Lecture

Sandy is not a great deal different from other homemakers, house in the suburbs, three children, minivan, and lots of church and civic involvement. But she seems to be the envy of her peers because she always gets things done. Other mothers barely seem to keep up with school events, but Sandy seems to be a step ahead anticipating what will be happening over the next month, thinking through options and scenarios that affect her and her family. She’s not a chief executive officer of a major corporation, but Sandy functions in an organized planning mode, partly the results of her own well-organized childhood plus a course or two in leadership and administration in college. Planning simply described means nothing more or less than predetermining a course of action, and that’s what lecture 16 is going to be all about. Like Sandy, every leader must understand what has to be done and figure out a way to do it in light of what we know about the future. Remember, a goal needs a plan to make it work. You just heard that in the last lecture. All of us in leadership positions are thrust into the planning process whether we understand how to do it or not.

Let’s start there, principles of planning. As I have suggested often throughout this course, axioms and mottos regarding the leadership process abound in leadership literature. And so it is with planning. I’ve just selected a few. I think there will be about six here (you have the outline, I don’t need to tell you that) as a foundation for understanding how the planning process actually works. Planning invests time. It does not spend it. Walking to the candy store to buy a quarter pound of fudge offers a pleasant experience both before, during, and after the purchase, but eventually the fudge will be gone and the money is gone of course. So buying fudge is an expense. Waiting in the drive-through lane at the bank irritates us, irritates me I should say, especially when traffic is already building for the drive home at 5:00 or 5:30 or 6:00 o’clock. But handing over that check as it beams through the bowels of the airlock system on its way into the building should elevate our emotions, because putting money in the bank is an investment.
We understand this clearly with respect to money, but somehow we lose the idea when we work with time. People don’t stop fifteen minutes to read a map before starting a trip through unfamiliar territory, so they lose forty-five minutes by getting lost. A housewife, not Sandy of course, but some housewives start out with a list of chores to do in town. But they haven’t prioritized them geographically, so they end up driving helter skelter from one shopping center to the other when a simple numbering system could have cut the driving time in half and even gotten her to the bank before it closed. Effective planners know that the time they find for planning will ultimately pay dividends.

Second, planning requires careful attention to immediate choices. Neophyte planners tend to look too far ahead. That may be a surprise line, but they get too wrapped up in the concept of vision and can only see what the church or mission might become ten years from now without understanding that one reaches the tenth year in incremental steps. The point of course is that immediate choices determine future options. A college which decides to invest two hundred thousand dollars in a residents’ building better know that resident students will be a part of its population in the future. Because when you put two hundred thousand dollars in a campus building, especially if it’s built like a dormitory, it’s pretty much difficult to use that building in any other way. This process works both ways. We make immediate choices in light of long-range planning, and the effectiveness of long-range planning depends on immediate choices.

Planning is cyclically based on evaluation. Poor planning leads to poor planning, and poor evaluation leads to poor planning. But sloppy objectives lead to poor evaluation. The better your database, the better are your options for planning. And that explains why planning is so difficult for a new organization. Church planters must plan ahead, but much of their planning is speculation since they have no history on which to base it. Even more complex is the church or Christian organization which has not kept satisfactory records for the last ten or twenty years. Current leaders find themselves attempting to carry out future planning for an organization that has a history but no decent record of that history. If you find yourself in that situation or even if you don’t, help the next person who will follow you. Keep careful records right from the first day, minutes, reports, statistics, trends, anything else that will help you and then help someone else in the planning process.

Next, planning requires acting objectively toward goal realization. Planning is impossible without goals. We have no target at which to aim. A student who wants to enter medical school after completing a baccalaureate degree must select those chemistry, biology, science courses required for that next step. She can’t decide on commencement day that it would be nice to enter medical school having treated the undergraduate curriculum like a buffet. A 3.8 average with courses in advanced criminology and statistical marketing is useless to enter med school, because the target is out in a different direction. Planning should allow for maximal participation. I’ll get back to this in just a moment, but here let me say that we need to emphasize that planning is not the vision of any single person. Handing down the Decalogue by Moses was a unique and never-repeated event. As participation of the stakeholder group increases, cooperation in the planning process increases; and resistance decreases, not representation, not majority vote, not unanimity necessarily, just participation. But again, more on that later.

Planning increases in specificity as the event draws nearer. Remember our chart of mission goals, objectives, action steps? The principle is at work here. If we need a one-year plan for a missions conference next February, the details may be sketchy and quite general this February. But the road narrows throughout the year so that by Christmas we have a very clear focus on the program, the personnel, the venue, and other important matters. There are two extremes to avoid here. One is staying general too long, and the other is becoming too specific too soon. Let’s look at some planning models. Again, Feeding and Leading will be helpful here, and you should have reviewed it and perhaps have a copy. Sophisticated models such as PERT are readily available for the planning process even if you don’t choose a complicated model. You need to understand that paradigms of one kind or another are important in planning as they are in decision making. You need a sound approach to getting where you need to go. There are models which are useful. PERT is, as I said, there’s a model in Feeding and Leading which shows you the PERT pattern. I won’t get into that here at all. But it is useful to talk perhaps about a planning step model, and some of these diagrams are available in your syllabus. So you’ll want to consult that accordingly.

