Fix the problem

My engineer son has a mantra: “Fix the problem.” As mantras go, it’s a pretty good one. Simple, memorable, intuitive, and to the point. The mantra refers to our tendency to go about addressing issues, problems, or stuck situations by doing a lot of things none of which will actually “fix the problem.” It’s an amazing phenomenon, all the more so for how common it is. Since my son’s brain is wired in the logical-pragmatic mode of the engineer he often is amused at the non-logical way people try to solve problems.

Recently, in the faculty and staff lounge of a school someone had the ability to “solve the problem.” The problem was with the coffee pot. Despite years of memos, signs, and complaints, inevitably the “last person” to use the coffee pot or leave the lounge would neglect to turn off the coffee maker (one of those “Mr. Coffee” things). (First logical problem: how do you know you’re the “last person” to leave a faculty and staff lounge?). This resulted in the roasting of the dregs in the glass coffee pot with its attending burnt-coffee smell and potential fire hazard. One clever staff member finally fixed the problem. Rather than try to change people’s behavior, trying to make them more responsible, sending out another memo, sending another e-mail reminder to the entire distribution, or putting up another sign, he got a wall outlet timer, set it to shut off automatically at the end of the day, and plugged in the coffee pot. Problem solved.

Another example is the company that needed to print new business cards for their new executive. In the midst of a budget crunch someone decided to save money by printing the business cards in-house. If you’ve ever tried to print out your own business cards using a desktop computer and printer you’ve learned that no program or printer can produce genuinelly professional looking business cards. At least three people from two different departments worked between three to four hours to produce an acceptable business card—and none of those people’s job had anything to do with producing business cards. When you add up the man-hours in salaries (3 employees x 3+ hours), lost time from other projects and the jobs those employees need to do, and wasted cardstock and printer ink, this small group managed to crank out the most expensive business cards ever—only to yield a product that communicated, “amateurs.” How to fix the problem: don’t be penny wise and pound foolish; send out an order for a professional printing job—it’s not that expensive, and a business card needs to communicate quality and professionalism. Fix the problem.

It’s an old situation

I recently came across this way of making the point for the need to “fix the problem.” You may have seen it:

The Tribal wisdom of the North American Indian, passed on from generation to generation, says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”

However, in the world of church and denominational life more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other churches to see how other congregations and denominations ride horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Outsourcing the issue to dead horses overseas.
8. Hiring outside denominational consultants to ride the dead horse.
9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance.
11. Conducting a survey to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
12. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the mission and budget than do some other horses.
13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Broken Sunday School?

If your Sunday School is broken, fix the problem. When it comes to Sunday School there are four aspects on which we typically overfocus:

• The problem isn’t with the hour. 9:45 a.m. is a perfectly fine timeslot that’s been around for ages. But the problem may be that the typical Sunday School “hour” only allows for 40 minutes of actual formal Christian education. Perhaps the problem is the length of the learning experience. The ideal length of time for a process-oriented learning experience is 90 minutes. And if 9:45 is the only time you offer formal Christian education, then that’s a real problem.
• The problem isn’t that you have non-professional “lay” teachers. The problem is probably that your church provides little to no regularly scheduled, on-going, formal training to help them be effective, knowledgeable skilled teachers.
• The problem isn’t with the curricular resource material you use (they’re all basically the same). The problem is probably that an instructional approach is just not effective when it comes to helping people grow in faith. When it comes to educating people in faith, they need a different way than what the limitations of instruction can provide.
• The problem isn’t that “only” one-fourth of your active church membership shows up for Sunday School. The problem is probably that you’re focusing on the wrong issue. First, adding more people to attend a broken program doesn’t fix the problem. Second, numbers are not an indicator of educational effectiveness (meaning, you’re assessing the wrong variable and attributing to attendance a meaning it does not warrent). Third, focusing on getting more people to come to Sunday School tends to make us miss the needs of those persons and groups for whom Sunday School, as a program and way of learning, cannot satisfy. The fact is that if Sunday School is the only, or primary, educational enterprise your church offers, then you’re not meeting the needs of some of the members of your church who need different ways and emphases to help them grow in faith.