Creative Bites

This week, we continue our Tools for Clarity series by looking at the PEST analysis. Some of the tools in this series might be difficult to visualize in your mind, so I’ve put together examples of each tool that you can use in your context on my website. Head to mcurtis.co/clarity to find worksheets for each tool as each episode is released.

What is a PEST Analysis

• a formalized way of thinking through different parts of your organization
• The basic analysis is broken into four categories 
  • Political: what are the political things happening in your city, region, state, or country that have the potential to impact how your organization functions or is viewed? 
    • Evangelicals and Trump 
    • Local politics 
    • Labor laws changing? 
  • Economical: what is happening economically that could impact the way your organization functions? 
    • Broaden this to include the impact economics have on your congregation
    • Think back to the housing crisis: people losing their homes. That has a big impact on your people, and thus your organization.
  • Social: what realities exist in the social space? 
    • What is the expectation of staff entering the work force? 
    • What are growing trend-sensitivities of the people in your region?
  • Technological: what is happening in the space of technology that your organization should be attentive to? 
    • Are you speaking the native language of people, or are you speaking old language? 
    • Is technology changing the way people interact with organizations? Are you adapting? 

What does the PEST do?

• The PEST Analysis helps you assess what things going on outside your organization have the potential to impact your organization. Often the PEST analysis will help feed the “opportunities” and “threats” portion of your SWOT Analysis.

What doe a PEST not to?

• A PEST Analysis doesn’t solve you problems, is simply identifies what is going on outside the organization so you can begin assessing how those things will impact the organization.

Let’s walk through the sample PEST

• Context
• Working through the consideration of an online expression of church
• We didn’t want to do this “just because”
• The PEST Analysis helped identify some of the reasons we should have the conversation, but also helped us identify some of the pitfalls we wanted to avoid.

Keep in mind, this tool was being used deep within the organization to identify something that we should propose to leadership. While leadership is served well by using a tool like this, it can be incredibly helpful by you in your department today. 

This week, we begin our Tools for Clarity series. We are going to start our series off with the SWOT analysis. Some of the tools in this series might be difficult to visualize in your mind, so I’ve put together examples of each tool that you can use in your context on my website. Head to mcurtis.co/clarity to find worksheets for each tool as each episode is released.

What is a SWOT Analysis

• a formalized way of thinking through different parts of your organization
• The analysis is broken into four categories 
  • Strengths: what are you good at?
  • Weaknesses: what are you not so good at?
  • Opportunities: what are areas we can invest in that drive the mission
  • Threats: what things can sabotage your accomplishment of the mission 

What does the SWOT do?

• It clarifies and pinpoints specific issues that your team or organization need to be aware of. 

What doe a SWOT not to?

• A SWOT doesn’t give you a plan of attack. It simply identifies what you should attack.

Let’s walk through the sample SWOT

• Context
• Just taken over a team with a really bad reputation
• People didn’t want to work with us
• The team was frustrated and bitter, and we needed to change our behavior.
• This example is based on that season.

Keep in mind, while I was over a team, I was nestled deep into the organization at this point. I wasn’t in charge. No one told me to do this. This is a tool you can use at any level of the organization to help add clarity.

This week, I to talk about the importance of clarity in you day to day. I believe that a lack of clarity is the most reliable way to fail. 

Most of the time we are quick to blame leadership for a lack of clarity, but there are things we can do to cultivate clarity regardless of our place in the organization. Over the next few episodes, I’ll be going through different tools that I have found to be incredibly helpful for adding clarity within my area of influence, and they’ve even helped add clarity outside my ministry. 

In this episode however, I want to unpack some of the specific reasons clarity is even important in the first place.

Why is clarity so important?

1. It tells you where to go

• Progress doesn’t happen on accident

2. It tells you where not to go

• Every destination isn’t the right one.
• Often our temptation is to do good things. In reality, though, we can’t do all the good things well. Focus on the few good things – usually connected to the mission of the organization – and say no to everything else. 

3. It helps you identify wins

• What should we repeat?
• If we haven’t identified what a win is, we won’t know.

4. It helps you identify who needs to grow

• If clarity doesn’t exist in your organization, it won’t be clear how people on your team need to grow.

Ok, great. So clarity is important. But how do we get there when you don’t run the show? I’m glad you asked.

