Why "Best Practices" and "Experts" are Killing the Church 01

...And How New Life is Coming from Adaptive, Spirit-Powered Leadership

St Willibrord’s, Verdun, Montreal. One year ago, this church was known best for the flea market in its basement. Now, unmissable invitations to Alpha outside the building leave you in no doubt this church is open for business!

This is a series of two newsletters. In the first, I outline how I think “best practices” and “experts” are killing the Church. In the second, I share how we need to move into adaptive, Spirit-powered leadership.

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Did you know there are some extremely exciting things happening in the Catholic Church today? At the level of the local church, I believe we are seeing things we would never have imagined seeing.

Take, for example, the parish in Montreal, Canada - one of the most secular places in the west - that grew so big it decided to plant into another church. (Yes, Catholic church-planting!) In the space of just a year, the parish grew from a handful of parishioners to over 150.¹

Or take another form of church-plant in Vienna, Austria, where a small group of ten including a priest starting meeting above a garage in central Vienna with a mission to young people in the city. This small group of 10 has multiplied to over 300.²

As bishops amalgamate dwindling congregations, they can only dream of new expressions of parish life like this that are actually multiplying in a short space of time.

What is the secret? What do these new expressions have in common? The principles beneath their fruitfulness could be explored in depth. But what I want to focus on here is this:

If their leaders had relied on “experts” and “best practices” to inform how to be evangelistically fruitful, they would never have seen such fruit.

How do we know this?

I would love to step back and introduce you to the Cynefin framework³. I remember clearly being introduced to this for the first time this past year, and it was a light-bulb moment. I could see so many applications for it in my daily work, and more broadly in the Church.

Put simply, the framework (developed in 1999 by Dave Snowden) identifies different contexts in which we might operate: clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic. Each context requires different decision-making principles.

Think of any straight-forward procedure or process in your daily home or work life. A grocery delivery is a clear context: you receive the groceries into your kitchen, organising them into the fridge, pantry or freezer. Little thought goes into the process, and you follow “best practices” about the best places to store different food products.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

A complicated context requires more analysis. You have a complicated travel week coming up - meetings, events, different forms of transport - with competing needs, dependencies and limitations. This context requires a bit of Rubik's cube manoeuvring to work out what a good outcome for the week could look like. In this context, experts are helpful: people who can bring to bear their experience of working out similar complicated solutions in the past, who have some handy ‘hacks’.

A complex context is a dynamic and unpredictable one, in which it’s not possible to impose ordered systems that have worked in other scenarios. An unexpected crisis or number of crises can trigger a complex context. Think of a business that unexpectedly nosedives, or a family that navigates a health crisis and unexpected unemployment all at once. Here, experimental approaches are needed because even one good solution (as in the complicated context) might not be found.

Doctors in A&E can tell you about the chaotic context! This is where action and rapid response is required. In a disaster zone, immediate action is needed to reestablish order. Innovation is needed here: trying things that have never been tried before and that, in normal times, we would shrink from.

“Best Practices” and Experts are Killing the Church

For centuries, the Church in the west has operated in clear and complicated environments.

We’ve swum happily in clear contexts where sense-categorise-respond works a dream.

People approach our parishes, we “categorise” them according to their sacramental, ecclesial background, and slot them into the programme they need.

When a parish has a vacancy for a priest, Bishop’s Councils (presumably) “categorise” the parish, make a decision based on past wisdom, and slot an available priest into the hole.

For every pastoral decision, there are “best practices” we can trustingly employ.

As the secular environment has changed, it has introduced a more complicated environment into the Church. Think of the legal, statutory and compliance issues a diocese has to deal with that it did not need to face fifty years ago. Responding to this, we rightly turned to experts. Think of the safeguarding officers, building surveyors, financial officers, HR professionals, fundraisers, and COOs you find in a typical diocesan Curia today, that would not have been dreamt of in decades past.

But, our environments have drastically changed.

Let’s examine each - “best practices” and “experts” - in turn.

