Jesus recognized the role good planning plays in life and ministry. 

He said, Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? (Luke 14.28)

Unfortunately, lack of planning often torpedoes otherwise good ministry ideas.

Scientist Gary Klein, author of The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work, offers a great idea he calls a pre-mortem.

Dr. Klein says that a pre-mortem can increase the chances that our plan will succeed. In contrast to a post-mortem that we often perform after a plan fails, a pre-mortem is an exercise that teams do before they implement a plan.

By imagining that an event is over and that it failed, a pre-mortem can often surface potential problems that you can address and prepare for before you invest time and resources in an event or a plan. 

In my next blog I’ll give crucial questions to ask to make a pre-mortem successful. 

But first, I’ve listed several benefits of a pre-mortem.

1. A pre-mortem helps you fail on paper rather than in practice. A pre-mortem considers what might go wrong so you can plan to avoid those mistakes
2. You can surface potential pitfalls in a safe environment. Before others get overinvested in the plan, considering the pitfalls beforehand makes it less threatening for a team member to voice a concern.
3. A pre-mortem helps you value your team members by soliciting their ideas and thoughts. We all like others to feel that our voice matters. A pre-mortem reinforces that experience.
4. You can help team members become more sensitive to potential problems as you roll out the plan. By discussing potential issues beforehand, your team is more likey to see potential issues when you do roll it out.
5. You can increase the chances that you will avoid a painful post-mortem autopsy prompted by a failure. We'd all rather avoid autopsies.
6. You can surface potential problems you might have otherwise missed. Pretended your plan has failed makes you think outside the box.
7. ___________ (what would add as a seventh benefit?)

 “I just learned 5 good reasons to conduct a ministry plan pre-mortem to avoid failure.” (tweet this quote by clicking here)

Related posts:

• 5 Ways to Minimize Ministry Silos 
• Strategic Planning for Dummies  

A new year offers us leaders a great opportunity to evaluate the prior one and plan what we hope to accomplish in the new one. Each January I complete three exercises that help me prepare for the coming year.

1. I re-read my journal to look for trends that I want to continue or weaknesses I want to address.
2. I evaluate to what degree I accomplished my goals.
3. I re-set my overall goals and objectives.

These are relatively straightforward tasks that many leaders already do. Yet, I think that to best prepare for a new year we should go deeper. Take an hour this week and honestly ask yourself these three questions. I recall reading them somewhere else, yet I don’t have the source.

• What are my leadership skills that are my strengths? In other words, God has given you a broad set of leadership skills, competencies, and gifts. If you were to rank them, what would rise to the top of your list? Are you leveraging this strength in your leadership role? Do you continue to hone that ability?
• We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. (Rom 12.6, NIV)

• What is my one fatal flaw? That is, what about your personality or current behavior could do you in? Are you one step away from making a decision that could wreck your life, your ministry, or your family? Do you toy with something that beckons you to indulge, yet know that if you did, it would devastate you and many others?
• … But if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out! Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you. But you must subdue it and be its master. (Gen 4.7, NLT)

• What one area of improvement will make the most difference in my leadership role? In other words, if you spent just 5 minutes a day or an hour of week developing that area, envision to what degree that improvement could help you accomplish your goals.
  • My friends, I don’t feel that I have already arrived. But I forget what is behind, and I struggle for what is ahead. (Phil 3.13, CEV)

2013 could be the greatest year of your life. But it won’t happen by itself. It will take proactivity, prayer, and persistence.

What has helped you prepare for the new year?

Related posts:

• 6 Tips to Keeping a New Year’s Resolution 
• 4 Questions Leaders should Ask Themselves to Avoid Burnout

I've used this simple tool to capture the essence of strategic planning. Feel free to use it with your team. You might also find this tool helpful as well.

Dave Berry, one of the funniest guys on the planet once wrote, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: meetings.”

I'm not sure if he's 100% right, but he's close. Meetings, and extended ones like retreats, often don't achieve their intended purpose.

My latest church pastor's retreat, however, was probably the best ever in the 40 plus staff retreats I've either held or in which I've participated in 30 years of ministry.

The church where I've served as lead pastor for 7 years employs about 20 staff, including part-timers. Four, including me, make up the pastoral level and we get away once a year for our planning retreat.

