This is the second part of a series on the Compelling Preaching Cohorts of the Mountain Sky Conference, and in particular, what that project can teach us about environments that lead to true sustainability. I am conscious of this not sounding like a tally of my professional successes, so trust that it didn’t start as one. It started as 2.8/5. 

Our first program to launch in the Compelling Preaching Cohorts were the Level 1 Cohorts. They consisted of a 2-day kick-off followed by a monthly zoom call for 5 months. Our evaluation model for that program involved a baseline measurement, a post-kick-off event evaluation, a mid-point assessment, and an end-of-experience assessment. After our first kick-off, we sent our event evaluations, and were pleased with the feedback, overall high scores, a few suggested tweaks, but no big surprises. 

Three months later came the mid-point evals, and that’s when the 2.8/5 showed up. People were not happy. Participants and leaders complained that the curriculum (that I wrote) was too long and too complicated, that the leaders didn’t seem prepared, that the communication and scheduling was a problem, that the homework assignments were far too labor-intensive. Half of the cohorts had such bad attrition and morale that they gave up before even finishing the 5-session curriculum. It was hard not to be immediately defensive, it wasn’t my fault the leaders didn’t read the curriculum ahead of time, or didn’t schedule far enough in advance, and that I expected a lot of people who wanted to be preachers! 

But the program director and I instead sat there, looked at the feedback and got into it. I named my own missteps (I had focused on curricular development over leader development) and mistakes (I had over-written the curriculum to try to make up for not being able to train the leaders well), but we held on to the things that were core to the program: peer leadership, the feedback loop of gathering, sending off with homework, and re-gathering to discuss, and formalized, repeatable curriculum. 

In the middle of that first cohort, I did the critical work that I had skipped before we started, and set up an hour with each of the 12 cohort leaders to talk about the curriculum, about their groups, and about what it really needed to do to function well. I learned and listened (and wrote about it). I created abbreviated alternative versions of the remaining lessons, and by the time we got to the end-of-experience surveys, the feedback on the cohort experience was stronger. We landed with an average score of more like 3.7/5, which felt like a small victory wrestled from the jaws of defeat. 

Between the first and second round of cohorts, we did a major rewrite, simplifying curriculum, and shifting more effort towards leader training. We did and re-did meetings, we explained concepts as many ways as we could think of and spent more time supporting and training leaders than we even asked them to spend with their cohort. We negotiated, re-wrote, built templates and systems, and had meeting after meeting with peer leaders making sure they felt 100% ready. 

And it made a real difference. That year, our feedback was significantly better (4.6/5), and perhaps more profound, we went from half of our cohorts not completing their time to all of them completing the curriculum, and half of them opting to continue meeting as groups after the formal curriculum ended. 

It wasn’t an easy shift, it took swallowing some ego (and more than one call with my bosses asking about why I was so dramatically over my hours), but it was worth it, not just because it improved satisfaction scores or retention, but because it was in that second draft that the program became truly theirs. As much as it would have been convenient for me if everyone had loved my first draft, and they had enthusiastically accepted it with no notes, it would have remained, in some way, mine. 

Sitting at the table, and explaining what they didn’t like, and in all those phone calls, exploring what they did need, where they did see the Spirit moving, and the program became something built in the space between us. Collaborative iteration, actually making iterative changes, responsive to those you are trying to reach, doesn’t just mean participants are better served by a program, but they can serve it better too. It displays that the program isn’t a sacred text to be protected, but a living, breathing dream that we can all build together. 

At the end of year two, we had a few little tweaks (a zoom session that still didn’t really work and an adjusted schedule for kick-off), and the Compelling Preaching Cohorts director told me she was recruiting one of the peer leaders, as well as another leader, to become the executive coaches for the next cohort of peer leaders (who were now mostly former participants). It was in that first of the year three leader training, seeing this participant-turned-leader-turned-leader’s leader facilitate the peer leader training, that I had the “grow up so fast” moment with the program director. I am confident that the new leaders in place will keep tweaking, adapting, and adjusting the curriculum, making it a bit better, and a bit more theirs with every iteration.

Next week, we’ll take on the second condition for building sustainable programs that I’ve noticed: meaningful boundaries.