1. Focus on adding clarity in your area first.

• Are you giving leadership status updates on your projects?
• If someone wants to work with your team, is it clear how they can do that?
• Are there areas within your team that aren’t clear? Make them clear!

2. Invite others into clarity

• When people participate in work with you, model what clarity looks like for them. Don’t expect them to be clear, or even to acknowledge the clarity that you are bringing. Instead, let your projects be more successful.

3. Protect the clarity you do have.

• Remember that this is a long term approach. You will not change the organization over night. That’s ok. You aren’t trying to change everything–you are trying to make your specific area better through clarity.

Now, I want to make it clear that while you can help improve the clarity that happens in your area, if clarity isn’t a cultural value, you might not be able to make significant change that sticks outside of your area. Usually when a culture doesn’t value clarity, it is because it values something else more.

• Sometimes it’s the “family nature” of the staff
• Sometimes personal preference is more important than clarity
• Sometimes there is an unwillingness to enforce a uniform approach to planning

Rarely, however, is it an active rejection of clarity. I like to think of it this way. Let’s say someone painted a wall blue. But you think the wall should be yellow. If you say to the painter “we need more yellow”, they’ll be a bit confused. Sure, yellow is nice, but we painted the wall blue. It was a matter of saying yes to blue more than it was a matter of saying no to yellow.

Clarity is often a casualty of another value.

But now what? How do I get there from here? That’s what the next several episodes are going to be about. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to feature a tool that you can implement in your job - regardless of your role. We’ll look at the purpose of each tool, how to apply it in your context, and what next steps it will help you take. Even if you are the only one in your organization to use these tools, they will help you bring clarity to your organization.

What an Organizational Hero is not.

• You stay late to complete a project every so often.
• You work a lot of hours over a short period of time because of an high-impact season 
  • Let’s say summer camp, Christmas, a major outreach promotion. 
• You work really hard
• You feel like you can do a better job at something than someone else
• You take pride in your work

What an Organizational Hero is.

Essentially, the Organizational Hero is the extreme case of these tendencies.

• You stay late to complete a project regularly. You always feel like you have more work than you can get done.
• You always have a reason to work a lot of hours–regardless of the ministry season.
• You work really hard without taking breaks to rest
• You feel like you can do things better than others, but you take on more yourself rather than helping them do better work
• You find your identity in your work

How do people become Organizational Heroes?

1. You love the organization.

2. Leadership affirms that you should invest more.

3. You are proud.

How Organizational Heroes hurt the organization.

1. They hide issues

2. The drive a toxic staff culture

3. They burn out and increase turnover

4. They prevent others from developing

5. They make it impossible for leadership to plan

What do I do about it?

1. Check your heart

• Address the root of pride in your life that is causing you to elevate yourself above your peers and look down on them. Instead, identify someone you work with that you can help make better. 

2. Start measuring things

• It’s hard to tell if you are losing weight without weighing yourself
• It’s hard to tell if you are running faster if you aren’t timing yourself
• It’s hard to tell if you are lifting more if you aren’t keeping a log
• It’s hard to tell if you are under budget if you aren’t tracking your expenses
• How can you tell if you are taking on too much if you aren’t keeping track of what you are doing?
•  Track your time over the course of a week. Look at where you time is going. Start learning how much time each of your tasks takes. 
  • For example, how long does your small group take? Most people will say “a couple of hours”. Is that true? Is it more like 2.5? Sometimes is it 3? The difference between an even taking 2 hours and 3 hours becomes really important when leadership asks you to add another responsibility to your plate.

3. Talk about it

• Have conversations with leadership unpacking what your workload looks like. If you just say you “feel busy”, you haven’t helped anyone. Explain what things take the most time, and see if there is something that can come off your plate.
• Leadership won’t react immediately because the conversations you have are the beginning of them studying the situation and seeing how they can best solve the problem, while also accomplishing goals for the organization.
• These are ongoing conversations that help you and leadership. Having them might feel embarrassing at first, or even like you are failing. But you aren’t failing. You are hanging up your cape so the organization can be made better.

Types of imbalance

Church of Chaos (not efficient) 

• Things take longer, and its quite possible that staff is struggling to keep up with all of the things that need to get done. Not because there are too many things, but because each thing is taking too long. 
• Everything is running inefficiently. 

