From Good to Great Youth Ministry Part 7

In this 7 part series we are breaking down Jim Collins’ book Good to Great and how it can apply to Youth Ministry. Jim Collins wrote this book by compiling a team of researchers to examine many different companies. Over the span of months and years the researchers compiled data that put some companies in a “good” category and some companies in a “great”. After comparing the “good” with the “great” the team came up with several factors of what makes a great company great.

Summary:
Finally we are at the last part of this series and I’m sure you are all in suspense as to what Jim Collins and his gurus came up with. Well, it’s all about the Flywheel and Doom Loop. The flywheel as Collins describes it is a massive metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle, about 30 feet in diameter, 2 fee thick, and weighing about 5,000 pounds. Now imagine that your task is to get the flywheel rotating on the axle as fast and long as possible. Running a company can be like this. Just getting it started you are faced with so much resistance and many different obstacles. These obstacles might be in the belief of whether or not you can do this, the fear of having the wrong people on board, worries of whether or not you have direction and concerns of whether or not you understand the risks. But believing that everything is in place, believing that you have what it takes to make your company great, all it takes is pushing the flywheel, slowly but surely. And if everything is in place, if you have the right leaders, people, you are aware of the brutal facts and you know your “Hedgehog Concept” not only will this massive flywheel of a company move but it will go faster and faster and faster until you hit breakthrough. No matter how dramatic the end result, the good to great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution. Good to great comes about by a cumulative process – step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel – that adds up to sustained and spectacular results. A company has hit breakthrough when everything they do seems natural, effortless and smooth. Basically the “great” companies stuck to what they did best and made small adjustments, small changes to help eliminate any resistance, there was no defining moment, it just eventually happened.
On the other side is the Doom Loop. This is a pattern that can be seen in companies that didn’t find consistent momentum. Rather than accumulating momentum – turn by turn of the flywheel – they tried to skip buildup and jump immediately to breakthrough. Then, with disappointing results, they’d lurch back and forth, failing to maintain a consistent directions. The comparison companies frequently tried to create a breakthrough with large, misguided acquisitions. The good – to – great companies, in contrast, principally used large acquisitions after breakthrough, to accelerate momentum in an already fast – spinning flywheel.

How this translates:
When I first started at ministry I had this huge fear that if something wasn’t working that I was surely doomed, so instead of really analyzing, tweaking, examining what I was doing or what was going on the first thing I did was destroy or change something. This caused a lot of friction, a lot of chaos and was not a good habit to have. Fortunately, I’ve been blessed with amazing ministers, awesome, God loving people who held on through the many drastic changes I made early on. It was hard to see whether or not we were making any progress in youth ministry. After a season of humbling circumstances a group of my ministers helped me come up with a clear mission statement, vision, set of goals for our youth ministry. Not only that but we confronted some brutal facts (some being my leadership), got some more of the right people on the bus, created some discipline and began to do what we do best.
I know we haven’t hit breakthrough yet, but with each week that passes by it has definitely gotten easier to push our flywheel.
In ministry, just like in business it’s easy to panic when things aren’t going our way, it’s easy to get stuck in the doom loop if we don’t have direction, if we are battling the wrong people and if we haven’t taken the chance to evaluate (or have others evaluate) our strengths and weaknesses.
I’ve only been in youth ministry for a few years, so I don’t have years of experience under my belt. But what I can offer is one piece of solid advice I think we all know but sometimes need to be reminded of. When it comes to discovering your “Hedgehog Concept” the best person to consult is God. God will always bring you what you need, even if you don’t recognize it. If your heart is truly in this ministry and you know God has called you here, then why deny the fact that God will help you out. God will bring the right people to you, He will help you see the brutal facts and help you figure them out. God will not only bring the right people but the right technology into your grasps. Turning the flywheel in youth ministry doesn’t just take Level 5 Leadership, the right people, facing brutal facts, having a “Hedgehog Concept”, a culture of discipline and good use of technology… it comes down to how much you are going to let God help you push the flywheel.
I thank everyone who has taken this 7 part series journey with me, I strongly recommend this book, even if you don’t believe business and church can be related. There is a lot you can take and use to help your ministry go from good to great.