Managing Projects for Ministry

180 Manag i ng Pro j ec t s for Mi n i s t r y

The Continuing Reign of Adhocracy: TUMI’s Prototype Shop, continued

What Are the Goals of the TUMI Prototype Shop ? The goals of the Prototype Shop are feasible and measurable. I intend to provide TUMI staff with the creative license to experiment on important projects for urban church edification. A Shop allows us to experiment with maximum creativity while doing minimal damage to the TUMI debt and budget situation. Further, a Shop will permit our TUMI staff maximum freedom to explore new ideas outside-of-the-box, to do off-the-wall tinkering and fiddling around for the sake of new idea creation. One of the major goals is to create an environment that allows for collaboration in creative production so that we may attain new levels of personal innovation among TUMI staff. In doing this, I believe that we will be able to “fail upward,” that is, to work with ideas, create prototypes, and, depending on their success, embrace or reject them. This kind of approach may allow us to do feasibility studies, pilot programs, and trial-and-revise sessions with an intent to find out what might really be useful to our partner churches and leaders. In the case that an experiment does not fulfill our expectations, we will also create a Prototype Graveyard of sorts, shelves of items which we will archive for later reference and stimulation or modi- fication. I am convinced that most of our Prototype items will be worthy of duplication; we ought not be surprised, however, if some of them will be weighed and found wanting. Not every effort or product will be or prove successful. The idea of a Shop affords us the opportunity to inexpensively learn and discover ways not to do things, allowing us to experiment without having to “succeed” in every endeavor, or worry about dramatic financial shortfall. How Will the Items Once Assigned to and Completed within the Prototype Shop Be Published and Produced? We will need a criteria to determine which ideas are worth a trial run in the Shop , and which of those that are completed should go on for production. Perhaps the best way to do this will be to develop a working criteria that we use as a kind of measuring rod regarding the viability and attractiveness of our Prototype Shop projects. Below are some of the kinds of questions I expect to be considered as we propose and follow up on ideas to be explored in our Prototype Shop .