Who Should Design? – Part 4

Teams, Stages, Personas, Surrogates

Ok.  From the previous blog posts,

• we have a team;
• we have its goals (or features that must be included in the ministry we’re going to design, such as faith stages); and
• we have identified personas (hypothetical people who together cover the range of characteristics that we expect of those who will experience our ministry).

That leaves us one more detail to discuss to answer the question posed by the title of this post; namely, who should design?

With only one twist, this discussion is easy: we look for people who can represent each of the personas we’ve decided to include.

The twist, though, is this: Ideally, the people we put on a design team would be people who will actually experience the ministry, who anticipate it.  We need a team of people who together have the range of characteristics we assigned to the various personas.

But, to find that group of people would be almost impossible.  That’s why we created personas, hypothetical people, in the first place.  So, we, instead of looking for real people, we look for people whose demographics (including faith stages) approximate somewhat each persona, people who are close enough to the persona that we can expect them to think like that persona would think.

By this we have introduced the use of surrogates.  A surrogate is someone who is put in the place of someone else.  In general, we do not want to use surrogates.  People with actual experience and who will actually experience the future ministry are by far the best people to provide input to the ministry design.  There is ample evidence that surrogates’ inputs miss the mark more often than any design team would like.  Their misses often require revised inputs and redesign.  But it is often not possible to find people with this experience, so most of the time in ministry design we must use surrogates.

We might call people like those we just described, those who approximate personas, half-surrogates.  But there will inevitably be situations in which the approximation is slight, and we will simply have to bite the bullet and choose full-surrogates.  The key question here, of course, is simply, “Can you think like the persona whose role you will play?”

So, if we have a team, essential design elements, personas, and wisely chosen surrogates, we know how to choose those who will design.  We have answered the question we set out to address.s