Church of Improvement

• Scale demands efficiency. 
  • And so, the process to make things efficient begins.
• Things like facilities, communications, productions, and even some high level ministry programs like small groups or weekends start finding a groove.

Obviously with all these improvements, we want more efficiency.

The Church of Efficiency

Then one day, you find yourself here. 

• Efficient. Streamlined. High performance,  but soulless.
• The joy just isn't there any more. 
  • What happened?

Efficiency happened. 

The Balanced Church

• The role of efficiency in the church is to allow inefficiency to be used well. 
• When inefficiency is removed all together, all the aspects of ministry that can't be streamlined suffer.
• The quest for efficiency is centered around the mission of the church. 
  • I believe that if you are regularly rushing through a counseling appointment or a shepherding opportunity for the sake of maximizing time, you are minimizing your impact. 

How to identify a culture that has overvalued efficiency:

• Conversations are rushed. 
  • Relationships don't have the time to breath that they need to. 
• We don't feel comfortable being still and listening to the spirit. 
  • Relationships are inefficient. Hospital visits take time. 
  • Ministry doesn't always go according to the script, and rarely can it be broken into the 30 minute calendar slots we allocate for it. 

Two values I hold in high regard for our team.

• Take as much work off our ministry teams as we can so they can focus on the ministry they have been called to.
• Serve our ministry teams with joy.

What does that mean for our team?

• It means that we are willing to go out of our way if a helps free up our ministry teams, or if it supports them above and beyond their expectations.
• If it doesn’t move forward either of those values, we get it done efficiently.

 We need balance

• Relationships are the context in which significant moments happen. 
• Feedback, personal and professional improvement, encouragement, development, growth, change, and even Biblical correction. 
• They all happen in relationship.

If you or your team are looking for ways to become more efficient as an organization, answer these two questions:

What is our primary ministry focus?
Where does my time get spent each week?

When you see where your time goes, you will know what thinks you need to look at. 

• Identify the areas where a lot of time is being spent, but wouldn't be identified as your primary ministry focus. 
• The size of your team doesn’t matter. There is still value in becoming more efficient at non-missional tasks.

Bottom line:

Relationships are more valuable than completed work. Don’t just keep adding more work at the cost of relationship.

Seven Simple ways you can get better at your job.

1. Show up on time 

• When you show up on time, you begin to cultivate a reputation of being dependable
• If you are regularly late, people will filter what you say through their perception of you. 
• This usually frustrates people. The good news, however, is that you can easily avoid this problem all together by showing up on time.
• Choose to grow in your discipline. 
  • Set alerts on your computer, phone, watch, shoes, whatever has notifications on it. 
  • Don’t book back to back meetings if you struggle with being on time. Leave padding between meetings.
  • Communicate if you are going to be late.
  • A proactive “sorry, I’m running late” lessens the frustration.

2. Be prepared

• Come to meetings having done work
• Stay focused on the agenda
• Understand the counter arguments and be prepared to address them
• Don’t make up answers. If you don’t know, say that you will find the answer and do it ASAP.
• Think about what those listening care about. What information do they need to know in order to make a good decision? 
  • Some care about budget. Some theology. Some data. 
  • Don’t judge what they want to know, provide answers. 

3. Be a multilayered thinker

• Sweat the details when you are presenting
• Anticipate the next question, and have an answer for it
• Tie what is happening to the objective 
  • What are you trying to accomplish, and how does it help move the mission forward? 

4. Put in more effort 

• Try three things before asking for help
• Try to find the answer on your own
• Pay attention to what you tried before 
  • Projects seem to take way more or way less time than we think they should. Don’t lose your due diligence just because this project is taking longer. 

5. Ask clarifying questions

• If you don’t understand something, ask for clarification
• There is nothing shameful about needing more clarification 
  • Projects I’ve been on that lack clarity usually lack success as well 

6. Stop giving up

• Don’t stop with your assessment of a “no”
• Share what brought you to that conclusion, and let others speak into it
• The hurdles you see might not be as big as you think
• The project might be more important than you realize

7. Respect the time of others.

• Before you walk into a meeting or a conversation, have a clear plan of attack. Seek the information you need, and be ready to move on. 
  • Consider the time you are taking from others. Don’t demand more time than you need. Free them up to continue to pursue the ministry they have been called to. 

