Does Anyone Have a Reliable Crystal Ball?

Photo by Arthur Ogleznev on Unsplash

Since November 2021 I have had the privilege and responsibility of serving on the Meadville Lombard Theological School (MLTS) board of trustees.  MLTS, located in Chicago, is an institution founded in 1844 and is one of only two theological schools in the U.S. affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist tradition. 

I understand my role as a board member to be one that is concerned with the institution’s ability to live into its mission and to thrive over the long-term.  I am learning that it is a challenging time to be a theological school, sitting at the intersection of two highly disruptive influences - dramatic shifts in traditional church participation coupled with substantial pressure on higher education’s cost and credential models.

Yet, it is also an exciting time to be a theological school.  The external forces in play provide opportunity and motivation to consider new ideas, new models, and new ways of thinking about how to ride the wave of change.  At MLTS, we are working to understand the possibilities of change and shaping the institution’s future through strategic visioning and planning work.

In the current fiscal year Meadville Lombard is participating in the Wise Stewards program offered by In Trust Center for Theological Schools, an organization dedicated to supporting theological schools in North America.  The Wise Stewards initiative brings together a cohort of theological institutions from a wide array of religious traditions for a year to receive coaching, assessments, resources, presentations, and peer learning.  Participants include board members and presidents of the cohort schools.

The Wise Stewards program, in combination with the MLTS conversations associated with strategic visioning, (not to mention a recent accreditation visit to MLTS), has me thinking a lot about trusteeship, and how best to steward Meadville Lombard’s long-term health and well-being.  My current thoughts are centering on the following components of change:

·      Business model – The business model of the past is not adequate for the present and will be un-workable in the future.  The future business model will need to embrace a broader definition of students to be served and to effectively meet the needs of those students in whatever contexts they will be practicing.

·      Transformative strategies – The strategies we must embrace to meet the future with confidence are necessarily transformative, not incremental.  Too much change is happening too quickly, accelerated by the pandemic, and staying ahead of opportunities means thinking and acting outside of the box.

·      Value proposition and hedgehog concept – Effective positioning in the market requires us to (re)define our value proposition, or as Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, suggests, our “hedgehog concept” – what we can be best in the world at while driving our economic engine and tapping into our passion. 

·      Agility – Because our environment is so dynamic and change is happening on many dimensions, we cannot effectively know the future, so we must operate with an agile mindset – advancing strategically but being prepared to adjust course as new developments unfold. 

·      Strategic Experimentation - We do not have the luxury of time to thoroughly vet possibilities, so instead of long research and development cycles we need to experiment strategically at small scales and fail quickly so we can move onto more promising possibilities.