As I reviewed this most recent retreat, in contrast to previous ones, I realize I've made some dumb mistakes in the past. My biggest ones include these.

1. Packing too much into the retreat (which has ranged from 1-3 days). I once handed out about 20 different documents for review and study.
2. Talking too much. At times I've talked/taught so much that I left little time for thorough interaction.
3. Going too long. As the adage goes, "The brain will absorb only what the butt can endure."
4. Not including R&R.
5. Including other leaders too late into the planning process. In one church I asked our elders to join us after we had completed our planning. They ended up not being on the same page and the pastors felt like our retreat was a waste of time.

I've served in a senior pastor role over 20 years and each year I've preached an annual vision sermon.

As I look back, though, I wonder how much Kingdom difference those sermons really made.

Pastors from large mega-churches that I've followed from afar encourage us to bring an annual  message. As a result, I've prioritized it as a necessary leadership tour do force upon which I thought the health, vitality, and future of my church depended. I had engrained into my leadership DNA that a vision message must include content (the what), the motivation (the why), and the inspiration (the impetus for everybody in the church to be moved to take on hell with a water pistol after listening to me for 30 minutes).

The kinds of vision messages I've brought have included these general themes.

• the I just got back from this great pastors' conference and this is what we will do next year
• the I just read a great book on church growth and this is what we will do next year
• the I have no clue about what next year holds but I have to bring a vision message or else I'm not a good pastor
• the I have to fire up the church with this message because, well, we need firing up
• the I've come from a Mt. Sinai planning retreat and here is what God told me we're to do next year
• and as I've gotten more mature the I humbly bring this before you as a word from God

The responses to my annual vision sermon have included...

• 100 people leaving the church the following year (after I attended Willow for the first time and decided we would be the Willow Creek of Atlanta; I'm not dissing Willow, I was simply too filled with myself when I brought that vision sermon)
• a phone call from a leader saying he was not motivated at all
• usually lower attendance on those days
• nice, smiling faces in the audience that telegraphed, "You go get 'em Charles. We'll be praying for you."
• yawns
• kind people telling me afterwards, "that was a very cool acronym you used."
• a few (I can count them on my hands and toes) who said, "Pastor, that motivated me to embrace the vision with you."

Vision dripping is more important than vision casting: Great churches produce visionary teams, and visionary people that share (drip) the vision in the course of daily leadership and life. Vision ought to be a team sport and engage an army of everyday story-tellers in the community. Vision should never be relegated to special gifting of a the point leader only.

Each November I bring an annual "vision" message to explain the big picture for the coming year and hopefully motivate buy-in.

Related posts: Strategic Planning for Dummies

Kevin Cashman wrote the book Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life. I highly recommend it. I'm reading it for a second time.

In one chapter he writes about managing change in an organization. His change mastery  shifts below apply to church leadership as well.

1. Focus on Opportunities vs. Problems
2. Focus on Long Term vs Short Term (don't lost sight of your long-term vision in the midst of change)
3. Focus on Purpose vs. Circumstance (keep focused on your and your church's purpose and values to avoid being mired in difficult circumstances)
4. Focus on Adaptability vs Control (control will only yield a certain degree of results; good leaders must remain agile, flexible, and innovative to sustain results over the long haul)
5. Focus on Service vs. Self (serve your leaders during the stress of change)
6. Focus on Listening vs. Expertise (effective leaders stay open and practice authentic listening to stay connected to others and to remain open to other innovative solutions)

Other related posts:

• Etch-a-sketch Church Planning

For more Help and Resources for Discouraged Pastors, visit Pastor Stone’s main site.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite toys was an Etch A Sketch. If you've never played with one, it works like this. You turn the two white knobs in different directions to create a line drawing like the one in the picture. That was cool enough for us kids like me who lived in the pre-internet era. But the coolest part came when when you wanted to start a new drawing. A quick jiggle of the screen and the drawing would 'magically' disappear ready for a new picture.

What does an Etch A Sketch have to do with planning? It's a phrase I coined during my recent trip to Nicaragua.

In six days our team held three 1-day training conferences in different locations in the country for over 325 pastors and their wives. Being a meticulous planner, I had created a well-designed schedule for each day. The only problem? My view of time didn't sync with how the pastors and wives viewed it nor did it sync with how the three local pastors who sponsored the events viewed it.

