Small Groups

I love it when the world presents examples (to me) of the tools I teach and coach. When I see a concept alive in a non 9-5 environment, it confirms to me why I do what I do.

For example:

The tool: Variation exists everywhere. If you want your business to improve and your customers increasingly satisfied, at some point, you will need to implement a variation reduction process. There are many in the world today including Kaizen and Six Sigma.

The non 9-5 environment: In joining a church, it is probably safe to assume that each member has the same "target". The top graph above depicts the whole congregation as sharing the same target (red line) but differing in commitment to the target.(variation)

If the church wants to improve, it must reduce this variation around the "target". In that spirit, many churches (including mine of 3000 members) are implementing small groups. The concept is that the whole is only as good as the sum of the parts. The groups are natural divisions of the congregation: men, women, teens, senior citizens, etc. The second graph depicts breaking the entire variation down by the groups. Some groups are more homogeneous than others or some groups have less variation than others.

By meeting regularly, the hope is that, over time, the groups become similarly homogeneous (depicted in the third graph) with approximately the same variation in commitment to the "target". When this occurs, the church as a whole improves.