Design Thinking and Church Community: Step Two - Define!

This post is the third in a six-part series on building Digital Church Community with Design Thinking, a series responding to the challenges of building Christian community in a pandemic. Click here for the intro post, and here for thoughts on starting design thinking with empathy!

All church leaders want to build "community." If we weren't invested in community-building, we wouldn't have gone into such a difficult line of work! The key challenge in community-building isn't a challenge of motivation or volition. It's a challenge of specificity.

When we set out to build "community," we don't actually know what we're looking to build. So we set out to extract the concrete from an abstract, which is to say, we set out to take specific actions based on a concept that is vague at best.

During my time working at Pine Lake Camp in Waupaca, WI, I recall seeing a poster on the staff office wall promising "1,0001 ways to build an intentional community." While I enjoyed reading through the ideas, the very fact that one could place 1,001 ideas on such a poster attests to the fact that "community" is an important yet highly ambiguous concept for today's Christian public leader.

What exactly is community? What is community within a virtual Christian setting? And why is a particular expression of community meaningful within a given ministry context? These are the questions that the church leader sets out to answer in "Define," the second step of the design thinking process.

According to interaction-design.org, step two of design thinking begins when we realize that:

It’s time to accumulate the information gathered during the Empathize stage. You then analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have identified. These definitions are called problem statements.

So while our intentions to build community, and specifically build virtual community are high-minded and idealistic, we do not begin with the question of "how do I build community?" As designers, such a question wouldn't generate ideas with adequate specificity and feasibility. Instead, we must begin with a problem, the problem that was discovered while Empathizing.

The problem we define in this step is never a lack of "community." The problem we must define is situated in the observations of our context, and framed as a question worthy of further design efforts. To truly design a collaborative solution, we must start with a problem that was collaboratively defined. We, therefore, define this problem by carefully analyzing the data from the "Empathize" phase of design thinking. When we listened to our community, what did they say? What themes emerged multiple times?

Analyzing this data and synthesizing it into design thinking, we will arrive at two outputs from the "Define" phase:

• A problem statement derived from the Empathize process, explaining what a church needs and wants from its "community"

• A research question that will inspire us as a design thinking group to solve the problem.

Let me provide an example of a hypothetical problem statement that may be relevant to some church leaders, circa October 2020:

"Disconnected from in-person worship, our congregation dearly misses the grace-filled experience of a Sunday morning sanctuary, where they could unplug from the problems of their day-to-day."

This problem statement, likely derived from a congregation struggling to navigate the turbulent conditions of a simultaneous pandemic and an election season, is helpful in that it allows us to craft our research question:

How can our church create moments to come together and unplug during this tumultuous season, so that we can collectively experience moments of grace?

Having defined the problem we seek to solve through design thinking, and framed the problem in the form of a question, we can turn our attention to a powerful brainstorm: the Ideation phase of design thinking, the subject of our next post.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of Grace and Gigabytes.

Design Thinking and Church Community: Step One - Empathize!

This post is the second in a six-part series on building Digital Church Community with Design Thinking, a series inspired by the COVID-19 and the challenges of building Christian community in a pandemic. Click here for the intro post!

One does not simply build a church community online. Or at least, a church leader cannot build community online without discerning what a context imagines "community" to be!

The internet is over-saturated with tools that promise to create some semblance of community. From Facebook groups to Slack accounts, Google+ circles (when they actually existed) to Netflix Watch Parties, digital tech companies recognize that we all need community.

In response to this business opportunity, these companies design tools which lure us with the promise of community with just one click. The result is one of the most pervasive myths of digital technology: if we create this page or start this group, if we ask this question or post this poll, surely some semblance of a community will appear!

Indeed, tech companies and the tools they provide implicitly promote the idea that community comes from tactics. They tacitly advertise the idea that the source of all community is the technology itself.

This assumption is part of the reason why it is so challenging to build church community in digital contexts. So many well-intentioned church leaders begin with the Facebook page or the Instagram feed, without completing the necessary groundwork. Too many church leaders click before they connect, and launch before they listen.

To create church community in this time of physical distancing and forced distribution, we ought to use design thinking to craft specific community-building moments that resonate within our context.

And to start that process, we need to empathize.

To quote IDEO’s Human-Centred Design Toolkit, empathizing means developing a “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for."

Before we build any groups, pages, or posts, before we start new accounts or purchase new technologies, we need a clear understanding of the problems and realities within our church context. More specific to community-building, we need a clear understanding of the problems and realities of finding connection during these difficult, distributed times.

"Empathy helps us gain a deeper appreciation and understanding of people's emotional and physical needs, and the way they see, understand, and interact with the world around them."

-Design-Thinking.org, "What is Empathy, Exactly?"

