When Solutions Create Problems
If you can proactively identify your solution’s impact before you implement it, rather than reacting to unintended consequences that arise, your projects will go much smoother, and the negative impacts on your team and others will be minimized.
One of our responsibilities as church production staff is to come up with solutions to various issues. Whether implementing gear to solve a specific challenge like multisite streaming or installing a new PA system in one of the rooms, our job is to devise solutions for our church. What we sometimes fail to realize is that new solutions can create new problems that we may not have anticipated. Today, we’re going to discuss how to navigate this.
I’ve been beating this drum for a while. It’s common to get really excited about gear and want to nerd out about all of its possibilities. I love figuring out how to use gear to solve problems, which is a good thing because that’s my job! However, I can sometimes get so lost in solving a problem that I forget to notice how the solution affects other things.
A friend of mine has a saying: “Everything Touches Everything.”
He used it as a teamwork axiom, but I believe it applies here, as well. Every solution we implement likely affects more than the singular problem we’re trying to solve. Identifying how implementing a new solution will impact other things and preparing to mitigate the problems that may arise is what separates good production staff from great ones. I’ll share an example from our own church.
We’re a multisite church, and we livestream our messages from our broadcast campus to our video campuses. We use Resi to stream the message each weekend. Let’s first examine this solution in terms of the problem we wanted to solve and then highlight some of the new issues it naturally created for us.
The initial problem our team had to solve was “We want to live stream our messages to our campuses.”
Our team worked on that solution and found Resi. It’s reliable, stable, and reasonably priced. It also provides an excellent interface for our staff and volunteers. Our team then ordered its services and equipment, learned how to use it, and taught others how to use it. We then replaced the existing system, which used SSDs and Hyperdecks. It seemed easy enough until we considered everything else that would be affected.
Some of the new problems it created include:
Resi functions best with a time buffer of 2-3 minutes between the broadcast campus and the receiving campus. To account for this, we now delay start of service at our video campuses by 3 minutes.
With our video campuses relying on our broadcast campus to stay on time so they can get the message cue, hosts and worship leaders at the broadcast campus have lost some flexibility, as they must nail their programmed element times and not exceed them. If they exceed the programmed times, they risk other campuses not receiving their Resi message cues by the time they reach that point in the service, making them unable to play the live message.
Our video campuses need to ensure they don’t get ahead of our broadcast campus or get too close to zero on the buffer window. This means that hosts and worship leaders at those video campuses can’t go under their times to ensure they get the message start cue on time.
Resi was (and still is) a great solution to the initial problem, but implementing it created new issues that required additional solutions. The problems didn’t stop there. Implementing those additional solutions created new problems, such as more rigid programming, limiting who could actually host on our stages to ensure they hit their times, and limiting worship leader flow moments.
How do we know implementing a new solution is worth the additional issues that may arise as a result?
Unfortunately, I’m not sure you can ever predict every problem that may arise from a new solution, but identifying as many of them as possible should be a part of your process when researching and proposing new solutions. The best way to mitigate this is to get the right people in the room to identify and solve the problem and then clearly articulate to leadership what those solutions are.
In previous blog posts, I’ve discussed building a sandbox for your team and seeking input and feedback from your leaders and other ministries. This is a great example of what it looks like to put those skills into practice. It required the feedback, support and buy-in of multiple teams, including the Worship and Programming teams, the Executive Team, the Lead Pastor, and the Campus Pastors. As the Production Team, your job is to ensure that everyone understands the initial problem, the solution, and the potential issues that may arise, and to invite those affected by the solution into the conversation. You also need to stay flexible and adaptable as a team to manage anything else that may have slipped through the cracks.
If you can proactively identify your solution’s impact before you implement it, rather than reacting to unintended consequences that arise, your projects will go much smoother, and the negative impacts on your team and others will be minimized.
See you in the next one!