Bottom line:

More often than not, the difference between success and failure is found in our willingness to work hard at the little things.

Six ways personal preference destroys your organization.

1.  Preference fuels division

• Someone wins, someone loses
• People become jealous when an idea you pitch gets approved
• People get disappointed when their ideas aren’t approved
• It becomes my idea vs. your idea - you vs. me
• we throw out ideas because of who they come from, not based on the caliber of the idea itself. 
  • People get labeled as “bad sources” and are functionally silenced 
  • Tribes begin to develop within the staff (and often beyond it). 
  • You need one of two things in order to make decisions: power or expertise. 
    • Leaders point to the org chart when advocating for their preference 
    • Experts design systems that only other experts can maintain in order to protect their preference 

2. Preference feeds pride

• When someone’s preferences are allowed to move forward, it feeds a “build my empire” attitude.
• This doesn’t typically start as the main objective. 
  • We unintentionally create our own vision. 
    • I want our design to be off the charts creative 
    • That doesn’t actually work in our context 
    • I get frustrated that I can’t accomplish my vision. 

3. Preferences alienates people

• Preference prevents us from considering anyone else’s opinion or perspective when “choosing a side” 
  • Approach to music 
  • Teaching style 
  • Approach to Discipleship 
  • Digital vs. print 
  • Approach to Evangelism 
  • Approach to community engagement 
  • What color our logo is 
  • What our welcome gift is 
  • How the website looks 
• Without running these through the filter of your church’s mission, you will be less effective at reaching people in your congregation. 
  • I often see people want to get rid of printed programs without considering if printed programs are effective. 
    • Sometimes you do need to blaze a trail, but you need evidence to back it up. Don’t get caught up by the advice of other experts without assessing your context. 
• Eventually, preference even pulls us away from God’s word. We no longer make our decisions surrounding what the church is called to in Scripture…we just keep chasing our preference. Our people are alienated as a result.

4. Preference wastes resources

• Preference is the fuel for mission drift
• Conversations are around “who is asking for this”, not “how does this help us move the mission forward”. 
  • Often a piece of someone’s preference is approved, but another part isn’t. This leads so incomplete or bad solutions. 
• Over time, preference trains us to think wrongly. The organization loses the ability to think on mission, so the ideas become less and less effective at moving the right things forward. 
• This is, in part, why organizations wake up one day and are in need of repair in dozens of areas. 

5. Preference ignores facts

• Sometimes the truth is difficult. But that doesn’t mean we can just ignore it. 
  • If your congregation gives at a certain rate, you can’t just wish for it to be different. 
  • If kids aren’t coming to your VBS, you can’t assume the program can’t change. 
  • If people are leaving your church, you can’t assume it’s a “them problems”. 
• The problem with presence, however, is that we often don’t want to make the changes that the data leads us to. 
  • Not every decision should be data driven in the church. But your defense against data should be scripture, not preference. 

6. Preference usurps&

The approach to multi-site ministry has evolved over the years. In a lot of ways, there aren’t any clear methodologies that we can identify because each church tends to Frankenstein together their own approach based on their ministry goals. Often the primary direction of multisite isn’t clear to the staff because leadership allows the model to unfold. I’ve heard numerous stories of a particular model of multisite being pursued for years only to have everything changed–or in some cases, entirely undone. 

Ultimately, time spent in the model reveals the implications the multisite model.

Three primary approaches to multisite

Franchise

• Least impact on central support staffing
• Least autonomy for ministry teams
• Few differences between campuses
• Evaluation stems from how well you implemented what you were told to implement
• Everything is led by the central team

Church Plant (or localized)

• Each campus can make their own decisions
• In some cases, leadership teams are developed on each campus (even independent boards)
• Each campus builds it’s own infrastructure and support teams
• In some cases, campuses eventually become independent

Hybrid

• Here is where things get crazy
• We want uniqueness, but we don’t want to hire more teams
• We want campuses to drive all decisions
• Central teams shift from contributors to responders
• Workloads increase, but depth of work decreases
• There is never a “final state”, as pressure tends to inform decisions more than strategy
• This is a very common model because it allows for some things to be franchise, but others to be unique and localized.

