Adam Johnstone

Profile Plus: Biotic or Technocratic?

In the international NCD movement there is an appropriate aversion to models and technocratic approaches. After all, the NCD principle-oriented approach is proving itself to be far superior to other alternatives. So, does the Profile Plus detailed analysis substantially enhance the principle-oriented approach or return us to the "bad old days" of models and prescriptive answers?

In one form or another this question has been asked many times since the predecessor versions of Profile Plus were first used more than 2 years ago. Allow me to make some specific comments about two common concerns.

1. Isn't it dangerous or technocratic to break the NCD survey down to the question level?

Whenever this concern has been raised we have found it helpful to point out that while the Quality Characteristics are representative of universal principles, the individual questions on Profile Plus are also in every sense representative of universal principles - not models or prescriptive ideas. These universal principles that lay behind the individual questions still require individualisation in a specific context to give them meaning for any particular church. To put it simply, the individual church still has to ask the question "why is the result for this question low?" or as they more often ask "why are the results for these questions low?" Profile Plus simply helps them to make sure that the questions they ask are valid within the context of their minimum factor and overall profile. After all, one major reason for doing a survey is to help a church gain some objectivity about itself.

2. Will people use it in a biotic way?

Before Profile Plus was released, we had used its predecessor with over 300 churches in Australia and New Zealand. At one of the earliest stages of testing, I gave a room of 30 pastors their individual reports and gave them 20 minutes to go through them without any instruction or explanation. I wanted to see what would happen if even the written instructions were not provided. (This was quite a scary experience because of the number of pastors, some fairly low results, and the fact that some churches had done 2 surveys with little progress made between them). I was absolutely delighted by what happened. Within minutes, all were switching between pages and making connections between different questions. In other words, they were naturally adopting an organic approach of seeing that each question was part of a broader picture of the health of the church. By the end of the 20 minutes, every pastor had experienced at least one significant revelation based upon a number of different questions. With the addition of a few instructional points in the accompanying notes, the pastors had all of their significant questions answered and were ready and keen to take the results back to their leadership teams for further discussion.

What became clear that day (and 100's of times since) is that pastors do not "begin" to engage with biotic thinking when they "start" the NCD process. Every living person in the world who has any degree of contact with other living people already uses biotic thinking to some extent. By putting Profile Plus in pastor's hands we provide them with more objective information than they can otherwise come up with for themselves through any other means currently available, and then they are able to begin applying whatever biotic thinking they already have - "all by itself". This level of biotic thinking will obviously be different from pastor to pastor, however it is quite unreasonable to think that if a pastor has a lower biotic thinking level to start with, that they will get more out of using just the basic graph of the 8 Quality Characteristics for their analysis – even with the best coaching available.

Beyond this, we have consistently found that Profile Plus is one of the best tools to encourage and teach biotic thinking. As in the story above, when pastors begin to make connections between different questions on the report they quickly discover many of the interdependent links in their church. Also as churches repeat profiles regularly and these are displayed in Profile Plus, a "moving picture" of the organic nature of church life begins to emerge very clearly - "We applied these resources and this result was seen!" Now we have learnt something significant about the life (bios) of our church and the important part we play in stimulating greater health!"

One of the specific components of Profile Plus that promotes biotic thinking is the "Highest 10 and Highest 10 changes" and "Lowest 10 and Lowest 10 changes". On these pages a church can very easily identify significant relationships between various parts of church life. Many times a church will quickly and accurately identify 1 or 2 themes out of these pages and these themes then lay the foundation for their action plans. Thereby allowing momentum to be maintained and NCD to remain "natural" instead of itself being a giant barrier that causes leadership to drop everything else for a period of time. This streamlining advancement has led us in Australia to reform our training around the concept of "NCD in the Everyday".

Beyond these two more technical points, I cannot emphasize strongly enough the impact that Profile Plus (and its lesser quality predecessor) have made on the uptake of NCD, helping churches remain in the process, progress in results and most importantly the bedding down of the NCD (biotic) paradigm in Australia. We have churches now coming back for their 3rd and 4th detailed analysis with increasing hunger, commitment and understanding of the NCD paradigm.

May I suggest that you put Profile Plus through rigorous testing as we have in Australia and feed back to us any consistently occurring short or long-term issues that emerge? From our experience – in accordance with the heart of a biotic approach – Profile Plus has been returning significantly increased fruit with significantly decreased input of time and energy from all concerned. For the sake of NCD in your part of the world, you must reach your own wise/biotic conclusion.

For a sample of Profile Plus click here.

Adam Johnstone of NCD Australia is one of the co-developers of Profile Plus. He is also an overseer on the Empowering Team of Lake Community Church (7 NCD Profiles undertaken)