When you and your team think about who they are attempting to become like who are they measuring themselves against?

Which organizations is your team learning from?  Who are they attempting to emulate?

If you are in leadership in a local church you have a benchmarking issue.  We have chosen an area of leadership where the vast majority of our communities opt of participating in.  In the communities I’ve lead in somewhere north of 90% of our neighbours decide every week to not be a part of church.  This causes a benchmarking issue because we end comparing ourselves against organizations that our community is also choosing against.

By comparing ourselves to other churches are we just pooling practices and approaches that are proven to not make an impact in our communities?  Even by learning from the latest mega-church (or giga-church) we are still choosing to learn from organizations impacting a small percentage of their communities.

Cirque du Soliel didn’t become the phenom it is by comparing itself to other (dying) circues. They became who they are by learning more from Broadway than Barnum.

Google didn’t make huge waves online by attempting to be just a little bit better than Webcrawler.  By learning from human behaviour specialists they built a system that gives us what we are asking for more accurately than any other search engine.

The customer service giant Disney World regularly sends it’s managers to learn from world class organizations in other fields to see what they can apply to their own operation.

For the next few days we’re going to look at three different areas of church life and I’m going to suggest some alternative “benchmarks”.  I’m hopeing to stir some conversation about some different organizations that we can be learning from.

Organizations tend to become what they focus on. Let’s spend some time considering something different than being just “3% better” than the church down the street.

What about you?  Who are the churches or organizations that you have been learning from? Let us know by commenting right now!