Beware of Noise
3 kinds of noise disrupting your church’s decision making
Sam Hamstra, Jr.
Executive Search Consultant
From time to time in the life of every church, a team or task force gathers to consider a new strategic initiative like calling a new pastor or adding a new staff member. In nearly every case, this group of dedicated church members and, hopefully, Christ-followers, comes together with a sincere desire to seek the good and perfect will of God for their church. The result of this process, in many instances, is a great decision that advances the mission of the church. But there are occasions when, in retrospect, the group can only conclude that it made a bad decision, one that harmed and hindered the ministry of the church.
Looking back over forty years of ministry, I have witnessed many bad decisions and have played a role in several of them. Now, I look back and ask, “Why is it that some groups of God-fearing people make bad decisions?”
One simple answer to that question is that the group consists of human beings with all their shortcomings. One would like to think that group dynamics would compensate for the limitations of each individual in the group but, unfortunately, that supposition has not been verified by reality.
Another answer to that question is that groups come to their tasks with biases which cause the members of the group to err in the same direction. I identified some of the more prevalent biases in a previous blog, Beware of Bias.
Still another reason is that each member of the group brings his or her noise to the conversation. What is noise? Noise is random scatter, the unwanted, irrelevant and unpredictable variables that impact a decision-making process.
Noise differs from bias. Two scenarios about one pastor-search team will help distinguish between bias and noise.
A pastor search team has been formed to discern who the Lord has been preparing to be the next pastor of their church. They receive many applications but decide that they will only consider candidates from their denominational seminary, ethnicity, race…or fill in the blank. The group is wearing blinders. Blinders that prevent them from seeing candidates the Lord may have placed right in front of them. The very candidate the Lord may have been preparing for them. That is bias.
In between meetings, members of this same pastor search team listen to sermons by three candidates. Then, they came together to discuss. During their meeting, they go around the room and grade the candidates as preachers, using a scale of one to five with five being the best. Delores, who has never heard a bad sermon in her life, begins and offers a grade of five to each one. Jeff grades two with a three and one with a five; interestingly, the one receiving the grade of five looks a lot like him. George, whose plate at home is full, doesn’t like any of the candidates as preachers; he tells the team that he stopped listening to each sermon after about five minutes. Susan grades two candidates five but offers a dramatically lower grade to the third because the candidate reminds her of someone with whom she has had a bad experience.
Four individuals offer four different grades for four different reasons, each of which had little to do with the sermons. That is noise.
Behavioral scientists have identified three sources of noise:
1. LEVEL NOISE
The first is “Level Noise” which is the reality that some raters on your team are, on average, more generous than others. Like Delores, they have never heard a bad sermon.
2. PATTERN NOISE
The second is “Pattern Noise” which is one person’s somewhat predictable reaction to a specific candidate being considered. The most prevalent pattern is that decision-makers tend to favor candidates who look like themselves or who come from the same people group.
3. OCCASIONAL NOISE
The third is “Occasion Noise” which is the “stuff” a team member brings to the meeting and then projects on to the decision-making process. In my experience, the more prevalent forms of this form of noise are fatigue, past experiences, and personal struggles.
The big question remains: How do we minimize the noise in our decision-making processes? Here are some practical tips.
First, acknowledge that when people participate in a decision-making process, noise is in the room. Random scatter, unwanted, irrelevant and unpredictable variables impact a decision-making process which means that reasonable and competent people might disagree.
Second, continuously reaffirm that the purpose of the group is to discern the good and perfect will of the Lord for your congregation. Towards that end, team members will be helped by constantly reciting the prayer of Jesus, “Not my will but yours be done.”
Third, pray before each team meeting that the Lord will still the noise in the room so that the team can hear the whisper of the Spirit.
Fourth, aggregate the judgments of your team members by calculating an average score. When discussing sermons, for example, have team members rate sermons on a scale of one to five. Add up the ratings and divide the sum by the total number of raters.
Fifth, trust your intuition. Once the team has reached a decision, sit with it for a short time then come back as a team to assess individual feelings about the decision.
In conclusion, the bottom line is to understand how we can better discern the good and perfect will of God for our congregations. One way, for sure, is to beware of both bias and noise.
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(For more on the subject of noise, check out Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Hachette Book Group, May 2021), by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein.)