In the planning step model, we have the diagram moving from left to right, from mission statement, information sources, planning assumptions, objectives, goals, action plans, or action steps, and implementation.

And the target then ultimately produces results and then review of those results and evaluation. What we see here is the long-range plan develops out of the mission statement. Once we understand why we exist, we can develop information sources both external and internal. External information deals with demographics and changes in the surrounding environment in which our ministry operates. Internal information provides statistics on attendance, age-group involvement, giving, and spending. Planning assumptions aren’t guesses. They relate directly to the information sources and essentially force us to say, “Because we know this about our ministry, we should assume that such and such will occur over the next five years.” Assumptions need to be made about every area of the organization from the recruiting of personnel to the availability of finances to the quality and repair of facilities. We’ve already talked about objectives and goals. And those steps obviously fit into the planning process. Action plans are the same as strategies. Once we have identified the first arrows, what exactly do we plan to do and when? And who will take responsibility for it? So we’re getting into the whole idea of strategy there. Implementation describes putting the plan into action. Perhaps we should stop here and say that though we use plan as a noun, in reality planning is an ongoing present-tense verb. And that will become more clear.

Finally, we look at the target to see how we’ve done. If you’ve ever done any pistol or rifle target shooting in a well-equipped range, you know that you pull the rope to bring that target back to you so you can take a look at where your shots have landed. Having done that and having noticed that the firearm pulls a little to the left, you make adjustments, you fix a new target, and you roll it back to its place at the end of the range. Now the new target looks exactly like the old one, but what changes is the way we try to hit it, not the target itself. Without evaluation, we can’t make those mid-course corrections which take us from the beginning of the planning process to the achievement of goals.

Callahan uses what he calls a “processive model” because he says the process of approach is more developmental and dynamic and has a more flexible spirit. I think of it as the progressive three-year model. Callahan calls it a blueprint for mission. He says, “The art of long-range planning is to keep as many options open as possible. The purpose of long-range planning is to keep the future open, not to close it down. The mistakes some make is to develop a unilateral long-range plan that they are going to follow come Hades or high water, and they will be disappointed.” In Callahan’s progressive or processive model, planning leaders take two steps at the end of the first year. They advance, improve, modify, or delete objectives for years two and three. That’s step one: advance, improve, modify, or delete objectives for the next two years. And then step two is to add a third year so that this is an ongoing deal. And this is a very good thing to do. Because if planning is an ongoing process, a present-tense verb, as we said, then the idea of systematic aggressive operation of planning is a good one.

Callahan argues, to move now to the annual planning model, though Callahan argues vigorously that churches should not plan one year at a time, I think many Christian organizations which do no planning at all would enhance their ministries significantly by at least planning annually. As my aging memory attempts to plod back through the years to one of my pastoral opportunities, I recall raising the question of long-range planning to a group of elders. And interestingly, they offered no opposition whatsoever. They thought it was a splendid idea. And they suggested that I go ahead and do the whole thing. Now that hardly reflects what we want in terms of cooperative participation. But in this situation, there was no other choice. The usual planning models would rarely work where planning has never been done before. So I designed an annual sheet which would help us design what we wanted to do during the next calendar year. The process began by identifying ten areas of ministry that church was involved in. The number is hardly consequential. Some churches can identify twenty, maybe others only five. So when we look at the annual planning model, it’s quite self-explanatory, built as it is upon the patterns of the last study. But note the specificity of the action steps. Remember, this is only one of ten areas of ministry. Others included such things as evangelism and finance and Christian education and so on. Worship was hardly the only thing. This is just an example of what we’re doing.

Before we leave this section, just a word about the difference between long-range planning and short-range planning. Sometimes short-range planning is viewed as anything up to a year and long-range planning anything beyond a year. But we can get more precise than that. For example, Drucker argues that short-range planning is the organization’s way to carry out what he calls “systematic abandonment of things that don’t fit.” Isn’t that great? Get rid of the stuff that’s not working. So we begin with a lofty vision and then submit it to the reality of feasibility studies until it actually becomes something we can do. Consequently, there is a distinct difference between a vision and planning. Some writers have talked about planning as a history of the future, which is interesting terminology. For example, they may be asked, imagine it’s one year from now and you are talking with a colleague. You are delighted by how the organization has progressed over the past year beginning with a strategic planning retreat. Imagine what has been accomplished that leads you to feel so positive. Describe the steps and the new initiatives and how they are linked with the existing services and operations. That’s pretty simple. You project yourself into the future a year, and you imagine a conversation with a colleague. And you say aren’t you glad we planned last year at the planning retreat for this whole year? Hasn’t it gone much better? For example, don’t you like this and don’t you like that and what about this? That didn’t work so well. We need to take care of that for next year and so on.

