747 words – less than 3 minutes
DJ Patil was the Chief Data Scientist of the United States at one time. But his notecard, kept in his notebook while working for the White House, reminded him and his colleagues about the expectations for what they were trying to do.
I find these sorts of reminders helpful, and I think his principles here can also be applied to churches. Yours may not be the same, but you can learn from it.
The first part of the card reads:
Dream in Years
Plan in months
Evaluate in weeks
Ship daily
The original card. Photo credit below.
Dream in Years -
As church leaders, we must dream beyond what we can see now. That takes faith. But it is essential to write down what we want to see in the future. Some call this the enchanted notebook process. Writing down what we want to see as clearly as possible helps align yourself and a team to a common distant goal.
Plan in months –
My personal experience is that churches need to think a bit longer than a software project, but whether it is six months or 36 months, we need to put together the discrete steps we would take every month to get us toward our dream.
Evaluate in weeks –
Data scientists can constantly iterate web tools and software with real users. Likewise, we should monitor response to our initiatives over a period of weeks, not years. Give it time to catch on, monitor the results, then decide whether to continue. (See below for other guidance from the card.)
Ship Daily
I would change it to Ship or Share Daily. Projects and Initiatives need daily work, or perhaps tangible outcomes we can share several times a week. I call these micro steps and find them essential to help staff and others make progress.
A micro-step can be as simple a task as making a phone call to a potential volunteer leader or setting up a critical meeting. But it is something at the end of the day we can point to that says: “I made some progress today.”
See the second part of the card after the ad…..
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Story continues…..
The second part of the card is:
Prototype for 1x
Build for 10x
Engineer for 100x
I have seen many churches reverse this order. A few times, they come up with big winners. Most of the time, they don’t.
Prototype for one, means we can try lots of ideas. Most won’t work. That’s fine. Decide what does work.
For churches, this means testing the idea for a new initiative or program with a very small number of participants. OR we try just the essential part of the idea with a focus group. That can be as easy as a one-page description to ask – “what works about this and what doesn’t?”
The most common mistake I see here is trying to adopt another church’s program for your congregation with an extensive rollout campaign. Better to first test the idea with a smaller group to see how it should be adapted to your context.
Build for 10x - after we pilot it, we scale for 10 times the size. This is where we move beyond the minimum viable product factor and add a few components to make it more robust. Don’t add too many yet, but then we can do a live test to observe how people actually experience the program, process, or experience.
Engineer for 100x – means we can start to add all the support systems and functions to take the effort across the organization or ministry. What would need to happen? What other departments need to be 8involved? How would we coordinate the use of our resources?
The last part of the card reads:
What’s required to cut the timeline in half?
What needs to be done to double the impact.
Sometimes it takes hustle, urgency, or resources to get the engineering to scale. Other times it is taking the project OUT of the church into a community field or other institution. Other times it is taking the same thing that is working within the walls of the church and taking it to another site to serve another congregation, location, or community organization.
Sometimes this means re-examining the project or program to remove extraneous components. Alternatively, one might focus on just the core items of the program that are making the most significant impact.
Find his article here and the photo:
https://medium.com/@dpatil/class-of-2020-from-one-data-scientist-to-another-f3de5f2d70d
With a quick web search, you can also find him giving the 10-minute talk to several groups.