I was literally forced to change our daily schedule every hour, sometimes as often as 5 times in an hour. For a recovering obcessive-compulsive, I was ticked. I had diligently prepared this schedule. We had lots to accomplish to finish at five each day. The speakers had prepared talks to teach. Our worship team had practiced songs to sing. But the people didn't show up until anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half late. And they took really long breaks. Early on inside I was yelling, "What's wrong with you Nicaraguans! Don't you wear watches?"

But God graciously moderated my inner voice and attitude and I realized I could learn a lot from how the Nicaraguans treated time.

For me, time has always been a commodity I didn't want to waste. I always felt that I waste time if I'm not always accomplishing some task or goal. I've also believed that people who are perpetually late aren't stewarding their time wisely. Although the two previous statements are often true, the culture I've experienced in my five trips to Nicaragua has helped me become less 'uptight' if sometimes my time passes without any appreciable accomplishment.

I believe these Nicaraguan pastors, as a whole, value relationships over tasks, perhaps more than we do in the United States.

If you are a pastor, you are a busy guy or gal. I know because I am one. It seems there's always more to do in ministry than time to do it.

But for me, I hope my Etch A Sketch planning experience will help me savor the relational moments that may show no immediate accomplishment. Perhaps Jesus had this thought in mind when he gently admonished Martha with these words.

... only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her. (Luke 10.42)

Related posts: Strategic Planning for Dummies

For more Help and Resources for Pastors, visit Pastor Stone’s main site.

What do you do when your plans get interrupted? Fume...fuss...cuss?

I tend to fume.

Recently two experiences interrupted my well laid-out plans. In the process, I learned a few simple life lessons.

Interruption #1

I'm taking a voice-over class in Chicago and I park in the same building where the class is held. The valet keeps the key and after the class (later that night), I retrieve my key from the security guard and drive home. Except this week. The guard couldn't find my key. She called the boss and while he drove back to the building, I had some time to kill. For the next while, I was able to have a meaningful conversation with Faith about having a relationship with Christ. She didn't trust Christ, but I believe her heart opened a bit. Eventually, the boss found my key and I made it home.

One redeemed interruption.

Interruption #2.

Two days later I prepared for my quarterly overnight planning retreat at a retreat center a few miles west of my home. Just before I left, I opened my MacBook Pro to send out an email. When I opened the lid ... a black screen stared back. This happened two weeks prior and I thought is was a one-time glitch. Apparently not, though. Fortunately, the first time one of my staff guys was able to perform a convoluted fix because my re-booting, removing the battery, and screaming at my Mac didn't work. But, he was now out-of-town. I checked with another staffer and he said he thought  he could fix it. He did. By the time he fixed it, though, I faced losing a half-day of my retreat. Plus, I had lost the file of my current sermon.

On my drive to the retreat center, I faced a choice, I could fume or pray. I choose the latter. Amazingly, that focused prayer time centered me and prepared my heart for the retreat, even though on the way a train stopped me and when I arrived the place was locked.

Another interruption redeemed.

Here are the 3 lessons I learned from those interruptions.

1. Life often seem like a series of interruptions punctuated by a few plans that get accomplished.
2. When interrupted, we all choose how we will respond.
3. When we respond with God's grace, He will redeem even the most frustrating interruptions for His Glory and our benefit.

For more Help and Resources for Pastors, visit Pastor Stone’s main site.

In a recent post, Strategic Planning for Dummies, I suggested a simple visual that can simply explain strategic planning.

I've used the tool below with that visual to help actually implement ministry plans. I hope it helps you.

Ministry Event Plan tool for blog

Strategic planning can sometimes be difficult to explain. This diagram has helped me easily explain the process.

The outside circle represents the process of strategic planning.

• Plan what you want to do
• Train and communicate to those who will carry out the plan
• Execute the plan
• Review/evaluate what you accomplished

The three questions to evaluate how well you are doing are these (the triangle):

1. What? (do you have a clear target, goals, mission?)
2. How? (do you have simple and effective systems in place to accomplish your goals?)
3. Who? (are you using unified teams of people to accomplish your goals?)

Here's the diagram.

Related posts. Strategic Planning for Dummies, part 2.