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Wycliffe: How Teachable Behaviors can get you to a goal with very little Strategic Planning.

By Justin Long ⋅ March 18, 2009 ⋅ Email This Post Email This Post ⋅ Print This Post Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Eddie Arthur’s post in Kouya Chronicle (“Is mission strategy wrong”) linked to Tim Chester’s series (“Why I don’t believe in mission strategy”). Both articles are interesting, short reads that actually poke toward a swarming strategy.

To me, there are two “categories” of strategy: long-term plans and short-term swarms. It’s important to see both have long-term impacts. Both can achieve a specific goal. Long-term plans are simply written out farther in advance.

There’s plenty written about long-term planning. Let me highlight for a moment one element of a swarming strategy: Vision.

When I teach swarming’s Vision component, I look at five specific components:

  • The Plausible Promise. A “lofty vision” tells you what you want to see achieved. Usually this is bigger than what you can do alone. In response to that, you make a “plausible promise”: something you will do that is specific, realistic, and measurable. This is the goal of your swarm. It might be an intermediate goal on the way to the vision, but it’s something that will take a while.
  • Shared Values. These are the boundaries along the path you will take. They mark out what you will do, and what you won’t. They are categories of action. For example, you may value translation, or you may value literacy, or you may value health, or something else. Between the Shared Values and the Plausible Promise you know both “where” you are going and generally “how” you will get there.
  • Teachable Behaviors. These are specific actions that conform to your shared values and get you closer to your plausible promise. They are teachable, reproduceable, and scalable. They are the “lego building blocks.” How to do an inductive Bible study is a teachable behavior. How to grill chicken is a teachable behavior. How to use secure email is a teachable behavior. The trick is to identify the teachable behaviors that enable your swarm to move toward its goal, and get people to do them.
  • Modular Strategies. A “strategy” in this context is basically a bunch of teachable behaviors strung together in a specific way to take advantage of a particular context (a time, a place, a culture). So, for example, let’s say you know teachable behaviors A, B, C, D. A modular strategy might be AABBBBC; or, if you found yourself in a different context, it might be CDBBBA. The key is to learn teachable behaviors so you can easily lock together different forms without getting locked in to one specific strategy.
  • Measurable Mileposts. The final key to this approach is to have a measurable plausible promise, and to ruthlessly measure everything you do in terms of how close it gets you to the promise and how well it conforms to your values. This gives you an idea of your speed and direction, so you can adapt.

Other components of a swarming strategy include collaboration (working together) and adaptability (continuously improving behaviors and strategies to be more efficient and effective). These components, together, enable you to keep a strategy goal in mind and move toward it, while maintaining maximum flexibility in the midst of any particular situation.

When we were on the field in Southeast Asia, I often said that the key to being a missionary was to be strong, flexible and have a good sense of humor. The balance between strength of purpose and flexibility of methodology is key to a good swarming strategy.

The balance between strength of purpose and flexibility of methodology is key to a good swarming strategy.

In “2025: a step too far,” Arthur evaluates Wycliffe’s Vision 2025 strategy in the light of Chester’s critiques. I, on the other hand, would take this a bit differently. To me, Vision 2025 is a plausible promise:

By 2025, together with partners worldwide, we aim to see a Bible translation programme begun in all the languages that need one.

In order to achieve this goal, a “swarm-ish” strategy is what is naturally emerging. Arthur notes a number of partnerships that have developed. These are “swarms” inside the larger organization that is Wycliffe (which is, I should note, a very swarmish organization in and of itself). I loved Arthur’s comment: “The genius of Vision 2025 was its call to realign ourselves with what God was doing in and through his people worldwide. We need to be constantly working to renew our alignment with God’s mission on an individual and corporate level. As we do that, God will sort out the dates—we can safely leave that to him.” This is promise-keeping, values-keeping, and measurement at its finest. They have a goal and they are measuring their progress toward it. Perhaps they will not hit it by 2025. The idea is not to measure failure by whether they hit it by 2025. Failure is to be judged by whether they did everything they possibly could to alter their speed and trajectory so as to have a more-than-reasonable chance of hitting the goal.

A final analogy. My in-laws live in Minnesota, and we are in Virginia. If we plan a trip to travel by car to Minnesota, and we want to get there in two days, we can know some basic things. We have some values (safe travel, travelers reasonably happy, etc). We know when we want to get there, when we can reasonably get there in light of our values (2 days?), so we know the speed we have to travel and the number of stops we can make. Now, say we have to travel at an average of 55 miles per hour to get there. If we poke along at an average of 25 miles per hour, we can reasonably say we failed to achieve our goal. On the other hand, if we’re averaging 60 miles per hour but then we encounter a traffic accident that blocks the highway and delays us 8 hours, then we probably won’t reach our goal—but it’s not necessarily our fault. In such a case, we can adapt and try turning off the highway and taking a route around. It might take us a bit longer, but we’ll still achieve our goal in the end. This exemplifies some of the ideals behind swarming, and is quite similar in many respects to what Wycliffe is doing—and actually, I think, what Chester wants to see happen as well.

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