Capturing a Design

Designs are ideas.  They are ephemeral things.  The problem is that until they are captured into something more concrete than our minds, we don’t have one design, we have as many designs as there are minds involved.  So, we need to ask, what might a ministry design team do to make sure it has only one design and not as many as it has designers?  In short, how can we capture and gain agreement on our team’s design?

Historically, there were three answers to these questions.  They were

• Words and documents
• Sketches and drawings
• A model: a scaled-down version of the product of the design (in our case a ministry) that emphasizes its major points.

Words have the benefit of allowing a complete description, including the rationale, of a design.  Sketches and drawings have the benefit of summary: they fulfill the aphorism that one picture is worth a thousand words.  They also seem to provide a better – or at least easier – connection than words to the way the human mind works.  Models are even better than pictures, but they are often a lot of work and, because they need to be approximations, they can be unintentional misrepresentations.

In many ways these historical approaches to capture a design are still today’s most common tools.  If a team announces it has just designed something, two of the most common questions that team will be asked are, “Did you write it up” or “Will you show it to me?”

True, today it is easier to write, sketch, and model than it was in times past.  We now have much better tools: word processors, spreadsheets, drawing software, team collaboration software, and even 3D printers, among others.  Ways to use these tools have evolved with them.  These range from simple forms to collect data, to fancy software systems that can turn collected data into impressive illustrations, to impressive three dimensional animations.

The utility of fancier tools to our topic, ministry design, is not immediately obvious, but who knows?  While the message is ageless, rooted in God’s plan, ministry approaches move with time.  How long ago, for instance, would a ministry design team have needed to design and build a television recording studio?

If this blog is to explore better ways of conducting ministry design, then we need to understand how better to perform this issue of capturing ministry designs.  And with that we need to keep in mind the issue of working “Across The Cerebral Divide” that I addressed in a previous blog post.

One thing, however, has to be clear.  We need a method to collect our design ideas as we go along, and this method has to help us:

• Bring our team’s design ideas together into an agreed-upon whole
• See the whole of our evolving ministry design and comprehend its interactions
• Explain our design to people outside of the design team.

So, it’s important early on in a design team’s activity that it settle on at least an initial plan for capturing the output of its work.   Agreed?