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.

Book Review - Microlearning Short And Sweet

In today's talent development circles, everyone wants "microlearning," but it seems that so few actually know what "microlearning" means!

As companies cut training hours and professional development budgets amidst a lengthening economic recession, more cash-strapped people leaders will demand more microlearning to meet employee skill development needs.

But these people leaders won't really know what they are asking for.

What is microlearning? Is it merely shorter learning? Is it the same learning in less time? Or is it the same amount of learning that's stretched out into smaller increments across a long period of time? Why has it become so popular? Does microlearning even work?

These are among the many microlearning demystification questions that Karl M. Kapp and Robyn A. Defelice set out to answer in their 2019 book, "Micorlearning Short And Sweet." Succinct and approachable, Kapp and Defelice's work is a useful survey of the microlearning landscape, one that connects this trendy buzzword to theory and research.

While their recommendations and prescriptions are ocasionally vague ("it depends" appears to be a favorite response of theirs), their work lifts microlearning from a platitude to practice, from jargon to meaningful job support.

"Microlearning Short And Sweet" rescues this rising instructional design practice from the gutter of ambiguous corporate-speak, making the book an important read for instructional designers, talent developers, and HR leaders of any organization.

Kapp and Defelice begin by tracing the origins of microlearning. While educational researchers have explored the principles of microlearning under various names for decades, the concept has only recently gained popularity within talent development circles.

Google Trends: Microlearning's 4x search volume growth since 2013

Accordingly, the book is a high-level survey of the microlearning landscape: when it's best used, how it's best designed, and even where it's least effective. The book is strongest in its warnings against microlearning mismanagement: using it as a "panacea" to the learning needs of a resource-constrained organization, or using it as a shortcut to skills development. Microlearning might be small, but it's no silver bullet. Throughout the text, Kapp and Defelice remind the reader that the time to master a skill remains constant, whether you teach that content in an eight-hour workshop (meso-learning) or 48 ten-minute simulations (micro-learning).

As an instructional designer, I was most intrigued by the book's suggestions on using microlearning to "augment" educational experiences. By strategically spacing interactive content, the instructional designer can eliminate forgetting, increase buy-in, and facilitate practice. While I took much away from this short book, my most immediate insight is to build post-workshop microlearning campaigns that combine quizzes, videos, and other pieces of digital content to reengage the learner's attention and memory after the learning event concludes. I look forward to soon deploying microlearning as a means of mitigating the "forgetting curve."

Other instructional designers may find intriguing the ideas of using microlearning to enhance buy-in around a change. In effect, microlearning can be used as a tool for change management, provided the content is high-quality, persuasive, and collaboratively produced. As we continue to navigate the pandemic with all its disruption and volatility, organizations will be forced to make major changes to their operations, mission, and vision. Microlearning can motivate learners to rally behind such changes, by communicating the need for change and by enabling team members to develop new competencies.

At times, "Microlearning Short and Sweet" wanders through unnecessary contextual detail, for example, expositions into theories of Cognitivism and Behaviorism. This tends to be the case with many well-intentioned business books. It's simply more ironic and noticeable when such contextualizing ladens a book on truncated learning techniques! And at times, the reader is left to wonder when the authors will move from the theoretical to the practical. If the book suffers from any deficiencies, it is a lack of concrete recommendations on how to immediately put microlearning to use in one's organizations. Still, the authors provide valuable tools and templates that any instructional designers and educators of any skill-level can use. The templates keep the book at a sufficient level of applicability, providing just enough urgency and transferability to retain the reader's attention.

"Microlearning Short and Sweet" is an important contribution to the field of talent development, one that invites further study, conversation, and debate as more business leaders are drawn to this increasingly popular concept.