1. “Best Practices” are Catastrophically Blind to the Elephant in the Room

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

We seem not to have recognised that our context is no longer complicated and it is certainly no longer clear: it is unmistakably complex (and even chaotic).

The science of complexity will tell you that a complex system is dynamic, and solutions are never found in best practices or even good practices: we look for the emergent, solutions that arise from the circumstances. The elements of the complex system evolve with one another, and evolution is irreversible. Hindsight never leads to foresight in a complex system because external conditions and systems constantly change.

The local church today is undeniably a complex system:

• The past system is integrated into the present, and both the system and its external conditions are evolving, in a state of flux.

• The system is crumbling as fewer people fill pews, give money, volunteer their time or are formed in Catholic identity.

• The system-managers (clergy) are fewer, and the structures designed to support them (two or three priests living in a presbytery, distributed roles and sacramental loads) are wearing thin.

• The system finds itself amid external conditions that are acidic to the system, and many realities we relied on in the past are being broken down:

  • people’s faith and sense of identity;

  • traditional, faith-maintaining institutions such as school and family life;

  • the health and well-being of the system-managing clergy.

Complexity has the system-managers of our dioceses put their heads in the sand. Where they are most familiar and comfortable are with “best” and “good” practices: operating manuals and experts.

At a loss, we desperately continue to apply the “best practices” that used to work in the clear context decades ago. “Best practices”, blind to the elephant in the room, are disastrous in complex environments. Here are some examples:

• Best practices: “Here’s how to create a engaging, family-centred sacramental programme.”

  • Elephant in the room: Families are jumping through hoops and parents have not experienced a personal encounter with Jesus.

• Best practices: “Every parish needs a priest to make sacraments readily available in as many churches as possible.”

  • Elephant in the room: Priests are ministering to smaller and smaller congregations, while all the while, thousands upon thousands do not even know Jesus.

• Best practices: “The diocese needs priests heading up departments and teams as well as staffing parishes.”

  • Elephant in the room: By ladening more and more responsibilities upon fewer and fewer priests, we overburden and burn out one of our most precious resources.

• Best practices: “Involve laity in the Church’s mission by giving them liturgical ministry roles, putting them on pastoral councils, and ensuring they advise the clergy.”

  • Elephant in the room: The laity are perfectly positioned and commissioned (and do not need permission from the hierarchy) to make explosive impact in the world thanks to their power in the Holy Spirit.

Can we take a deep breath and admit that it is time courageously to chuck “best practices”?

2. Applying Technical Solutions to Adaptive Environments Is Kicking the Can Down the Road

Experts’ solutions work in complicated environments. They apply technical, tried-and-tested “good practices” to complicated problems.

This is true of every area of society not just the Church. Old models are collapsing across the board, in economics, politics, health, psychology. Reliable predictability is increasingly a reality of the past as we move into an age of disruption. In a Times article earlier this year, a comment is cited from one of the world’s most successful fund managers that the charts and models he used in the past today give little clue about what to do with his money.

Why are we quick to treat complex environments like complicated environments?

Christian pastor and cultural commentator, Mark Sayers, suggests that we internalise the anxiety of people who are concerned about the rapidly changing external conditions, increasing challenges, and the lack of fruit seen in earlier times.⁴ We look for quick fixes to quell anxiety and demonstrate leadership. We employ experts who employ technical solutions learned from complicated environments. We replicate what another diocese has done in a different part of the world, that seemed to work for them.

But all these attempts are, in a complex environment, examples of kicking the can down the road. Applying technical solutions generates second- and third-order side effects that need to be solved too. It is like cheap Googling for solutions, when what is called for is deep thinking, innovation … and a lot of courage.

This is adaptive leadership - as opposed to technical management - and this is what I’ll consider in part 2.

1. Watch the whole of this remarkable story in this webinar.

2. Listen to the full story here.

3. An excellent, more in-depth, article is in the Harvard Business Review, “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”.

4. Listen to his excellent Rebuilders podcast episode here.