Category Archives: Organisations

A consultant’s perspective

Church: organisation or Body of Christ

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In the Church Times last week Martyn Percy criticised the Church’s use of ‘secular models of organisation” under the headline ‘It’s not an organisation, it’s the Body of Christ’. (See: http://goo.gl/EznDGa for the original article – you may need to be a subscriber to read it in full)  Here is my response, which may or may not also appear in the letters column of the Church Times!

The first thing is to say that if the use of organisational thinking indeed results in the intrusion of a rootless commercialism, over-simplification of complex ideas, an instrumental culture of objectives and results or a tendency to bureaucracy then I don’t want it either. I share the concern that there is already too much bureaucracy: this, to me, is an example of how the Church is adept at borrowing the less appropriate and attractive features of the secular world! The Church can feel over-administered and under-powered as a result. This can be remedied partly by a renewal in spiritual practice and in theology – but also by a richer understanding of the learning that is around about organisations. Continue reading →

Clergy pay the price for Church uncertainty

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“The difficulties facing the Church create heavy daily burdens and dilemmas for those whose task it is to lead the Church.  There is a cost associated with the confusion and uncertainty that exists.  Continue reading →

Management speak or theology speak

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I don’t know which is worse –

In my experience Church people are suspicious of the language of management and business – and I can see why, even if I think the antipathy is sometimes misplaced.  In recommending ideas and practices that hail, in part, from that quarter, I am far from doing so uncritically.  What worries me more is the extent to which 1. the Church adopts the most bureaucratic practices from the Civil Service and others and 2. uses theological language as a way of avoiding reality…What follows is the first of a series of extracts from my new book, “Creating the Future of the Church”.

“‘Management speak’ is not attractive and it is an easy target for the media and clergy alike.  Continue reading →

The Church and (its) wonga

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How refreshing it was to see the Church hit the headlines for positive reasons! The Archbishop of Canterbury’s initiative to challenge Wonga and other payday loan companies by using the resources of the Church to support local credit unions and compete them out of existence is bold, imaginative and appealing. It was a shame then when it was revealed the next day that the Church is, if only indirectly, invested in Wonga.

To be fair to Justin Welby he handled the embarrassment this caused very well. And I don’t think the news undermined the power of the original idea. But it does illustrate a couple of significant ways in which the Church neither helps itself nor makes the most of its still considerable resources. Continue reading →

St Paul’s, Bad Capitalism and the Principles of Sustainable Success

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The story of the protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral has been dominated by the coverage of the Chapter’s management of the situation.  There are some signs now that attention is turning to the larger problem of what the protest means and of what should be done to rein in the excesses of what Ed Miliband has called ‘bad capitalism’.  Voices from both right and left are suggesting that not all is well with the way ‘the City’ operates. I want to suggest that both the Cathedral and the ‘bad capitalists’ might benefit from giving some consideration to the question of what makes organisations sustainably successful, viable, that is, over the long-term. Continue reading →

What the NHS really needs

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A report in today’s FT suggests that the savings from the government’s latest NHS reorganisation will be quite a lot lower than promised.  That does not come as a great surprise.  Every NHS restructure is costly and time-consuming.  As they happen every few years it means, as one senior manager told me, that as soon as the new organisations it creates are mature and actually achieving something they are abolished in favour of a different configuration.  And back to square one we go.

It is not that the current changes and the many previous ones do not make some sense or have not contributed to some improvements.  My experience is that NHS Trusts are far more focused on efficiency, for example, than they once were and the separation of commissioning (Primary Care Trusts at the moment) and provider functions (hospitals, community health staff and so forth) may have helped to achieve that.

But restructuring never delivers what is promised because it cannot.  Continue reading →