by Eddie Pipkin
Last week’s blog episode referenced a podcast from Hidden Brain. This week you get a referral to the Freakonomics universe. An April podcast from the minds that explore weird connections in the world of economics focused on the impacts of unintended consequences. In the ministry world, we have stories to tell. We mean well, and we think we know how changes will empower an exciting vision, but things commonly veer in unexpected directions. Maybe it’s possible to learn some strategies to mitigate unplanned detours, or maybe we just have to prepare for the reality that no matter how pure our motives, things will head down pathways we never imagined.
The Freakonomics Radio podcast I am referencing is titled, “How to Pave the Road to Hell,” because . . . well, we all know the old saying about the material which is inadvertently employed in the production of the road to the bad place: good intentions! The Wikipedia entry on the time-honored aphorism notes its uncertain, ancient origin, but there is an applicable verse from Ecclesiasticus 21:10 for you scripture nerds:
“The way of sinners is made plain with stones,
but at the end thereof is the pit of hell.”
There are some great interviews with corporate leaders and academics in the podcast, and they provide potent examples in the ways that best intentions can deliver results that are sometimes the exact opposite of what we were hoping for, the most fascinating for me being their assessment that the American with Disabilities Act has actually resulted in less participation in the labor force by Americans who have disabilities – the explanation being that employers find lots of other reasons not to hire job candidates that they perceive are going to require them to make expensive ADA accommodations. (There are plenty of reasons that these perceptions are incorrect and morally suspect, but the fact is that the ADA rules only apply to existing employees, not to perspective hires, so not hiring someone in the first place is a practical strategy that has been regularly used by squeamish hiring managers.)
The Wikipedia entry on “unintended consequences” is actually a fun and eye-opening read. Among my favorite examples listed there are these:
- Mandatory bike helmet laws making riders’ heads safer but leading to a higher overall injury incidence rate (which has a complex explanation) and a reduction in overall health outcomes (which has a simple explanation, because people ride less since they did not want to deal with the hassle of wearing a helmet).
- Prohibition leading to the rise of organized crime.
- Fire suppression beginning in the early Twentieth Century leading eventually to bigger, more catastrophic fires.
- The killing of dogs and cats during the Great Plague in London which led to an increase in the rat population that was the true carrier of the pests causing the plague.
- A bounty on cobras offered in India that led to people secretly breeding more cobras to collect the bounty, then releasing all the newly bred cobras when the bounty became worthless.
- Any number of examples of animals or plants being introduced to non-native environments for supposedly beneficial purposes, only to run amok and become invasive nightmares. Hello, Australian rabbits! Greetings, kudzu (of which I have many fond memories as a Central Georgia boy).
Examples are seemingly endless. The Wikipedia article has many delightful, related sidebars from “The Streisand Effect” (when an effort to suppress information unintentionally leads to its wider distribution) to discussions of “groupthink” and “virtuous circles versus vicious circles.”
Our assumption and intentions as ministry leaders can lead us astray in all these ways and more.
I worked years ago with a Children’s Ministry leader who provided a couple of my favorite examples of how our attempts to appease people (or at least not antagonize them) can backfire:
- This Children’s Ministry leader never thanked people publicly by name, only in generic terms. Her reasoning was that she would leave someone out, so rather than giving specific credit to specific hardworking people, she kept the platitudes and gratitude generalized to avoid the potential hurt feelings from forgetting to name an individual. Unfortunately, this created the effect of people not feeling appreciated as individuals.
- This Children’s Ministry leader did not believe in communicating high expectations to volunteers. She maintained that keeping responsibilities and expectations low meant that people were more likely to say ‘yes’ and get involved, because high expectations and too many responsibilities would just scare people away. However, there is plentiful evidence that high expectations and serious responsibilities are reliable motivators for people who want to feel like their talents are being recognized and rewarded and the investment of their hard work is making a difference. In fact, it is the most talented A-listers who seek out the most demanding jobs, the assignments worthy of their efforts. The reality is that they are turned off by ‘meh,’ unchallenging assignments.
We serve in complex environments, so every decision we make has consequences. We’re trying to solve for good outcomes, but there are “knock-off effects” and “why didn’t we think of that?” moments. The economists in the Freakonomics podcast frequently mentioned the concept of tradeoffs. Every decision is a tradeoff, one potential outcome exchanged for another:
- Worship Design: Too many options for different styles of worship may bring in more people or they may dilute our resources. We may offer different flavors at the cost of a unified sense of community.
- Discipleship: Too restricted a path for discipleship may box out people who don’t fit the standard educational model, but too many individualized options may leave people confused about how to make progress or intimidated about navigating the menu of possibilities.
Some prominent causes of accidental or unintended consequences were analyzed by American sociologist Robert K. Merton in an analysis he developed way back in the 1930s (as summarized from the delightful Wikipedia entry I linked earlier);
- Ignorance.
- Errors in analysis.
- Immediate interests overriding long-term interests.
- Basic values which may require or prohibit certain actions even if the long-term result might be unfavorable.
- Self-defeating prophecies. This is the opposite of the more popularly known self-fulfilling prophecy. In a self-defeating prophecy, an organization solves a problem that doesn’t yet exist – it’s only anticipated. This means that sometimes we solve problems that weren’t really even problems, sometimes with detrimental effects on other areas of our work.
The first three of those causes of unintended consequences are standard failures of planning and execution that we could ameliorate with better systemic approaches. We can educate ourselves more thoroughly, analyze all options in more detail, and remind ourselves that long-term outcomes are our true focus.
The last two points are more subtle, insidious, and harder to guard against. The “basic values” argument is, in fact, not even necessarily a negative, since adhering to our basic values is one of our organizational imperatives. It is the question of how those values continue to be interpreted and re-interpreted in a rapidly changing world that poses the challenge to avoid unintended outcomes – by remaining true to core values in specific ways, for example, do we alienate people we might have otherwise partnered with?
The self-defeating prophecies problem is endemic to church leadership. We are constantly trying to nip potential problems in the bud and thus complicating our ministry lives unnecessarily. I think of examples of aggressive “no trespassing” signage on our property or overly complex coffee hospitality instructions.
Of course, sometimes the unintended consequences can be beneficial!
These are happy accidents, and they happen all the time. We put someone in charge of something on an emergency basis because we have no choice, and they turn out to be the best person who ever served in that position. A hurricane blows the roof off the building, and the common cause of rebuilding sparks a new energy in the congregation.
What have your experiences been with unintended consequences, bad or favorable? How do you build systems with your teams to produce results based on your decisions that hew as close to your intentions as possible? Share your stories in the comments sections below. Hope you are having a great summer so far!
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