What changes with multisite?

Multisite requires more systems

• No single person owns anything anymore.
• No single students person, there are now multiple. This means a culture of partnership and collaboration are not optional.

Multisite requires more conversation

• I’ve heard it said that when your church grows significantly, the complexity grows exponentially.
• It becomes much more complex to minister to many more people
  • In that line of thinking, I would say multisite makes reaching the same amount of people exponentially more complex.
  • In the beginning, almost every decision requires a lot of people’s input

Multisite requires more humility

Moving something forward in the organization is rarely driven by a single person anymore

• Now, nearly every decision that is made impacts someone. Remember, you now have more than one of almost everyone. If you design a great baptism shirt for one campus, another campus might want to use it. Or, they might want their own shirt.
  • This conversation happens regardless of your model. Just because you are franchise doesn’t mean people have stopped caring about being unique. Just because you aren’t franchise doesn’t mean people have stopped caring about being efficient.
  • Now every decision requires a conversation. It could be “we need to be unified under our franchise approach”, or “is it ok to share this”, or “you need to be caring about making your campus unique”. 
• Partnering to figure stuff out takes humility

Multisite requires more patience

When everyone comes around the table to try to make a decision, it reveals who is on mission, and who isn’t.

• It also reveals that the mission might not be as clear as we thought it was
  • You can’t assume others are against the mission if they are advocating for something agains the mission. It probably just means the mission wasn’t as clear as you thought.
  • This process make it feel like the organization has completely stalled. It hasn’t, you are just doing the hard work of bu

This week we are going to finish our conversation on branding. If you haven’t listened to part 1 of this conversation, hit pause and go listen to part one. 

This week we will reference a case study on mcurtis.co that works through the transition from a house of brands to a branded house.

What does a strong church brand do?

• It delivers on the promise of growing people in their walk with Christ 
  • If you have an event, it moves people toward growth 
• It helps clarify pathways for spiritual growth. 
  • It directs those with needs to biblical solutions 
• It is an identifier of a specific gathering of the body of Christ 
  • It reveals the transformative power of a legitimate relationship with Christ to a doubting and lost world 
    • It is a testimony of the truth of God’s word, and of God’s promises through the body of Christ 
• It values the right things 
  • It can be a tool to articulate what is important
  • Sometimes we lose sight of the larger mission because of our love for our own area of focus.
  • Multisite usually focuses the conversation of house of brands vs branded house, but I think our values should.

Case Study

• Every ministry had a logo, and every ministry leader wanted their logo to be amazing. We were constantly rebranding ministries
• That isn’t a good branding practice, and it is an expensive use of time
• Multisite amplified the complexity. We were now tasked with overseeing, designing, revising, and maintaining hundreds of logos. 
• We weren’t helping people find what they needed. 
  • Catchy names, witty abbreviations, and a completely internal language that visitors couldn’t engage. 
  • This is a house of brands - unique everything for everyone 
  • We moved to a branded house - one brand with minor, plain name customizations for each ministry. 

Recommendations for a branding solution

You brand should establish a visual hierarchy based on importance

1. Church first

2. Campus second

3. Ministry third

Everything your church does should function within this system. 

• Affirms that a win for any team is a win every team.
• Affirms that a win for any campus is a win for every campus.

Your brand should have goals that move forward the mission:

Clarity: People who have never been to our church need to understand what we are saying without us explaining it. 

Consistency: Consistent branding helps people understand what we are saying, and reinforces that we are one church with multiple ministry sites. 

Scalability: This new branding philosophy can be implemented quickly which will allow us to move at the speed of ministry. 

Flexibility: As each campus begins developing and investing in a local focus, this approach positions us to help support better. 

Unity: As an organization, every ministry win is a win for our church.

Bottom line:

The strongest brand isn’t one that wins awards for looks, it’s one that points your congregation and your staff toward the mission.

1. Schedule a meeting with someone just to see how they are doing. 
2. Take them to coffee, go to lunch, or just chat with them at work.
3. Focus the conversation on them, not on you.
4. Listen more than you talk.

By getting to know how others are doing, you force yourself to recognize that other people are going through things as well. Burnout is telling you that your life is worse than everyone else’s. It’s a lie. As you hear from others, you are warring against the lies burnout is telling you.