If we’re going to have participation, we’re obviously talking about something we can call the planning group. How do you organize your planning group? Remember Sandy? Sandy has no planning group. Maybe she does except for total family projects, that might work there, a vacation, a renovation of some part of the house. Sometimes just Sandy and her husband are the planning group. Sometimes Sandy and her husband and three kids are the planning group. But most of the time, she doesn’t have a planning group. Most of her work she does on her own. Homemaking, leadership represents a one-leader small business. But you and I don’t operate that way most of the time at least. We’re responsible for and to dozens or maybe in some cases thousands of people in an organization. And their involvement in the planning process is important.

But who makes up that planning team? How can we spot planners? Or how can we spot people who would be effective in a planning situation? How can we select people who would help us do this? In some cases such as my earlier illustration about the elder board, one has little choice. However, in many organizations, even in some churches, it is possible to put together a carefully constructed planning team with members unrelated to other positions or titles they may hold in the organization. Now what kind of people do we want if we do that? We want people who know the organization, its history, and its goals. We want people who are spiritually mature and work comfortably with one another. We want people who are flexible and not rigid regarding the future.

We want people who are able to disassociate their ideas from their persons and thereby having those ideas effectively critiqued by other members of the team. We want people who will stay with the project over the long haul.

A planning team is not really a task force that comes together and says, “Okay, this is what we should do” and then breaks up again. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it won’t be a good planning group. And then we want people who are positive and optimistic in their outlook. Thomas Gilmore reminds us paradoxically a good sign of effective strategic planning can be a somewhat depressive tone which indicates the group members recognize the difficulties of linking their ideas to a changing reality. By contrast, a manic feeling can suggest that the group has fled from the difficult implementation issues and has remained stuck playing with ideas but not linking them to existing constraints. Interestingly, there are tests which we can use to see whether people are well-suited to be on a planning team. You can determine whether or not you are an appropriate planning team member. I don’t think there’s any biblical or sociological mandate, for example, that requires a senior pastor or a CEO to be a member of a long-range planning team. Obviously, you want to stay very much in touch with the team, but you wouldn’t necessarily have to be on it. You certainly wouldn’t have to chair it. There’s a book you might want to get your hands on called The Local Church Planning Manual published by Judson Press some years ago, and it has some wonderful models and some ideas for long-range planning in the church and also has some guidelines in one of the appendices, I think, which describe how best to select the members of this planning team.

Let’s move on to reality and talk about planning and the budget. Star-struck visions of the future often hit the planet with a thud when we look at the bottom line of the budget. The budget is simply a plan for handling money. It comes in two parts: income and expense. The general operations of any organization include a financial plan for each of its ministry segments unless the organization operates on a unified budget where it’s all together. Simple budgets rarely are segmented unless certain ministry units have their own budgets and are treated separately. And that can happen, of course. Current fund budgets almost always run for a calendar or fiscal year. Educational organizations frequently will run from July 1 to June 30. Churches are not bound into that kind of a financial year and will frequently go for a calendar year. Special project budgets are kept separate. They may run for indefinite terms, but they really do not affect long-range planning.

I don’t want to make the next few minutes a monotonous rehash of budgeting procedures, but there are some basic guidelines here.

Budgets should generate from the bottom up as much as possible. A Sunday school class, for example, should have a voice in the things they need and equipment which will enhance their ministry for the next year. That budget item moves up through departmental superintendents and general superintendents and perhaps the pastor of Christian education before it lands on the board’s desk. In educational institutions, we say academic planning must always precede budget planning. Second, ultimate budget planning decisions and balancing decisions should be made by a finance committee, not by one person. If a senior pastor or a chief executive officer has ultimate control of the budget’s bottom line, that organization will reflect only his attitudes and his priorities toward ministry. Whether we call them trustees or a finance committee or a budget control group, there needs to be some kind of financial wisdom in a multiple group of counselors. A budget is useless without controlled buying such as purchase orders and appropriate signatures. When those Sunday school teachers have identified certain equipment and the equipment appears in the budget, somebody, probably the pastor of Christian education, has authorization to approve a purchase order. In many organizations, every purchase order must be signed by a head of the department requesting the item and then cosigned by some other administrator.

