I greatly dislike brainstorming sessions.
I said what I said.
Few things frustrate me more than sitting in a room for an hour, filling a whiteboard with ideas, talking about everything we could do, and then walking out without clear action steps, ownership, or follow-through.
What did we decide?
Who is doing what?
When is it due?
How will we know whether it worked?
If nobody can answer those questions, I’m not sure what we accomplished.
I like ideas. I love strategy. I enjoy solving complex problems and imagining better ways to accomplish our mission. But eventually, somebody must turn the idea into work.
Vision sounds great in a meeting.
Execution shows up Tuesday morning.
Someone has to build the timeline. Someone has to determine who owns what. Someone has to check the budget, write the policy, configure the system, communicate the change, answer questions, and follow up when something inevitably does not work the way we expected.
Welcome to the world of implementation.
I have spent most of my adult life around churches and other mission-driven organizations. These environments tend to attract people with ideas.
Thank God for that!
We should dream, innovate, and ask whether there is a better way to serve people and accomplish the mission God has given us.
However, ideas are not accomplishments.
An organization can generate tremendous creative energy while accomplishing surprisingly little.
At Manna University, a new academic program can begin with a relatively simple question:
What if we offered this?
Okay.
Now we need to determine whether the program fits our mission. Is there actual demand? What does the curriculum look like? Do we have qualified faculty? What are the accreditation implications? What about state authorization? Library resources? Financial aid? Marketing? Recruiting? Assessment? Technology?
And, of course: How much is this going to cost?
The original idea might take five minutes to articulate.
Making it real could take years.
The same thing happens in church ministry.
“We should start ______.”
Maybe we should.
But who will lead it? What problem are we actually trying to solve? Who are we trying to serve? What resources will it require? How does it fit what we are already doing? What will we stop doing to create the capacity for it?
Those questions are what leadership is all about.
Jesus uses a wonderfully practical example in Luke 14. He asks who would begin building a tower without first sitting down and calculating whether he has enough to complete it.
Notice that the problem is not ambition.
What Jesus calls out is ambition that is disconnected from adequately considering what finishing requires.
Starting something creates energy. There is a launch date, a new logo, an announcement, maybe some cool pictures for social media.
Maintaining it is different.
Six months later, somebody is still scheduling serve-team members.
A year later, the expense is still sitting in the budget.
Two years later, someone finally asks why we are still doing something nobody can clearly connect to the mission anymore.
Organizations rarely become cluttered overnight.
A program here, a meeting there, a committee nobody remembers creating, a report everyone produces because everyone has always produced it, and an initiative that made perfect sense five years ago but has never been reevaluated.
Eventually, all those good ideas begin competing for the same limited resources.
Every new initiative should force us to ask what it will require from the organization and whether we are prepared to provide it. Sometimes the answer is yes.
Sometimes the idea needs to wait.
Sometimes something else needs to stop.
Occasionally, we discover that the idea sounded much better on the whiteboard than it does after someone actually runs the numbers.
Good.
That is what the process is supposed to reveal.
I don’t want meetings that merely produce ideas. I want meetings that produce clarity.
What did we decide?
Who owns it?
What happens next?
When are we checking back?
Most importantly, did we actually do what we said we were going to do?
Vision without follow-through eventually becomes organizational noise.
So, dream big. Challenge assumptions. Put audacious ideas on the table.
Just don’t leave them there.
Assign the work.
Set the deadline.
Follow up.
Finish something.
Dr. Carlo A. Serrano, President