Question:
It seems that the new NCD Survey Workbook assumes that churches will be using detailed analysis reports of their results. With the dangers of reductionism (churches focusing on perhaps a single question and not viewing the results interdependently) isn't this a risky or even irresponsible approach to broadly encourage?
Answer:
The 'danger' of reductionism is one of the most over-stated, longest-held myths associated with the NCD process. Unfortunately, the assumption that it is a genuine danger has kept many in the global NCD Community from experiencing the incredible benefits of detailed analysis, and the increased progress that can be achieved with the help of such tools (after all, we've already asked the people a lot of very good coaching questions through the survey, so why not look at what they said). In order to try and bust the myth once and for all (and liberate thousands of churches in the process), there are a number of organic realities that need to be understood.
Church as a frog, not a bicycle
To support the danger of reductionism, it is often quoted that a church is more like a frog than a bicycle. When fixing a bicycle, you can remove one broken part and replace it without having any effect on any other part. However, as with a church, when a frog has a sore leg, a veterinarian can't just pull it off and put on another one without there being some kind of wider effect on the rest of its body.
On the surface this seems to be a very good argument for avoiding a focus on individual questions from teh NCD Survey. However, to really find the truth about the reductionist 'danger', you must ask yourself if the leaders in the church are the frog or the veterinarian. That is, are they working ON the church or ARE they the church.
Consider this scenario from a different environment.
The directors of a company have a business audit done on their organisation. It identifies that marketing is the weakest area and that product development is the strongest. With minimal reflection they decide to drop funding of the product development department by 90% and apply all those resources to marketing. Of course, in the immediate term, business goes through the roof. But shortly afterward, when the new products dry up, the company ends up in a far worse situation than where they started.
The directors were like a (very bad) veterinarian. Because it didn't personally cause them pain, it was easy to apply a reductionist, non-interdependent strategy to 'fix' the problem.
Imagine instead that the directors made use of a 'Natural Company Development' survey which evaluated the health of the real organisation, the people - more specifically, the leadership. This survey identified that, while the directors were fascinated by the products that were being developed, they were not as a group very good at personally relating to the customers needs. Understandably, this left the marketing team down in the basement feeling at best unmotivated, and at worst, a necessary evil.
In this scenario, the directors appropriately understood themselves as part of the frog and not as the veterinarian. While in the first scenario they were able to easily make changes without much personal effect, the second scenario is much more difficult for them, but in the long-term enormously more fruitful. Faced with the need to grow in areas that they hadn't previously understood, were not motivated about, and had given little time to, there is incredibly little likelihood that the directors are going to drop all of their current preferences and overnight, focus in a reductionist-like way on the those very areas. The change will come at some kind of personal cost.
And so it is exactly the same in a church. Fearing that the key influencers in a church are going to recognise their personal responsibility for a minimum factor area (or individual question), and then overnight, go completely against their everyday habits and priorities is bordering on the supernatural. And, assuming God would be against such an unnatural idea, hopefully he wouldn't grant such an odd miracle.
It could be argued that a particularly autocratic leader could determine that all energy in the church was now going to be taken away from the maximum factor areas and applied to the minimum factor, or more specifically, to a low scoring individual question. Though again, this is not likely to be a problem since such an influential controlling leader would almost certainly have established a minimum factor in the church of empowering leadership. Therefore they would be asking the whole church to jump on their back to make them more empowering - an amusing but good problem to have if it were ever to actually take place.
It is interesting to note that those who have mostly sounded the warnings of reductionism to do with NCD detailed analysis are people who tend to work ON the church (as veterinarians) rather than AS PART OF it (as the frog). When you test the reductionist-danger-theory from the coalface of ministry life where the survey is a reflection of you personally (you are the frog), the danger of reductionism quickly goes away and the interdependent benefits of detailed analysis become very clear.
Cyclical growth is inherently interdependent
While the points above relate to the passive interdependence that comes from key influencers and then the whole church working on their own minimum factor issues, the 3 Color Life Cycle at the heart of the NCD Survey Workbook actively increases the interdependence of the many parts of their church.
Even in the MOST extreme of possible scenarios where a pastor or leader might look at just one low scoring question on the Profile Plus report and completely ignore every other question, the mini-cycle process will ultimately connect that issue with countless other aspects of church life.
The 'challenge in ministry' example presented in the NCD Survey Workbook relates to a specific low scoring question for that church. Based on a relatively low understanding of what the issue is about, the key influencers start cycling it.
Due to their naturally low level of understanding in the beginning about challenging ministry, the issue sits in relative isolation from most things in the life of the church. It is very unlikely that the key influencers (particularly in this extreme example) have much of an idea of the interdependent relationship between the 'challenge in ministry' issue and other important ministry-related topics like...
- faith and maturity
- the gifts of people
- how to support those in ministry
- the partnership between God and people in ministry
- how people would respond to greater challenges
- what will happen in the church if we challenge people to a greater extent
- etc etc
The beauty of consistent cyclical growth is that this (understandable) lack of interdependent thinking simply doesn't matter when starting out. Even in the very simple but everyday example in the NCD Survey Workbook, you can see that within one week, the key influencer group has discovered an interdependent link between 'challenge' and people's perception of it meaning 'more work'. With this in mind, the very next week through their revised mini-cycle plan, they begin integrating the issue of 'challenge' with 'appropriate workload' and over subsequent weeks no doubt end up relating the challenge issue to most or all of the practical issues mentioned above - all starting from a completely isolated view of the challenge issue and without even having to know what interdependence (or reductionism) means.
There are those who believe in or have been taught to rigourously pursue every interdependent link between issues from the NCD Survey, develop a comprehensive multi-point action plan and then run that plan through a biotic (growth force) filter in order to make sure that a church proceeds in an organic way (the writer of this response being guilty of this in early NCD days). It can be seen from the above points that such intense work in the understand and plan stages of the process is really not necessary and may even stall the process.
After all, energy transformation would tell you not to overestimate how much energy a church has for the NCD process but to harness the REAL available energy at the start and right throughout the process. Knowing that most people don't start with a lot of energy for their minimum factor areas (that's why they became their minimum), it is delightful that God in His genius established cyclical growth as an inherantly interdependent process.