You want to avoid inter-fund borrowing. Inter-fund borrowing simply means that at a given crisis point during the budget year, you borrow money from yourself probably from a building program account or some other block of funds specifically designed for some future project. The money’s over there, and we need it now for salaries and for paying the electric bill. Let’s grab it. The intent is never to keep the money out of that account of course permanently. We intend to repay it when gift income improves or when student tuition money becomes available. Many institutions do this regularly. And when done with extreme caution, it’s not going to lead to financial collapse, but it does open the door to shady practices. And when inter-fund borrowing is not paid back within the fiscal year, ultimate difficulties may very well arise.

Number five, designated gifts are sacred. If Grandma Jones wants to give the church five hundred dollars for a new pulpit, we can accept it only if we spend the money on a new pulpit. If a Christian organization doesn’t want or will not do what a potential donor wants done with designated funds, refuse the funds. Obviously, we can ask Grandma if she will allow us to use the five hundred dollars toward new hymnbooks if that’s what we really need, but the ultimate decision is hers. It’s her money, and designated gifts are sacred.

Let’s talk a little bit about donor records. Donor records are the actual records that we keep of what people give. This is not a matter of nice, in-house financial practice. This is an absolute legal requirement. Churches and Christian ministries are non-profit organizations, and we have to abide precisely by the rules of the IRS; and they are many and complicated. And they require us to produce an exact record at the end of the fiscal year of what people have given to the organization. Financial reports and disclosures must be thorough and frequent. This means an annual audit as well as some public financial statement which we can give to potential donors or to anyone who asks about the institution. A Christian ministry, and again I give you my opinion so much in these studies, in my opinion a Christian ministry which keeps its finances strictly secret invites unwanted and unpleasant and probably unnecessary investigation by either informal or formal means. We used to call it in Florida government in the sunshine. Get those numbers out there where everybody can see them.

Keep our total debt within two and a half times the total annual current fund receipts. Look at the numbers on that, and we can make it work. If your church has an annual income of $60,000, that would be a rather small church obviously but just for simple numbers. If your church has an annual income of $60,000, then debt should not rise above $150,000. Immediately you see how this affects long-range planning. A church with an annual income of $60,000 has absolutely no business planning a $750,000 building to be completed within three years or whatever. I know that’s done all the time, but that doesn’t make it right. And it certainly doesn’t make it wise for leaders to engage in what can only be called foolishness, not faith.

Maybe I can end this study by pointing up some common pitfalls in planning without a great deal of detailed explanation for each one of them. One pitfall is the failure to make the tough decisions.The planning process requires decisions which demand vision, breadth of thinking, sometimes decisions which carry with them painful budgetary cuts. In either case, failure to make tough decisions will bog down the planning process. A second pitfall is sloppy data collection and analysis. This takes us back to early steps in the first model, the old cliché garbage in-garbage out certainly applies to the planning process. If we have distorted information regarding the organization’s past, we will probably distort its future. A third pitfall is bureaucratic centralization. We have been talking of course about decentralization. No single person or group of powerful persons should dominate the planning process. God speaks to His people, not just His pastors or principals or presidents. I’ve said that before, and you’re very likely to hear it again. Wide and cooperative involvement in the planning process is recommended by every management book worth reading.

Number four is failure to keep constituents informed. We were just talking about making those financial reports and getting those numbers out there where everybody can see them. Not everybody will be on the planning team, and not everybody will take the opportunity to speak to a planning team member when we announce that Bill and Joe and Harry and Mary and Susan are our planning team for this year. But we can post announcements. We can send out periodic letters. We can print paragraphs in the weekly bulletin or newsletter describing what the planning team is doing and analyzing its progress and so on.

A fifth and final pitfall is timidity or lack of vision. Now we’re talking about planning. With the wrong members on the planning team, we can easily end up in narrow, restricted thinking lines. When it comes to protecting orthodox doctrine, that kind of conservatism is laudable. In long-range planning, it’s deplorable. It’s a trap. Dr. Richard Love puts it this way:

The leader who would be effective must thus make the organizational vision a top priority. He must recognize its importance and commit himself to the development of the vision in collaboration with other team members so that it will become the life blood, the heartbeat of organizational purpose.For the Christian leader, this vision must follow God’s heartbeat as spelled out in Scripture and illuminated in space and time to the seeking believer. But getting to this point is not enough. The vision must then go through the specification of the short-range or goal-setting operation in order to develop a common roadmap to the organization’s destination, a destination to be reached by everyone together.

That’s a lot of material to digest. If you have not done long-range planning before, this is one of those tapes you may want to listen to a second time. I realize that there are some tapes in this course which you’ll be able to take in and say, “Oh yeah, that’s right. That makes common sense. Yeah, I’ve done that before, and it will just sort of fall into place.” There are others which will not be quite that clear and will have a little bit more of a technical character to them. And I think this one on planning certainly falls in that category. Familiarity with the models, understanding budgetary procedures, these are very important. And so I’ll be asking some questions about them and try to direct your thinking. And again I suggest that, for this tape, give it a second listen if all of this does not sound right off the bat to make sense to you.