Balancing Emergent and Hierarchical Governance at Church

Speaker 1

Jonathan Jardine, the first time we had a very good question. is an executive director of product supply at Valero Energy Corporation and was previously the general manager for Valero’s Latin American Latin America business based in Lima, Peru. Before Valero, he worked in healthcare services and prior to that, in finance at Goldman Sachs and Dodge and Cox. in San Francisco. He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where he learned the value of air conditioning while moving rocks and trimming oleanders in his grandparents’ backyard. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from BYU and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Jonathan and his wife, Rachel, have six children. Jonathan.

Jonathan Jardine

All right, well, I hope you’re all micro-dosing so that you think my talk is one of the top five.

Jonathan Jardine

So in my presentation, I’m going to talk about emergent strategies and deliberate strategies. So emergent coming from the bottom and deliberate coming from the top, and recommend how decentralization of strategy in the church can help us build Zion. I’m not talking about decentralization of doctrine, but in the actual praxis, how we live and practice our religion. And I want to give credit. I borrowed a lot of my initial ideas from Clay Christensen, who passed away a couple years ago. He was a professor at Harvard Business School, an amazing thinker and a wonderful human being.

Jonathan Jardine

All right. I’m here in person, I’m still having issues. Oh, there we go. All right.

Jonathan Jardine

So, also going to start out with a quote from Joseph Smith. I think this is his most famous statement on governance. I teach them correct principles and they govern themselves. And I think the genius behind this is that when we govern ourselves well, we exercise our spiritual muscles. We sacrifice, we consecrate, and our efforts are multiplied. And in eulogizing, Joseph Smith, W. W. Phelps said, sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven. And we also heard earlier from Carl referencing Doctrine and Covenants 58 talking about the importance of individual agency acting for ourselves. Another concept that I think is important from doctrine and covenants is that all things in the church should be done by common consent.

Jonathan Jardine

I’m going to skip this example, but this is a picture of Primary Children’s Hospital, or one of its iterations. And I’m going to share some examples from our church history of emergent strategies. And then I’ll talk about kind of definitions of those.

Jonathan Jardine

But seminaries and institutes of religion were started by a guy named Joseph Merrill more than a hundred years ago. So Joseph Merrill was the first person from Utah who got a PhD. And he traveled back east. He studied at the University of Chicago. He studied at Johns Hopkins. And when he came back to Utah, he was inspired by what he had seen in the seminaries back east and in the Midwest. And so he started a seminary. In his first year, he had only 70 students. And today there are over 700,000 students in seminaries and institutes across the world. Also, I think just to note, I think part of the reason they were successful is it was a disruptive strategy to what existed before, which were the academies operated and run by the church, which were much more capital-intensive.

Jonathan Jardine

The primary association was started by a woman named Aurelia Spencer Rogers and paraphrasing Clay Christensen One Sunday in 1873, she looked at the unruly boys in her ward, and she decided that none of them was ever going to be worthy to marry her daughters. And so she created a weekday class where she got together these kids and taught them the basics of the gospel, which is why she called it primary. And Brigham Young heard about it, loved the idea, and standardized it all across the church.

Jonathan Jardine

I’m going to skip some of these other examples, but also inventions of individual members of the church, church magazines. This welfare square just representing the church welfare program. which came out of the Great Depression. So Harold B. Lee was a stake president up in the Pioneer Stake in Salt Lake City. And had thousands, literally thousands of the members of his stake who were out of work. And working with the people that he knew developed a program in order to put them to work and have them work for each other. Hebert J. Grant loved it so much, he had him standardize it all across the church, and it’s grown into what we now known as a welfare program.

Jonathan Jardine

So, like I said, home teaching, or now we call it ministering, before it was home teaching, and before home teaching it was block teaching or ward teaching. Also, girls’ camp, singles wards. I couldn’t think of another representation. So this is what I got for singles wards. All of these were started on an individual local level by individuals trying to solve problems for the people that they knew personally. And then church leaders saw the great results and were inspired to push them out and standardize them across the entire church.

Jonathan Jardine

And I think we’ve seen a shift over probably the last 50, 60 years. So this first image is not a strategy in and of itself. It’s just kind of representative. This is the church office building, which was actually completed 50 years ago in 1972 for the purpose of housing all of the church employees who centralized the development of strategy and helped to scale church operations across the world.

Jonathan Jardine

So this is a small form factor temple. It’s the Monticello Temple. In the 1980s and 1990s, President Hinckley. First in the first presidency and then later as the president of the church, was wondering, sitting at the top of the church organization, how to extend the blessings of the temple to more members of the church without wrecking the church’s balance sheet. And as he puzzled over this, he had the idea. And he later said, I had a revelation. And he envisioned specific details about how to create a temple, which he then sketched out, analyzed, discussed with the other apostles, and then announced. In general conference in October 1997.

