For faith communities and congregations

You can see what is coming

The congregation has nowhere to talk about it, so you have carried it alone.

Start your first cycle

For a congregation, a parish, a synagogue, a mosque, or a council that serves several.

05 Scenario Preparation

Two things you cannot control become three futures you can rehearse.

  • One The younger families stay, and the building is the constraint.
  • Two Giving holds but attendance does not, and the question is what you are for.
  • Three Neither holds, and the decision you postponed gets made for you.

Nobody has to predict which one. The work is being ready for more than one.

Where this comes up

The arithmetic everyone has done privately

The conversation nobody starts

Saying it out loud would make it real, so nobody does.

A crisis instead of a choice

The roof, the shortfall, the resignation, decided in a week under pressure.

Change reads as loss of faith

Any proposal gets heard as a judgment on what people have loved and built.

What the practice does

A standing occasion to think together

Set the organization type to faith, and the cycle weighs community trust and theological coherence.

Ratings before the meeting

Members rate on their own, so the gap belongs to nobody in particular.

Prepared paths

Rehearse two or three futures while you still have room to choose.

Pause is not neglect

Keep, adjust, pause or follow the need, each with a written reason.

"The single most common source of leadership failure we have been able to identify is that people, especially those in positions of authority, treat adaptive challenges like technical problems."
Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line

If this is you, start here

More on the blog

Put the conversation somewhere it can happen

Pick the question you have been carrying and run the nine steps together.

Start your first cycle
Part of CollectiveNexus

One tool in a growing suite

SharedForesight gives your community a Product Coach role and the tools that work needs. It is one of the CollectiveNexus tools, and your people carry across to the next one.

Learn more about the full suite
A nine step adaptive practice for communities that have to decide together.
One of a handful of small tools I am building for teams and communities that want to run themselves better.
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