Lots of organisations have great ideas and yet fail because they are unable to execute them. Others fail because they execute but don’t measure. Others because they execute and don’t evaluate, learn and change. Failure is common when all these processes are not pursued with vigour.
Our new Vision Statement and Strategies are in place. So what comes next? What will stop us from failing?
These are great questions to be asking. They are the right questions for the staff and Parish Council to be asking – and not just asking but answering and acting upon.
As a staff we have started to create measurables for each of our areas of responsibility and the various ministries that go on month by month. We have already spoken about our desire to see everyone bring someone to know Jesus and join our church in the next 5 years. This is the first of our measurables and we will be releasing more as the new year starts and our staff movements are complete!
We then need to be putting plans together to achieve our measurables in accordance with our vision and 5Ms. This means some change in most things across the church – the modes of leadership, processes and structure and purpose of all our work needs to be rethought. But once the thinking is done, those plans need to get off the paper and be executed.
We then need to be looking at and listening to what is happening – are we meeting measurables? Are we remaining focussed on our Vision and 5Ms? Are plans being executed and if not why not? These are the questions we have to be asking throughout the year.
But we also need to know now where we are at, what people are thinking, and what our key focus areas need to be.
To that end, this Sunday in church you will be participating in a mini-NCLS Survey called the M20. It takes a quarter the time, is a quarter the size and focussed on vision and mission. We are glad to have the opportunity provided by the diocese to participate in this survey that will give us accurate and current data to help us plan for 2016 and beyond. The beautiful thing is that unlike NCLS this data will be back to us in a week – unlike NCLS that takes 6 months to obtain. We will use what you tell us to guide us.
Thanks for your help in this and we look forward to sharing the data with you in the weeks ahead.