How to Try

Design Thinking and Church Innovation

Lorenzo Lebrija

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781640653474
• eBook ISBN: 9781640653481
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

What if tried and true methods from the corporate world could raise your ministry's probability of success by a considerable margin?

Lorenzo Lebrija, director of TryTank, a lab for church growth and innovation, has developed a fresh straightforward framework for experiments in new ministry based on research and interviews. With three clear steps, this framework can have a lasting impact on any church that uses it. You can even start innovating today, using this specific and actionable process within your church community.

Scripture is full of examples encouraging us to try new works in the name of God. This book gives the exact tools and templates for how to do just that, and to find God in the failures as well as the successes.

Design Thinking
and the Church

Design thinking is a process, but it started as a school of thought. In the 1960s, efforts in the corporate world were made to better inform the process of product design. Rather than just hoping that creative people would come up with new and innovative designs, was it possible that they were following a roadmap? This new field was called design research.

A Short History of Design Thinking

Design as a framework was explored in Robert A. Simon’s 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial. Professor Robert McKim of Stanford made leaps in the nascent field in the 1980s and 1990s. During that time, it was recognized that the design of products needed to focus on the needs of the people who would use them, not only on the needs of commerce. That was the key element: it was centered on people first.

In 1987, Peter Rowe first popularized the term “design thinking” to encompass this method, and now it was able to go beyond products. Design thinking could be used to dream up experiences or figure out how to improve education. The core concepts were being applied in more and more fields. By the 1990s, David Kelley of the influential design firm IDEO was among the founders of what is now called the Design Thinking Movement. (FYI, when we launched TryTank in January of 2019, we sought out a framework to use for our work. After looking at several and trying a few, we settled on design thinking because it made sense for what we wanted to do. To really do it well, I was trained and certified by IDEO in this process in 2020.)

As it is currently used, design thinking is a process for creative problem solving. Or, to put it more academically, “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to finding real innovative solutions to tough problems. Design thinking combines the approaches of design, management and science to solving a wide range of complex problems . . . design thinking is about intelligent change.”¹

IBM was an early adopter of design thinking, creating their very successful IBM Enterprise Design Thinking innovation lab. So was MassMutual (yes, the insurance company) when they wanted to reach a new market. Fidelity Labs is the in-house lab of Fidelity Investments. Even Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, has Intuit Labs, which used design thinking once with eighth graders to create a social enterprise.

Today, design thinking has influenced more things than you could imagine. From toys and shopping carts and video games, to how kids are fed in a school cafeteria, it really is everywhere. I think this is so because it’s an organic and intuitive way to creative problem solving and generating ideas.

The Framework

Here are the three steps:

1. Generating Insights
2. Developing Ideas
3. Trying

See what I mean about it being an organic and simple process? I would bet that in many areas of your life you have used the design thinking process without even knowing it. You had an insight about something. The insight led you to think of ideas you could try. Then you tried one of them. Congratulations, you are a design thinking practitioner!

If it’s so simple and you have already done it, why do you need this book? Because there are better ways of doing it. Imagine being better able to gain insights. Imagine being better able to come up with ideas. Finally, imagine being better equipped to try them. That’s what this book is really about. (And quite frankly, even if you don’t need to be better at this, the church does.)

Why Design Thinking Works for the Church

I believe design thinking is perfect for our holy work, especially if you are part of a liturgical tradition. We love to follow frameworks! But it goes beyond just that. Once, I was working with someone to carry out a new ministry in a congregation. It didn’t take long for us to realize that we hadn’t done a good job of getting buy-in from the congregation. Without the buy-in, some people felt hurt that they weren’t in on the creation process and were unlikely to support it. It would be hard for the new ministry to become sustainable without support from the congregation. We found that this was going to be a longer process than we had anticipated. After noting that we were going to have to backtrack and get involvement from people, both of us let out a long sigh, and my partner in ministry said, “Doing the work of the people of God would be considerably easier without the people of God.” We laughed. The process of design thinking as we have developed it for the church helps you get buy-in from stakeholders along the way.

I once had a boss who described how a new idea came to be by saying, “We threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and saw what stuck.” That seems like a wasteful way of trying new things, and it’s also a top-down way of coming up with ideas. Rather than gaining insight from those who would take part, it just “seemed like a good idea” and then it was pushed out. That process looks more like this:

1. Idea
2. Try

It’s missing the key step of getting insights. When generating insights, what you are actually doing is clarifying the question your ministry is looking to answer. To put it another way, design thinking helps you be crystal clear about objectives.

Finally, design thinking maximizes your chance of success because you are not just throwing things at the wall and hoping they stick. The church doesn’t have the resources or the time for that. We need to be much more intentional about what we’re doing, and design thinking helps do that.

The Design Thinking Mindset

One of the best things that happens when you undertake design thinking as a process to lead change and innovation is that your mindset changes. You no longer just see things; you are always looking for those insights. At the same time, you are planting seeds in your mind that will grow and connect to those insights.

