Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

This weekend I came across some research which gave me pause.

In the 1980s, two MIT researchers looked at the relationship between how long a working group had been together and that working group’s communication with “outsiders”. The key premise of their research was that the most effective working groups frequently receive feedback from people outside their immediate sphere. Outside feedback included the suggestions and insights of those whom they were serving, conversations with people doing work in a similar field, or the insights of consultants brought in to assist with a project. Not surprisingly, the research found that the longer a working group had been together, the less they seemed to want feedback from the outside. In The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner summarize the MIT researchers' results as follows:

They’d been together so long, it appears, that they felt they didn’t need to talk to outsiders. They were content just to talk to each other. It’s easy to understand, therefore, how some workgroups and organizations become myopic and unimaginative. The people themselves aren’t dull or slow-witted; they’ve just become too familiar with their routines and isolated from outside influences.

One of the reasons I was struck by this research is that it describes an aspect of working collaboratively that I recognize and take part in regularly. Take, for instance, ECF Vital Practices. I think it’s fair to say that our launch in October 2010 was a creative, if somewhat chaotic, time in the life of the Episcopal Church Foundation. As a member of the team that helped put this online publication together, I can recall some early, humorous missteps that we made along the way as we figured out roles, expectations, and how we were going to accomplish our goals. Thankfully, over time, we’ve managed to work most of the kinks out. Early decisions regarding roles and expectations have become norms. Our earliest, haphazard methods have yielded to familiar processes. The immediate benefits of this routine are obvious. But as this research points out, smooth operations come with a price.

Leadership teams need the disrupting voices of outsiders who will question why we do what we do and who will offer constructive feedback about the way that we do them. For vestries, this may mean asking younger members (however long they’ve been attending) to serve at the highest level of congregational leadership. It means learning about how other congregations are tackling the same problems. It may mean regularly attending skill building workshops and webinars. How else can congregations incorporate outside perspectives into their vision of the future?

Outside voices can add a fresh perspective to business as usual. You might be inviting a bit more chaos into the room, but a totally efficient system is frequently a closed one.