Why Design Thinking Can Help the Church

May 2014

The world is changing remarkably fast.

The rate of macro social change and overall global interconnectedness has been a subject of much discussion in the 21st century. Urbanization and population trends are perhaps the most striking — the world gains a new Singapore every month. The urbanization of China is the single biggest movement of people in history. Nigeria is positioned to become one of the world’s most populous countries and Lagos is exploding. And so on.

In the micro, lived experience, we see our communities and neighborhoods becoming increasingly diverse and pluralistic, with people hailing from every culture and walk of life (this is seen in the increased movement of peoples from conflict zones, for example).

The continued integration of global markets and the growth of the knowledge economy means talent and capital are flexible and mobile, and more people competing for the same work. These concentrations of talent and capital continue to drive the growth of the gap between the cultural elite rich and the disconnected poor, particularly in cities, while the middle class feels the pressure of unemployment, cost of living inflation, and increased job competitiveness.

Increasingly affordable technology means that our access to information and the means of cultural production have never been higher. Young digital natives are the harbingers of cultural trends, and what is “beautiful” and what is “popular” are increasingly driven by clicks, views, and viral sharing. On-the-grid internet culture creates homogenized sub-communities, meaning individuals in Miami, Mumbai, and Moscow are likely to have more in common with each other than their own neighbors.

It’s a potentially scary time to be a "legacy" institution — particularly if your institution has a lot to lose. There are market shifts and new disruptions seemingly daily, and mature organizations often don't have the immediate incentives to build the new capacities needed for tomorrow. “Surely we can get a little more leverage out of what we've always done and the strengths we have, and surely we can keep our position a little longer,” we think.

The church, oriented toward the stewardship of a tradition by its very nature, exists in the midst of all of these shifts as well, though potentially experiencing different components of them. Jenkins has noted the divergence in the coming decades for churches in the Global South vs the West. In the Global South, the church stands to gain a great windfall of growth from demographic trends. But in the West, the church faces decreased attendance, decreased cultural credibility, increased pressure on its historic positions, and an increasingly inoculated audience of “moralistic, therapeutic deists" or worse.

Cruise ships, of course, don’t turn quickly. So it begs the question — what can the church (particularly the Western church) do to respond to cultural and economic whiplash, which shows no signs of slowing?  Can churches and ministries become agile without losing their essential identity?  Can they faithfully adjust in a way that creates new credibility, plausibility, and connection to changing cultures and communities? 

To use biblical categories — how does the church remain faithful, yet do everything in its power to become fruitful?

Faithfulness and Fruitfulness

In business, the inability to be agile in the face of a rapidly changing environment means losing customers, market share, profit, and eventually, losing the business itself. In the church, it means losing families, influence, credibility, and relevance to hurting people in need of community, hope, and the invitation to participate in the story of Jesus.

To survive, the business world has realized that their credibility depended on two things: their ability to tell a compelling story to their tribe, and their ability to deliver a product, service, or experience on the customer’s terms — and quickly. They had to pick up market signals more efficiently, get more creative, get more artistic, get better at delivering, and most important of all, they had to get faster. This didn’t necessarily imply changing their identity, but it did force them to learn to exercise different muscles.

Design thinking, formulated and developed around nerve centers like Apple, IDEO, and Stanford, is an approach to organizational problem solving that is equal parts engineering, humanities, and art. Its methodology is fundamentally oriented around deeply knowing, empathizing with, and caring about the end customer — or perhaps, “loving your neighbor.” To build the next great product, and find the signal among all of the noise, businesses have had to learn how to actually listen to their customers, understand their customers, and truly care about their customers, in order to build products that serve them. Empathy and others-oriented service, suddenly, have became incredible competitive advantages in the business world (see titles like this, for example).

Maybe another way to say it is this — humility, incarnation, and understanding your neighbor, it seems, is not only biblical, it is good for business.

If any organization should be “human-centered,” it should be the church. How much more, then, should the church be able to understand its community and design products, services, experiences, and messages that speak precisely to their realities? If churches can’t establish credibility and influence in their communities, it might be because they don’t truly take the time to listen, understand, empathize, and diagnose — and thus fail to act quickly and decisively on what they discovers.

Design thinking is for the church too.

To further illustrate, I’ll give two helpful metaphors, for connecting the dots between an enterprise-philosophy of design and the healthy functioning of the church: medicine and agriculture.

Christians and missionaries used to be called “doctors of the soul.” Doctors, of course, are experts at listening, observing, diagnosing, and prescribing a course of action that is specifically built to heal the malady of a specific patient. A doctor is always testing his prescriptions over time, against results from follow up evaluations. Eventually, the lessons of hundreds of doctors over time give us reliable, normative information about how to treat different types of people in different scenarios. Good ministry is when God’s people spend time doing observation, diagnosis, prescription, and follow up evaluation, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to learn how the Gospel and the full wisdom of God apply to ever-changing scenarios of our people. We have to get better at “culture reading” — at diagnosis and evaluation of our contexts and communities, in both the micro and the macro. We have to become experts at designing solutions for spiritual, emotional, and relational health. We have to become hospitals again.

Farmers are responsible to maximize the yield of their fields — but immediately, they must recognize that they aren’t in control of the weather, and they aren’t in control of the type of terrain they inherited. Farmers live in deserts, mountains, and tropics. In each case, they have to determine the types of tools and crops they are going to utilize, in order to maximize their yield based on the type of soil and climate they have. So, they work to pick the best seed, and to increase their productivity through technology or process improvements. In the same way, Christians do not control the hearts of men and women, and we do not control the sovereign work of God’s Spirit — but within the “fields” given to us, we have to work to bear much fruit and yield a bountiful harvest. We have to know our tools, our fields, and our workforce intimately.

It makes sense that Christ himself used both medical and agricultural analogies to communicate the Gospel; these both contain within them the basic logic of design - observing the customer and the market closely, testing a solution in real time, and being committed to health and growth no matter what. There is a biblical mandate to be good stewards of the mission God has given us, and we cannot do that if we don't learn to deliver real healing and real value to the people in our communities through the power of the Gospel.

Design Thinking for the church is about joining what God is doing in the world and using all of the tools he has given us, to design smart, coherent approaches to local mission and ministry, which fit the communities around, even as they change quickly - in order to see real transformation take place in the lives of people through God-ordained means.