Our job as leaders is to see what others don’t see- to look at the same reality that everyone experiences and be able to perceive what is really going on and what needs to happen next.

A big part of that is accomplished through concentrated days of Team Planning – where we chart our course for a new year.

In most of college ministry, that time is now.

So toward that end here is some, hopefully, very practical stuff you can use to set up your planning time:

 

A couple key thoughts on planning:

• Click to read yesterday’s post on our favorite way to do planning
• We are big fans of Buckets and Holes solutions:
• Using what we’re good at to fix what we’re bad at

We’re not scrapping our methods and long term goals every year and starting from scratch.

• Our planning is framed by a 12 year plan to accomplish the vision: “that everyone on campus would know someone who passionately follows Christ”
• We’re committed to building a movement by reaching a progressively larger freshman class every...

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This is the best idea I’ve ever come across for planning.

How do you take all that is going on in your movement (the good and bad) and all you hope to accomplish (with often conflicting team opinions on what we should focus on next) and make sense of it all to determine what your team needs to focus on in the fall?

A few years ago I read the book The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam. The author described a brilliant way to take a LOT of information/issues/problems and emerge with THE best solution. We’ve found this approach to be incredibly effective and a lot of fun (something no one has ever accused PrEFACE of!).

Roam calls it the garage-sale principle:

“Regardless of how well organized all the stuff in our garage may be, laying everything out on tables in the light of day yields a completely new perspective on it all. The same is true of data: when it is packed away in individual files and records, it’s impossible to look at the big picture – but getting everything out in the open makes otherwise ...

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Part 3 of a series on Planning for Year 2023 – click to read parts 1 & 2

“Without specific team goals, team members become confused and revert only to what they like to do or want to do. Goals that motivate always contain a ‘stretch element’ to them. In other words, they go beyond what you did last year and cannot be accomplished by simply plugging in last year’s methods and strategies. Most staff would rather fail at attempting something great than to succeed at something mediocre that just feels like failure.”
Eric Swanson

As a new staff, I always found the setting of our team goals to be rather arbitrary:

Team Leader: “OK, we had 50 coming to Cru last year, what should our goal be this year team?”

Staff 1: “I think we’ll have 75 this year”

Staff 2: “Why?”

Staff 1: “I don’t know – because 75 is a little more than 50?”

Staff 2: “Where’s your faith? Let’s add a zero! We’re going to have 500 this year!”

Staff 1: “You’re an idiot”

Staff 2: “No, I have faith”

...

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Part 2 of a series on Planning for Year 2023 

(Read part 1 to catch up on an intro to long term planning)

Why does having a numerical goal change things?

1) It forces you to plan differently

2) It gives your staff and students hope/vision

 

1) It forces you to plan differently

What happens when you realize that you need to not just reach freshmen but need to reach 80 of them?

It forces your team to think in new ways – to try things you’ve never done before.

It takes “reaching freshmen” from an abstract idea/wish to a concrete reality that needs to be planned.

It makes you realize:

• We’re going to need more than just our staff team of 3 in order to make this happen.
• We’re going to need 20 freshmen Bible study leaders (paired up, leading 10 studies) in order to make that a reality
• We’re going to have 120 in freshmen studies by the end of the fall in order to have 80 still in studies by the end of the spring
• So we need to figure out a way to have conversations with 400 freshmen (if 1 in 5 will ...

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Part 2 of a series on Planning for Year 2023 

(Read part 1 to catch up on an intro to long term planning)

Why does having a numerical goal (connected to a long term plan) change things?

1) It forces you to plan differently

2) It gives your staff and students hope/vision

 

1) It forces you to plan differently

What happens when you realize that you need to not just reach freshmen but need to reach 80 of them?

It forces your team to think in new ways – to try things you’ve never done before.

It takes “reaching freshmen” from an abstract idea/wish to a concrete reality that needs to be planned.

It makes you realize:

• We’re going to need more than just our staff team of 3 in order to make this happen.
• We’re going to need 20 freshmen Bible study leaders (paired up, leading 10 studies) in order to make that a reality
• We’re going to have 120 in freshmen studies by the end of the fall in order to have 80 still in studies by the end of the spring
• So we need to figure out a way to have conversations wi...

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