Remember when I talked about Dial-A-Priest? The seed that was planted was the news story about the priest who gave last rites over the phone. Somewhere, I had also learned about companies that were running call centers, but they were not in one large phone room anymore: technology allowed the calls to be routed to the agent’s own home. And then, when the insight came about the upcoming overwhelming need that was coming for pastoral care, my mind connected the dots into a “What if . . . ?”

I firmly believe that our minds naturally want to work this way. We do it every time we are creative. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, said, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” Scientists who study the brain have concluded that creativity requires the mixing and remixing of mental images in our brains that represent the external reality.² We can hone those mindsets and make them stronger.

Now, you are not going to become Sherlock Holmes and every time you walk into a room you’ll automatically start to look for the smallest details, and how, and why things are, but you will notice things more. You will be more open and inquisitive about details. You will plant little seeds. Plant enough of them and they will grow. Your mind will make the connections.

In each of the steps, I list the mindsets that will be most helpful. For the insight step, the mindset is being curious. For the idea step, the mindset is being playful. For the trying step, the mindset is being courageous. Anyone, at any age, can work in these mindsets, and they are what open us to getting the most out of this work.

The Example We Will Use

In brain-speak, I am a left-brain kind of person. I am practical to the core. This is a great quality to have. Mostly. It is hard for me to follow some of the more theoretical and esoteric points of theology and philosophy. Some of my courses in seminary were very hard because of this. The professor (usually some very distinguished archbishop or the like) would be teaching a theory of the atonement and I’d be just lost. I would raise my hand and ask, “Can you give me a practical example of that?”

I say all that as a preface to what follows. I see it as very practical and I want to teach it that way. To that end, I want to use one example we can follow throughout the book that will let us use what we are learning in a practical way.

This is our scenario:

Sue is a new vestry³ member of St. John’s Episcopal Church. She’s been a member of the congregation for about a year, maybe a little more. The church is an average Episcopal congregation. It has seventy people at worship on Sundays and about two hundred on the membership rolls. The members skew older, so while there are two or three families with small children, most of the members are at or near retirement.

Sue was recently elected to the vestry. At her first meeting, she asked about evangelism and efforts made by the church in trying to get new members. After a long discussion of the things the congregation had done in this area in the last thirty or so years, she agreed to head up a small group to look at this question: “What if we intentionally sought out new members?”

In design thinking, this is our design question. It is what leads our insights and ideas and our trying. Please note that the question will evolve. At a later point, there will be an intentional pivot to it becoming an action question.

It is very possible that as you begin this work, the design question itself will change as you gain more clarity. For example, this “What if we intentionally sought out new members?” could become “What if we intentionally sought out young families?” or “What if we intentionally sought out LGBTQ members?” Don’t be afraid of the pivots! They are good, they show that your insights are already bearing fruit and leading you to a more clear and specific question. Let that happen.

For now, we’ll begin with the original question of “What if we sought out new members?” which we’ll use as our example for the rest of this book. I hope that as we go along you will be better able to follow the process by the illustration of the example. I hope that you will also think of your own design question. Take some time now and think about some of the “What ifs?” you may have about your own congregation. Pray about them. Ask God to illumine your mind and heart to begin this work.

FIELD NOTES

Throughout the book, I’ll share some of the experiments that TryTank has done, what we were hoping to achieve, and what actually happened. Not all of our experiments have been successful. Of our first fifty experiments, six have succeeded, fifteen have failed, and the rest are currently in process or are still in development.

Alexa Prayer Skill

Design question: How might we lower the barriers to get people to engage with scripture more regularly?

The idea: Research tells us that people who engage with scripture at least four times a week are more optimistic, more generous, gamble and drink less, and are less likely to have extramarital affairs. So, could we lower the barrier to make it easier for people to engage scripture on their own?

The smart speaker is perhaps the fastest adopted technology in human history. It took virtually no time to go from its introduction to more than a hundred million of them in the U.S. Within the category, the most widely used smart speaker is Alexa from Amazon, a small device that you interact with using your voice. Applications for the speakers are called “skills.”

We set out to create a skill that people could access easily to play a four-minute version of Morning Prayer for them. We were limited to four minutes since those are the parameters set by Amazon unless you play a different kind of media. The other kind of media is more expensive to develop, so it’s important to look for the minimum viable prototype to test before investing more.

A few weeks later, our skill was active, and once you enabled the skill for your speaker, you could say, “Alexa, open Episcopal Prayer,” and she would respond with “The Lord be with you,” followed by the prayer session. In just a few weeks we had dozens of people praying regularly with the speaker. We ran ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Welcome to TryTank
• CHAPTER 1. Design Thinking and the Church
• CHAPTER 2. There’s a “T” in “Team”
• CHAPTER 3. Step One: Generating Insights
• CHAPTER 4. Step Two: Developing Ideas
• CHAPTER 5. Step Three: Trying
• CHAPTER 6. Warning: It Will Seem Long, and You Will Fail—and That’s Awesome!
• CHAPTER 7. Using This Book as a Leadership Team
• Final Thoughts: Celebrating Experimentation