“Like the prophets of old, John the Baptist’s word strikes abrasively against the easy certainties of the religious establishment. He will let us take no comfort in our rites, tradition, or ancestry. Everybody must submit to be made over. Everybody must descend into the waters, especially the religiously secure and sophisticated”

In this time of Lent, I’m going to be looking for new life in our denomination in the midst of death… then I’m going to ask myself, “What do I need to do to help this new life flourish?” I think all of your questions (to which I have no immediate answers) point in that direction…

That being said, I would have liked the report to have at least proposed some measurable evaluation criteria. This is, admittedly, the hardest part of being “agile”, and is the part that most organizations most often fail to handle well. It forces you to describe the goals of your experimentation in concrete, meaningful ways. It forces you to set real targets for your work. It forces you to admit loudly and clearly that your work may fail. And, most importantly, it gives everyone participating in the experimentation a common notion of what success looks like.

Without a common notion of what success will look like, you often end up with an organization that looks alot like a basketball team practicing on those courts that have 6 or 8 goals along the sides as well as the ones on either end – and people shooting randomly at all the wrong hoops.