The Cluetrain Manifesto - Innovative Business Ideas for Churches

Welcome Doc Searls' blog readers. This is one posting in a series that I am writing called Innovative Business Ideas for Churches.  My purpose is to foster greater conversation (such a Cluetrain thing) within traditional mainline churches about how to adapt to the new world of business. Your comments and questions are welcome and appreciated.  The series home page is here.

In this series on innovative business ideas for churches, I want to not only present helpful ideas, but also introduce readers to influential books. One of those books came out in 1999 with the odd title of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual.

Cluetrain, written by four guys from the world of technology, signaled a new way of looking at organizations. They saw themselves as revolutionaries in the mold of Martin Luther. They even had their own 95 theses. Their point? That business should be conducted with a human voice between people in conversation with one another. Here’s how they began their book.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Cluetrain’s brash tossing down the gauntlet to challenge the way business had been done for generations was refreshing to many people and confusing to others.

Cluetrain’s challenge to the status quo mirrors the numerous challenges to traditional churches from the likes of contemporary worship advocates, Emergent Village, Generous Orthodoxy, Radical Orthodoxy and Evangelical Mega-Churches. Cluetrain mirrors these innovations upon the theme of church as a way new ideas for being the church are reflecting a drive to make businesses more centered around human interaction.

Cluetrain was not really a philosophical argument for change or a new management system, but simply a manifesto to take action to make business more human.

For example, here are the first six of The Cluetrain Manifesto’s 95 Theses.

1. Markets are conversations.

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

You can read the whole list and entire book online. 

Replace markets with church and you begin to see what I see. 

1.The importance of conversation as the center-piece of what it means to be the church.  If you have read my posting on Conversational Planning for Churches, you understand that Cluetrain and I are in agreement about the importance of human interaction.  Chit-chat at fellowship dinners is not the full range of conversation that is needed.  Conversation that lets the congregation and the officers speak their minds and listen to others in a respectful manner is the point.I don't find most churches too engaged in the kind of conversation that Cluetrain advocates.  What is lost is the voice of the Holy Spirit that comes through the interaction of people. At the heart of the Trinitarian relationship is communication between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the same should be true for the church. This communication needs to be more than newsletters delivered to member addresses.  It needs to be conversational.

2. The place of technology in advancing human communication. I know many people who hate the Internet, hate email, detest the thought of Instant Messaging, FaceBooks and Weblogs.  And some of their reasons are very valid. It is true that relationships born of Internet interaction are not whole relationships, but rather narrowly defined encounters of people that lack commitment.  While this may be true, it is also the case that the deep, significant human interaction takes places every day between people across the globe whose only connection is through a modem on their computer. 

I could tell you stories of two people with whom I have never heard their voice or been physically present with them because one lives in Toronto and another Singapore, yet who have touched my life in ways that people in my church have not. What is the difference?  Intentionality.  In order to interact with a person in Singapore, an effort has to be made that is quite different than the typical pleasantries that take place in the hall of the church on Sunday morning.  Cluetrain's point that I endorse is that the future belongs to the connected, and that connection is facilitated by technology. We are not talking about fancy websites. We are talking about using technology to facilitate a deeper level of human sharing. Let me give you an example that was both a success and a failure.

In the spring of 2005, I was asked to make a presentation on servant leadership to a student group at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. When I found out that only 6-8 people would attend, I challenged the group's leaders to see if we could "fill the seats of the room."  A week before the event they invited me to meet with the council of student organization leaders to pitch my presentation. Instead of pitching the topic of servant leadership, I ask them questions about the challenges facing their organizations.  For most of them, they were alone in their leadership role. Participation rates were way down, and they were tired and disheartened.  I really felt for them. Having spent five years as a chaplain and adjunct professor at the school, I understood what they were going through. So, I challenged them to "fill the seats."  They gave me their email addresses, and I set up a weblog to provide a tool for communicating with them.  You can go to my University of Word-of-Mouth weblog and see what I did with them over the course of six days.  Many lessons came from this experience.  I gave my presentation the next week, with a 20 minute additional talk about how to increase participation in their groups. Instead of 6-8 people, there were 14 that came. The seats were not filled, but I was assured that the message got through. When I asked why all those people didn't come (I encouraged them to bring their best friend and the freshman most likely to one day be the president.), they said because the host group didn't invite them.  We learned that even great ideas face social barriers.

So how should churches approach the use of technology for the purpose of enhancing communication?  First, start small. Pick the one group other than the youth - the youth are already using the technology - that seems mostly likely to be willing to try a technological experiment. Set up a weblog. Use it for communicating information and for interaction. Give each member of the team or committee author rights, and forbid email. 

Project blogs provide a wide range of benefits for groups.  Not only do they enhance interaction, they also archive the interaction.  No more keeping emails for the past six years.  It is all store online available 24/7.

3. Our relationships within the church become more honest, trusting, caring, open and supportive of new ideas and ways of being the church. There is a simple, yet very difficult choice before the church in our time.  We can act like the church is a museum that celebrates the past, whether than past is biblical or recent, or we can honor the past by living as the early Christians did, dependent upon God to meet their needs through their fellow believers.  When we elevate conversation, we each begin to find our voice for testifying to the goodness of God experienced.  Churches aren't just rituals and activities. They are conversations where we learn to see God in the midst of the relationships of the church. When we begin to see the church as less an institution and more a gathering place for conversation and shared life, then we will find that many of the old gripes and conflicts that pit family against family, theology against theology, seminary against seminary, generation against generation, new member against old and church against church will find a way to be resolved.

If you read The Cluetrain Manifesto, and I hope you will, you will not agree or understand everything in it, I didn't. But you will be challenged to make our life in the church more human, and less organizationally artificial.  If you do read Cluetrain, I'd like to know what you think. Let's talk about it in the comments section of this posting.  I look forward to hearing from you. After all the church is conversation.

Comments

[Jerry]

powerful book