How Important Is It?

There are two sorts of risk in every opportunity: uncertainty about feasibility and uncertainty about the benefits.
Edward de Bono1

Identifying the nature of the issue involved, whether theological, institutional, interpersonal, or personal, is the essential first step. But once we ask what kind of risk we’re facing, a second major question needs to be asked: How important is it that we make this decision?

Take, for instance, the case of one pastor in the Southeast:

“Our district superintendent put me in charge of a regional camp for six churches. He wanted to start a summer youth conference, and his plan was to have a one-week camp. I checked facilities and talked to the pastors to find out how many of their people would be interested. My research showed two things: the cost was too high and the anticipated participation too small to support a week-long camp. I reported this to the superintendent, and we decided to change to an overnight retreat.

“Then I found out the district had never held an overnight camp before. Further, the district had never been well organized, and there was little sense of community among these churches.

“I told the district superintendent, ‘I don’t think the people are going to accept this idea, at least not this first year.’

“He wasn’t so sure. He asked me to come to the district board meeting and present my information: prices, locations, and my impressions. I did and suggested an alternative for the first year: an all-day picnic. ‘We won’t have to rent a facility, the people won’t have to stay overnight, and it won’t be such a drastic innovation,’ I said. ‘It would be something we can handle financially no matter what happens, and we’ll be building for an overnight camp in years to come.’

“The superintendent said, ‘I’d really like to go with an overnight activity.’ He pushed. ‘You don’t feel good about that, do you?’

“I said, ‘No, I don’t. I don’t want to cop out by having only a picnic, but I think it’s the only thing that will work.’ He persisted, however, and finally I gave in. He gave me $45 to put down on a facility and told me to do the best I could.

“I still didn’t feel good about it, but I didn’t feel the issue was important enough to object more than I did.”

The ambiguity in such decisions rests in the fact that taking a risk in any situation is essentially a two-step process. The “scientific” core of a decision is the determination of how risky the situation is. At this fact-gathering stage, the pastor acts as an objective observer, reading people’s emotional states, factoring in probable consequences, thinking of alternatives.

However, even after the facts are in, the decision still needs to be made — usually on the basis of a value commitment (the second stage). In this pastor’s case, he placed the value of good relationships with his district superintendent above having to prove his analysis correct.

In making these decisions, the pastor is acting like any good administrator. Consider the question of the use of the insecticide DDT. William Lowrance in his book Of Acceptable Risk traces the history of this important insecticide that won chemist Paul Müller the Nobel Prize in 1948.

After World War II a general insecticide was urgently needed. The spread of typhus by body lice, malaria by mosquitoes, and typhoid and dysentery by flies threatened health worldwide.

As early as March, 1945, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior recognized DDT could be harmful to fruits and vegetables (and thus eventually human beings), but initially DDT’s perceived benefits exceeded its dangers. However, continued studies added to the pressure to discontinue its use. In 1972 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned the use of DDT.

The decision was a difficult one. The EPA based its decision on a 577-page report that itself presented mixed views. Its conclusion: “With the evidence now in, DDT can be regarded neither as a proven danger as a carcinogen for man nor as an assuredly safe pesticide; suspicion has been aroused and it should be confirmed or dispelled.”

The statistics did not conclusively decide the issue. The final decision was based not on the numbers but on other values of our society. As in many church decisions, values conflicted. We need effective pesticides to maintain high agricultural productivity. We also need to protect society from the long-term residues of such pesticides. When the EPA discontinued the use of DDT, food prices skyrocketed. Famines worsened; malaria and other diseases controlled by DDT increased dramatically in several parts of the world. The case richly illustrates the difficulties of risk-taking situations.2

Measurement

Step one in measuring a decision’s importance is to develop a measuring tool. Chapter 13 introduces such a tool for church leaders. After surveying one thousand local church leaders about tough decisions they have made, we ranked the relative risk of their most frequent decisions. Using this data, we put together a scale to measure a decision’s relative risk.

Obviously such data does not by itself decide an issue. Before a patient enters surgery, the physician informs him or her of the risk, usually with a hair-raising list of possible negative consequences: brain damage, paralysis, etc. A few patients decide to delay the surgery, or avoid it altogether, if it’s an elective procedure. Most choose to go ahead, however, in spite of the risk. The statistics did not determine their choice, but they informed it.

Similarly, knowing how risky a decision is can prepare a church leader to make that decision.

Values

In some situations, values override risk statistics. Some religious truths, for example, we should be willing to risk everything for — even life itself. There are points of principle (although probably not as many as we think) for which we should be willing to risk our position of leadership. Even in those cases, however, knowing the numbers can help one strategize the approach to the decision. Greater care needs to be taken in high-risk cases.

