Assembled Intelligence: Hearing the Voices of Your Community

Synopsis
Strategic Ministry Design is the process of looking ahead and discerning the best path into the future. We believe this is best achieved using AI, Assembled Intelligence. This involves gathering input from your whole community and filtering it to ascertain where God is leading your organization. Learn how you can leverage this kind of AI to maximum advantage. 

AI is top of mind these days as ethicists, tech gurus and legislators scramble to figure out how to develop, harness and regulate the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence. We Lutherans are no strangers to AI except that ours is Assembled Intelligence. Our polity derives authority from the voters’ assembly or association delegates or other such collections of folks with a vested interest in the success of our organizations. 

Understanding this dynamic is at the core of our Strategic Ministry Design process. When it comes time to craft your next strategic plan and plot the course forward for your organization, there are three important things to consider:  

• Where you have been. 
• Where you are now. 
• Where you are going. 

Discerning where you have been is as simple as reviewing old strategic plans, going all the way back to your founding purpose and considering past successes and failures. When it comes to where you are now, you can cite registration numbers, curricular offerings (for schools), current state of facilities, etc. But such an assessment is incomplete if you aren’t also assembling your community and getting their feedback. What does your community see as your greatest strength? Your greatest weakness? Your biggest challenge?  

Likewise, when looking ahead, what does your community see coming that you might not have on your radar? Is the community changing around you in ways for which you’ll need to adapt? Are there needs of future generations for which you must begin preparing now? These are the kinds of input any good plan must incorporate to avoid myopia. The assembled intelligence of your community is an invaluable source of input when developing your strategic plan. It takes time and effort to assemble the community. It takes well-crafted questions to draw out the insight of the group. 

When you’re ready to refresh your strategic plan, consider how best to collect the assembled intelligence of your community. Listen to their voices and consider your blind spots. Weigh the input you receive carefully and move boldly into the future prepared for what comes next. 

The Strategic Ministry Design process Lutheran Church Extension Fund (LCEF) provides maps out a step-by-step course that includes collecting your community’s AI and helping you process it. If you’d like to learn more, please contact Tim Kurth at tim.kurth@lcef.org. He’s available to explain how the process can work for your organization.