Lessons from the Cloud

I have a fundamental belief that the problems we experience in church leadership are technologically based. It’s not that we have the wrong mission or wrong people, it’s often that we are working on the wrong technologies. (Programs, agendas, projects)

You might not see the connections between this presentation and your church. But the parallels are stunning. 

• Just like at this company, there are lots of committees and their agendas at play.
• Just like this company, we have legacy programs which are expensive to maintain.
• Just like this company, there are people who work at your church doing things deemed mission critical that aren’t actually critical to the mission of the church.

A grocery store company isn’t in the IT business any more than a church is in the building maintenance business. Contextualize that for your church. There are lots of things that each church does which are deemed mission critical but aren’t actually critical to the mission of the church.

Yet, when we talk about foundational changes in the church, getting back to the core mission, there’s tons of fear internally. Fear is what stops all change. Fear is what stops all dreaming.

Here’s what we learn from this talk that transfers right into the church.

1. Different people buy into change for different reasons. The CFO wants to hear you’ll save money. The user wants to know you’re making their life better. Fiefdom owners want to know their fiefs are respected.
2. End-users are wondering what’s taking you so long.
3. The hardest shift is within the staff, it’s all about control.
4. Continuous improvement is an expectation of the end user, even old people. And it changes the culture of the staff.
5. Spend the time not on making changes but on change management. The changes themselves can happen quite quickly.
6. Real-time collaboration is a better learning and leadership tool than presentations. (Though presentations still have a place.)
7. Changing the focus back to our core mission helps the whole organization dream about new ways to live out the mission. Thousands of brains and hearts focused on the same thing is so much more powerful than a handful of leaders guiding the mission.