The Group Mind

How a survival exercise can save today’s church

My friends know I’ve recently been on a training exercise up in Redmond, WA. In Redmond we did several team building exercises. One of which was a survival exercise. Could your team survive a plane crash in the cold terrain of rugged Canada?

You and your teammates survive a plane crash. You salvage 15 items from the plane. You must rate the items in order of importance first individually then as a team. After you complete the exercise, you will compare your ratings against the experts to see if you lived or died.
So we went about quietly rating our items. Then it was time for the team to get together and work out the team ranking.

My team first wanted to try to walk out like many others. But after talking about the risks and challenges involved, we came to a consensus that it was safer to try to make camp and wait it out. In our plane crash scenario it’s important to understand there was no one “in charge” of our band of survivors. Even the captain of the plane was supposedly dead. So the only power that could be exerted initially in the exercise was that of leadership and charisma. So we as a group came to a decision. And no one was around to tell us how to make that decision.

How we came to the decision to stay was interesting in itself. During the initial chaos someone came up with the idea that we should find out if anyone had any survival training. Two people spoke up but only one was heard. The one that wasn’t heard interestingly had the best training and ultimately the best individual score. This is important.

In a fair system you might simply average the scores each item received and go with that. That would give each person equal input into the decision process. Or we could vote on it. And choose as a group to go with the vote. We might find out who the most likely expert is and just agree to go with the experts choices.

So we each argued some more passionately then the others about why our choices were in essences better then everyone else’s choices. In the end we came up with a list that no one was happy with but everyone agreed to follow.

You might find the results interesting. One might have thought the team expert who ended up having the best individual score would have beaten the team score. But he did not. It wasn’t even close. Our unhappy team did survive because we choose to stay verses attempting a walk out. And we did good enough on our ranking.

Lessons learned out of this exercise were in our face. Had we all took the time to really understand who in our group had the expertise we would have fared much better. That is not to say we should have abdicated our decision making to him. Because clearly as a group we were better than he was alone. In addition he should have made himself heard. Only half the blame goes to the group for not listening to him. The other half is his for not stepping up.

The other big lesson was that the group mind is smarter than the average of the component minds. Had we just taken an average, we would have died. And the two people with the previous training, (a previous boy scout and a Norwegian trained soldier) would have been the only two to survive.

So how does this apply to the church? The church in the U.S. is primarily run in an authoritarian style. There is usually someone at the top that is paid to be the expert. And that expert makes the decisions the others generally agree to follow mostly without question. Because if you question you can be thrown out of the church (or otherwise ostracized.)

But in our exercise two points contrast with the U.S. church of today. For one the real expert wasn’t the most charismatic on my team. In today’s churches the “successful” ones are often headed by the charismatic types. There is no way that one man can be the expert in all aspects of church. And secondly even if he is an expert in one thing or another, does that mean that he is more expert then his entire congregation? Probably not.

In fact as the group gets bigger and more minds are available the level of expertise of the group can grow dramatically if it is molded to do so.

The pastor is most often like the most persuasive in our team exercise. People listen to him. For whatever reason, he has the skill of working with people. His job is not to make all the decisions. But to make certain the group mind can work effectively. To make sure the real experts are heard. And to work on connecting people in such a way that the best results and outcomes are achieved as often as possible.

There is an exception to the group mind theory. And that’s when the group is just plain wrong. It’s rare but it does happen. See the Israelites leaving Egypt for several examples. But that’s another blog.

Peace