is communicated through this specific design? There are some great looking logos on this list that could possibly be communicating things that aren’t connected to vision and mission, but there’s no way to know that without the background story.

3. Why do unused concepts make the top 77?
If the true essence of a great logo is that it communicates vision visually or, in Kent’s words, that it “communicates the unique qualities” of a brand, how can we include unused logo concepts in the list? That serves as a signal to me that the list is more about what looks nice rather than what communicates the uniqueness of a specific congregation. Therefore we have reinforced the classic problem of church design: slapping together pretty pictures without meaning. (Read Picasso’s Missing Subject, my contribution to the Outspoken book on church communications.)

Those are probably my initial three questions about Kent’s list. From his list, however, I’ll pull out a few to examine more closely…because I think they are more effective.

Christ Church (Fort Lauderdale, FL)

From a brief look at their website, Christ Church seems to have done a good job of choosing a logo that connects with their unique way of communicating their vision. They talk about being a “gathering of people coming together to leave a personal and eternal ‘fingerprint’ on the world around us.” This type of language can form the foundation of a unique way of interacting with the world, inviting people into this kind of life. I love it. And their logo, which is a cross made of fingerprints, communicates the personal nature of this invitation and how each person can make a contribution to it. Great stuff.

Harvest Church (Mobile, AL)

Here’s a great example of communicating vision visually. While I don’t necessarily think that this is the most beautiful logo on the list, it communicates well. Their tagline, which is almost directly pulled from their mission statement, is “discover your destiny.” Their logo communicates that this is a journey (with the roadway image) and the sun-like shape at the top (illustrating the destiny piece). Not only that, but the roadway has a subtle “H” in it, in case you missed it. Again, not my favorite from a pure aesthetic point of view, but it connects directly to their mission and communicates it well without a ton of effort to explain it, which makes it stand out to me.

The Foundry (Houston, TX)

Of course I’m going to mention one of the logos we designed at Auxano, right? I won’t repeat it here, but I already shared a short case study on this church and their logo here.

New City Church (Phoenix, AZ)

I love the way this logo connects with the way New City talks about their mission. Listen to this, pulled from their website:

“Cities are the intersection of art, politics, and business. New City exists to engage culture where it’s created, weaving the story of God into the story of Phoenix. The desire of the church is not simply to gather on Sundays, but to meet you where you live, work, study and play. The green section in the New City logo represents an oasis among urban streets. Likewise, New City believes that following God breathes new life into our culture. We believe we can actively change our world by shifting the priority set from money, success, and fame to worship, community and mission.”

I couldn’t have articulated it that clearly, but their logo certainly communicates intersection and city, and the colored section makes you want to ask, “What’s different about that block?” The answer they offer: it’s an oasis among urban streets. That’s a great logo and a great mission.

What about you?

The real question that I want to raise is this: what does your logo communicate? Does it say something unique about your church, inviting people to find out more? Then, whether it made Kent’s list of 77 or not, it’s a top logo.

Thanks, Kent, for your time in searching out great logos and keeping the conversation going about how we can, as the Church, use design to effectively communicate vision visually to our congregations and to the world.