Jonathan Jardine

Preach My Gospel was published in 2003 and came in response to declining productivity of missionary work. and also represented years and years of research and analysis, formation of committees and subcommittees and statisticians. and testing different alternatives before the final product was then finalized and disseminated.

Jonathan Jardine

Come Follow Me, there was a similar process. I came out with a new two hour church schedule on Sundays. Elder Cook in his address and general conference mentioned how internal studies were carried out to evaluate alternatives and then choose a path with the best potential to bring the Holy Ghost into members’ lives and homes.

Jonathan Jardine

So this is City Creek Mall in Salt Lake City, and also just emblematic of the centralization of church finances and investment management. and ensigned peak advisers. So the Wall Street Journal and others have kind of published some indications that as of 2019, the church was managing over $100 billion just in financial securities. And that from the sixties when the church was threatening to go bankrupt under David O. McKay. And the church actually did face bankruptcy a couple times previously. So by centralizing, the church financial success is demonstrated in a lot of different ways.

Jonathan Jardine

Then in efforts to provide access to education, we’ve got the perpetual education Fund, and then more recently the BYU Pathway Program. So, in these examples, what I’m talking about are kind of centrally ideated, analyzed, tested, and then implemented. In a top-down fashion.

Jonathan Jardine

So breaking these out into emergent and then deliberate strategies. So sorry, a lot of words on this page. But emergent strategies appear in response to opportunities or problems experienced at any level of an organization. And when the existing product isn’t good enough or when circumstances are changing or have changed, emergent strategies can bubble up inside an organization when individuals inside the organization have the resources and the autonomy. to pursue them.

Jonathan Jardine

Deliberate strategies, on the other hand, are carefully analyzed and crafted when you’re kind of slicing and dicing customer segments, and they often come as a result of an organization’s existing resources, processes and priorities. And they’re best when you’ve already established product market fit and your main challenge is to scale as quickly as possible.

Jonathan Jardine

So in Clay Christensen’s words from the innovator solution, this is not simple stuff, to know when you do one versus the other. So when you’re considering what size or type of organization, you wonder, is it oh, that image wasn’t supposed to come up yet, but Are deliberate strategies better when you’re managing a larger organization? So this image is going to kind of block one of these charts, but The chart basically shows that in the USSR in the 60s and 70s, there was exponential growth in the production of passenger vehicles. So this image here on the left shows the Lada, I don’t know how to speak Russian, not that that has any political overtones at this point, but this was the car that was the predominant unit produced during the 70s. But by the end of the 70s in the United States, this is what we were producing here. So if the end game had already been reached and the circumstances weren’t changing, arguably the centrally planned or deliberate strategy at the USSR would have been better.

Jonathan Jardine

Now, is it I wanted to share another example of a private company, and a lot of you guys in this room are probably could understand and give this example better than I could. But in the early two thousands, as the retail e-commerce business of Amazon was taking off, A lot of their engineers were frustrated that they didn’t have enough time to actually work on their product, customer-facing engineered solutions. And so they created an internal platform that they called Web Services. And in 2002, they opened it up to outside developers. In 2003, they came up with the idea of renting out Virtual server capacity. And you guys know the rest of the story. So over the last twenty years, AWS has become not the dominant source of revenue for the company, but in 2021, AWS represented 74% of Amazon’s operating income. This was an emergent strategy that came up in the lives of engineers inside the company, which then became a deliberate strategy.

Jonathan Jardine

And as you’re pursuing your deliberate strategies, hopefully you’re paying enough attention to what your customers are saying so that you see a feedback loop. And as long as your people are empowered, they can then pursue new immersion strategies. I want to make it clear that deliberate does not equal bad.

Jonathan Jardine

So I think we have a really good case study over the last couple of years in the pandemic with Operation Warp Speed. So within only months, we saw an unprecedented development and production and distribution of hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines all across the world.

Jonathan Jardine

Sometimes deliberate strategies are easy to identify but can take decades to play out. So one that obviously is important for me, I work in the energy industry, is that China The CCP has a deliberate strategy for dominating the supply chains of the materials that go into batteries. So you can see here kind of the red showing their ownership of the minerals that go into batteries. versus the US, which doesn’t really have a coherent strategy. And so we’re somewhat subject now to or will become increasingly subject to insecure and geopolitically risky sources of minerals. So point here, we need a balance, and it’s not easy to know ex-ante when to pursue emergent strategies and when to pursue deliberate strategies.

Jonathan Jardine

Why is it that we’re not seeing more emergent strategies coming up in the church? I don’t think it’s because We are no longer created. I think the people in this room are an example of how we’ve continued to see immense amounts of creativity and hard work. but not actually happening within the structure of the church. So looks like my time is up. So Carl, I’m just going to ask you, am I should I wrap or?

Speaker 4

Yeah, I think we don’t have time for questions. Sorry. No, that’s fine. All right. Well, I’ll skip the rest of my slides and look forward to talking to you guys afterwards during breaks.