I heard a term this week in a book I'm reading called The Lean Startup
One of the things about a digital world is that we have more metrics available to us than ever before. We know who reads our blog, how our social media is performing....we even know more about who attends our services, what they give and which activities they attend. The challenge is in being willing to look at the numbers in a way that tells us whether or not we are meeting our core mission.
For example, if we structure our Vacation Bible School to reach out to the unchurched children in a community, yet the majority of the attendees are members of other faith communities, did we meet our mission?
If we are raising funds for a certain initiative, are we looking at total dollars raised, or the percentage of people in the church who participated in the giving?
Ries explains that leaders have to not only be willing to look at the real metrics, but also be willing to "pivot." This is not an abandonment of strategy; it is simply making a significant change while keeping one foot firmly anchored in the ground. Ries highlights that one of the most difficult challenges is the decision to pivot when we discover our assumptions about the effectiveness of our strategy are false. Everything in us wants to persevere. We want to hang onto our initial vision.
Leading a team with this type of change requires a great deal of humility. After all, we have to "throw away" some of our initial work.
However as a friend reminded me recently, sometimes pruning of roses, grapevines and such requires cutting off good stuff to enable the whole plant to grow more fully. Ignoring vanity metrics and being willing to look at those that matter gives us opportunity to practice just that.
