Change is tough for any of us…..and the bigger and more established the group the more difficult to make the shift (see the book The Innovator’s Dilemma). As we ponder the acceleration of change it makes me wonder if church planting and multi site are our only long term hope of staying nimble enough and growing fast enough to replace dying churches.
Dave Ferguson and I were pondering the thought this week at our Cornerstone Conference www.cornerstoneconferences.com.
If Alan Hirsch is right with statement recently…..“the US is the last hope for Christianity in the Western world.”…..we must pay attention how to leverage our scarce church leadership capitol across many highly nimble church groups it would seem.
My friend Rex Miller shares some thoughts below that seem to support that thinking…..
Here is a short summary of: “The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World”
The cost of organizing and managing many large firms has reached a point of clear inefficiency. The rapidly decreasing costs of technology enable many small businesses to operate as efficiently as larger ones.
At the same time increasing real estate costs, along with escalating infrastructure costs such as energy and transportation networks, make it far less attractive to aggregate large numbers of people within one organization. And human resource support costs like health care, retirement funding, and staff development are also escalating almost beyond control.
Put it all together, and we’ve reached the cross-over point in Coase’s model. And, we might add, the increasing movement to triple bottom line accounting increases these organizational costs even further.
Those basic economic facts are driving the shifts in how we organize to do work. We repeat:
Like it or not, the world is in the early stages of powerful, deep running and pervasive changes that will transform its economics, its cultures and people’s understanding of who they are and what they stand for.”
(Again, that’s from The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World, John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan, Harvard Business School Press. 2008.)
Rex
Thought Leader
Mindshift