Church leaders have long been adept at empathizing and listening. Of the many organizations I've been part of, churches seem to be the most consistent in offering "listening posts," "sounding boards," and other formal listening structures, particularly during times of leadership transition. With COVID-19 upending all of our routines, we in the church should think of this time as a profound leadership transition, one that requires dedicated investment in listening to our communities.

But we're not listening for the sake of listening, and we're not putting out a proverbial suggestion box for ideas on how to build community. In the context of community building, we're engaging the "empathize" phase of Design Thinking to listen for responses to two questions in particular:

Six months into the pandemic, what are you missing most about your church community?

How can your church community support you as you navigate these uncertain times?

We can design community from the (virtual) ground-up when we listen widely for the answers to these two questions. Whether by survey or by 1:1 on Zoom, whether by socially-distanced conversation or a masked-up meeting, whether by Doodle Poll or Facebook discussion, we ought to be asking these two questions, right here, right now.

Listen to responses to these questions. Empathize with those who provide the responses. Thank them for sharing. Document their thoughts. Then find some more community members to ask, find some more perspectives to engage, find some more voices to include.

After we have intentionally listened and listened some more, we can advance to the next stage of design thinking, the subsequent milestone on our journey to reinvent church community during COVID: that of Defining the Problem. It is to this step that we will turn in the next post within this series.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of Grace and Gigabytes.

What Every Church Leader Should Know about Building Digital Community

This is the first post of a new series on using Design Thinking to build virtual church community. Click here for our second post, which details how to start the Design Thinking process!

“Worship attendance is fine, but it doesn’t feel like a community anymore.”

It’s a quote I continue to hear from church leaders navigating our new normal. Perhaps you’ve said something similar at one time or another. Sure, members are tuning in to watch live-streamed or recorded worship. Maybe your finances are even secure thanks to members stepping up their generosity in recent months.

But still, something’s missing. We miss that sense of community our church enjoyed prior to March 2020. We lament that it’s just not the same, we acknowledge that an entirely virtual church is often a poor substitute for the face to face community that brings so many of us to church in the first place.

It’s hard to build a digital church community in “normal” circumstances, let alone during a pandemic where many of our families are juggling working demanding jobs from home while homeschooling their kids. But as church leaders, we are nevertheless called to build community, even when such a task seems unachievable.

While tactics for building a digital church community will vary from one congregation to another, community building in these uncertain times begins with a clear awareness of the challenges and opportunities involved with building up our now-distributed communities.

With an understanding of why it’s so difficult to build this digital community and why it’s so important to do so, we can begin to find the small acts of community building that will bring us together in profound and powerful ways.

The challenges are often self-evident. Our communities are busier than they’ve ever been. Parents are trying to teach and motivate their students, who are often reluctant to learn virtually (four in ten students didn’t complete any virtual homework last spring).

They’re also burnt-out in digital connection. Zoom fatigue is very real. Google searches for the query “Zoom fatigue” increased 1,000% between April and May 2020. Some have even suggested that online calls lead to unhealthily low levels of respiration - we don’t breathe as we should while online. This observation, described as “Zoom Apnea,” may explain why distributed, virtual work is so exhausting. Those who are working from home have little energy for additional digital engagement after the workday ends, and hardly any appetite for more video calls. And of course, an election is taking place. 55% of Americans are currently “worn out” by political posts on social media, while 70% find online politics discussions “exhausting." So many of our assumptions on digital church community intersect with social media, yet social media has its own set of problems.

But just as there are many challenges, there are even greater opportunities. If we find a way to create a sense of virtual community within our church, we can provide a moment of Sabbath rest, where we can all pause together, breathe together, pray together. If we find a way to connect our flock during this time of social distancing, our church can provide a concrete taste of grace and forgiveness, often lacking in social media environments. Perhaps most importantly, if we find a way to create a digital community in these divided times, we can inspire hope in the promise that God is greater than any pandemic, that Christ is our salvation, and that these challenging times will end.

So how do we realize these opportunities? How do we build a digital community that promotes a sense of rest, connection, and hope? We begin with the acknowledgment that community building is highly contextual. What works for one congregation will not work for the church across the street. We also start with the tacknowledgmenthat not all digital community is synchronous. In an environment of Zoom fatigue, we need not log on together to find meaningful connection.

From this starting line, we must apply the design thinking process to craft meaningful community moments that resonate within our context.

What is design thinking? According to Interaction-Design.org,

"Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods."

Design thinking can build community in these challenging times because it facilitates the identification of alternative strategies and solutions. As a process, it moves us well-beyond the proverbial box, revealing the best ideas for our ministry context.

In upcoming blog posts, we'll explore design thinking and what it means for the church. We'll dive into each specific step in the design thining process (from empathizing to testing and everywhere in between), and offer suggestions for using digital tools to support collaborative brainstorming. Many, if not all church leaders, have lamented the breakdown of community during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's time to start rebuilding. Let the designing begin!

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@ryanpanzer is the author of Grace and Gigabytes.