To elaborate on Ms. T’s comment, I learned recently that in the business or programming world, #3 is also referred to as “The Bus Factor.” How many people would need to be on the bus that crashes before you had no one who knew how to work on/complete this project/task? One of my friends who works at a UU church is the only person who can update the church’s website. A Bus Factor of 1. Pretty scary.

These certainly are counter-church cultural. They seemed steeped in the principles of appreciative inquiry and they remind my of the leadership theories of Ronald Heifetz in Leadership Without Easy Answers.

Heifetz argues that leadership is all about adaptive work, finding adaptive solutions to the new problems and solutions that confront us instead of doing what we’ve always done, but better, faster, stronger. Heifetz also says that leader is not authority, but about getting the work done. Authority comes from power granted in order to perform a service. If the service is provided - getting the work done, solving the problem, the power is granted to continue the work (and in this case, churches, continuing to create community is part of the work). Exercising power without performing a service is authoritarianism. Too often church committees (”that’s the way we’ve always done it” , “we must have a meeting to decide things”, and ministers, both clerical and lay (committee chairs) act in an authoritarian manner and forget to provide the service for which a congregation or a committee has granted them power in the first place.

@Elizabeth: In my experience, strategic plans are out of date as soon as they’re written. I’ve found an asset-based exercise like the one in this book to be both quicker and more inclusive.

Absolutely not!! We’re having a meeting to do this work. Sure, it would be faster if a couple of us just sent in our opinions. But what is the goal? To get a strategic plan written as fast as we can?? NO.

We will meet and bounce ideas off each other so that our collective wisdom will come together in a plan we can be proud of, a plan that we own and will be vested in seeing through to fruition. Because we are the ones who will be expected to carry out the plan, we must have time to think, discuss and formulate the plan together.

There’s a name for a rule that sort of corresponds to #3. It’s something like What Would Happen If X Was Hit by a Bus. In other words, have we built an organization around one person who is irreplaceable?