Other issues are not so obvious in importance. One pastor remembers an incident where conflicting values (in this case efficiency versus institutional harmony) clouded his decision:

“A lady who had served as secretary of the church board for several years was unable to type, gossiped about board discussions in the community, and had a severely negative attitude. I wanted to remove her as secretary, which sounds like an easy decision until you realize she was related to the dominant family in the church, which represented three-fourths of the leadership and about one-third of the membership. What should I do — keep people happy or increase office efficiency?”

Another factor making value judgments difficult is the pastor’s feelings. Church leaders must withstand a certain amount of pressure and attack without letting it affect judgment-making ability. One pastor remembered: “One woman, during a church softball game, lost her temper and treated me in a disrespectful way. The hardest part for me was to finally decide to do what the Scriptures plainly say in Matthew 18:15: confront her. This woman is more outspoken than anyone else in the church; her husband was chairman of the board of trustees. Everyone in the congregation looks to her for leadership. But I felt I had to confront her.”

Deciding the importance of an issue can be a lonely, subjective job. Enlisting the help of others in the church is essential, particularly the assistance of the leaders. They articulate the mission of the church. They hire (or ratify the hiring of) the pastor, and the pastor needs to match his or her ranking of values with theirs.

Group decisions, however, tend to be more risk oriented than individual decisions, particularly when the ruling group is relatively homogeneous. Sociological studies have shown that when birds of a feather flock together, they push one another toward more extreme decisions. It’s as if they give one another the courage to move further than may be wise.

Sociologists call this phenomenon the “risky shift.”3 The more homogeneous the group, the more likely it is to shift toward risky decisions. The church leader needs to consider the board a valuable resource to avoid personal subjectivity, but at some point he or she needs to correct for the danger of “committee only” decisions. The individual does boast some advantages over the group in decision making.

Ernest Beevers, pastor of West Hills Baptist Church in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, developed an analytical tool that has proved helpful (see Chart 5). He uses an X-Y grid on which the X-coordinate represents degree of certainty, answering the question, “How sure am I that I am right?” The Y-coordinate represents the degree of importance, or “How important is this matter to me?” Each coordinate moves from one to five, five representing the issues about which a leader feels most strongly.

Beevers uses the example of handling the toothpaste tube: “I’m absolutely certain the tube should be rolled from the bottom, so on the X-coordinate I give a five. However, I don’t think it is a very important issue, so on the Y-coordinate I give a one. I will not break fellowship with my wife if she persists in squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle. I’ve even decided not to rant and rave about the matter.”

As an opposite example, Beevers cites the matter of whether to prolong life by artificial means. The importance of the issue is a definite five on the Y-scale. However, there is quite a difference of opinion on the question so the degree of certainty is less than five.

Any decision that falls in the shaded portion of the chart is an action issue. We are usually willing to go to the wall for issues in that area. Other quadrants indicate cautious action or none at all.

Another way to determine the relative importance of an issue is to answer a set of questions regarding it. Although pastors will develop their own set, the following list gives a feel for the process:

— Is this risk necessary?

— Can I reach my goal any other way?

— Is the potential loss greater than the potential gain?

— What can I lose by taking this risk?

— How will I know I’m losing?

— What can I do to prevent these losses from occurring?

— What do I need to know before taking this risk?

— Why don’t I know it already?

— Who else can tell me what I need to know?

— Who else should know about the risk? Why?

Once a pastor knows the importance of an issue to himself, the church, and the other people involved, he can begin to determine more specifically whether the risk must be taken.

Edward de Bono, Tactics: The Art and Science of Success (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), 115.

William Lowrance, Of Acceptable Risk (Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1976), 155-173.

Many studies have been done of the so-called risky shift phenomenon. Some representatives: Dean G. Pruitt, “Choice Shifts in Group Discussion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (December 19 71): 339-360; Richard Lilienthal, “Group Polarization (Risk Shift) in Led and Leaderless Group Discussions,” Psychological Reports 45 (1979): 168; James W. Dyson, Paul Godwin, Leo Hazlewood, “Group Composition, Leadership Orientation, and Decisional Outcomes,” Small Group Behavior (February 1976): 114-127; Earl Cecil, Larry Cummings, Jerome Chertkoff, “Group Composition and Choice Shift: Implications for Administration,” Academy of Management Journal (September 1973): 412-422. In this last article, the authors state five reasons why group decisions may shift toward either more risky or more conservative positions: 1) Making a decision in a group allows for diffusion of responsibility in the event of a wrong decision; 2) Risky people are more influential than conservative people in group discussions; 3) Group discussion leads to deeper consideration of the possible pros and cons of a decision, leading to a higher level of risk; 4) Risk taking is socially desirable in our culture and socially desirable qualities are more likely to be expressed in a group than alone; 5) Generally, people will choose a risk level they believe is equal to or slightly greater than the risk the average person will take. Thus, when a group decision is made, members discovering they are more conservative than the average will become riskier.