Understanding a Design

This post is a week late.  For those of you who follow me, I’m sorry.  I intend to post at least weekly on Mondays.  I think it might help explain my tardiness if I tell you that a week ago we lost my dear wife’s beloved brother, Myron, to pancreatic cancer.  We’re grieving, but we know he’s healed and jumping for joy.

In my previous blog post we discussed the necessity of providing a ministry design team with a graspable and powerful tool for capturing the results of the team’s design efforts.  It’s an adage, but certainly true, that if a team does not document (record) its findings, then there is really nothing left but memories – lots of them: each different.  Why?  Because we each remember different things.   To minister, we need a single ministry concept to which we can all subscribe and which can be implemented to accomplish the ministry’s goals.

In that previous post we went on to observe that the tools available today to capture designs are much more powerful and easy to use than ever before.  Today I’d like to focus on what are arguably the most powerful of these tools: models.

Remember models?  In earlier posts we noted that models are powerful because they have the virtue of the thousand words of a picture … plus!  They may not reach a million words of value, but in terms of utility, they may exceed that.

Modern models are more powerful than ever — in part because along with the innovation that improved them came a deeper understanding of how complicated things work.  Techies call this understanding systems theory.  Please don’t glaze over yet.  Our topic here not systems theory; it is a continuation of our discussion on how to capture our ministry designs.

Models are now better on paper (or, these days, on a screen) because we have a richer set of modeling options (I’ll describe two categories of options in a future post).  Once we learn to prepare and read them, they pack a lot more information on a page than yesterday’s simple diagram, just as a picture of the front of a building (or another pictorial view) is better than just a floor plan.

However, the real power of models begins to emerge when they let a design team “walk through the design;” that is, to gain an understanding of how it will feel to the people who experience it.  This can be done, for instance, with a version of role play, where each member of the team describes how people will experience a different part of the ministry.  In walk-throughs, a team can keep track of not only the flow and feel of the ministry, but also of key performance parameters, such as how many people might be served at each stage of the ministry, how long it would take a person to go through that stage, or what range of outcomes might be expected from it.

Even more power comes from transferring a model to a computer, using software that allows a team to simulate the operation the ministry.  Simulations mimic a team’s walk through with the added benefit of going through the ministry quickly and many times, with different assumptions each time (for example, a different mix of people participating in the ministry.)

My trail of blog posts so far doesn’t allow me to substantiate my claim, but it’s important to know that I believe based on experience there are very powerful tools out there that can give us much better ways to capture and communicate our ministry designs and, in the process, gain confidence that our designs will accomplish what they set out to do.