The Seven Practices
Vision-Guided Experimentation is seven practices which that help leaders balance a healthy respect for time-tested tradition with a capacity for creative experimentation, including:
- Minimum Viable Belief — How to develop a transcendent vision that will enable a lean, experimental, and self-directing culture.
- Getting Outside the Building — How to engage in evidence-based discernment of community and congregational needs, guided by #1.
- Minimum Viable Programs and Ministries — How to avoid program-killing assumptions about what people need and want, by starting small with a no-frills prototype of #2.
- Rapid Iteration Prototyping — How to cut preparation time and expense by conducting rapid application, assessment, and adaptation of #3, repeating PRN.
- Lean-ing from the Inside Out — How to stop wasting your people’s time and talent, by instead stewarding their God-given gifts and skills.
- Leading from the Outside In — How to be an extrapreneurial leader who assertively acts in concert with other organizations with compatible missions that serve the same community.
- Measuring What Matters — How to move beyond counting butts in the pews and other vanity metrics to actionable metrics.