Improve By Making Deliberate Mistakes?

In my brief ministry experience, I have served as youth minister (twice), associate Pastor (once) and senior pastor (twice). In addition, ever since I have been given the title of professor, on several occasions I have been invited to a number of ministries and or churches to act as a consultant assess the ministries strengths and weakness while making suggestions for improvement.

What has been amazing to me is that no matter the context, people of all ages are resistant to change – even though change is necessary part of life. Below is an article where the resident "ministry expert" at Rev.org where he suggests making mistakes on purpose to learn from them based on some business practices cited the Harvard Business Review. Below is an excerpt from this article.

Most of us realize that we learn most from our failures. The goal, therefore, is to fail fast in order to speed up the learning process. The difference between smart mistakes and dumb ones involves identifying our assumptions, selecting assumptions for testing, ranking the assumptions, executing the mistake, and then learning from the process. (3)

So what does this mean for a local church? Let's say we want to challenge our assumptions about outreach, especially because we want to create several events a year and our track record hasn't been great in this area. For example, we believe that people from our community should be motivated to attend a special parenting seminar, but we don't want to invest advertising dollars to promote it. Therefore, we put on the event.

Sure enough, only thirteen people show up, two of whom are not from our church. We survey participants on how it is they found out about the event and what motivated them to attend. Then we gather the leaders together to debrief. Who came? Who did we think would come? How much money did we spend on advertising? What did it cost us to pay the presenter, open the doors of the church, copy the fliers, handouts and provide refreshments? What might this tell us about the way we're going about doing outreach events? If we're going to do this in the future, how do we determine what topics interest people in our community? How do we go about strategizing getting the word out to the people most apt to be interested in it? What is a way to better strategize our objectives, such as follow-up, staffing, measuring effectiveness, and raising marketing money?

While it may seem silly to put on an event for the primary purpose of analyzing a mistake, the potential benefit is that we'll learn how to do outreach events more effectively in the future. That fact that we're placing our assumptions and processes under a microscope means we want to be good stewards of our outreach dollars as well as become more effective at connecting with our community. We're no longer satisfied with doing business as usual, sweeping mediocre results under the rug or chalking it up to "how difficult ministry is."

So, what do you think? Is this a logical argument that we should try to implement in our local context? Do most pastors even have the job security to attempt something like this?


Harvard Business Review; June, 2006. "The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes," by Paul J.H. Schoemaker and Robert E. Gunther, 108-115.
(3) Pages 113-115

Alan Nelson is the Pastoral Ministry Champion and Executive Editor of Rev! Magazine at Group Publishing, Loveland, CO.