Here is a brilliant piece of timing.

Louai Al Roumani, who was part of the management team of Syria’s leading bank (BBSF) during some of the hardest years of the war in that country, has distilled his learning in ‘Lessons from a Warzone’.

He has come up with 10 lessons; all are interesting but here are a few highlights which struck me as I think about Multiply and where we are right now.

These thoughts seem to resonate with our aspiration that we grow disciples in the crisis that we are in.

‘Why let your pre-crisis self, place limitations on your future self?’

At the start of the war Al Roumani thought that the first bomb might trigger a decision to leave the country; he ended up staying for four years after his first mortar strike.

He clearly didn’t welcome the war but he did find that in this crisis, he discovered new resources in himself and opportunities to serve his customers that he had not expected.

We are ‘Take up your cross’ people so we shouldn’t perhaps be surprised that crises can be times of growth.

Keep thinking about what really matters 

The bank’s leadership learned to stop obsessing about how long the war would go on and instead they focussed on the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) that remained essential whether there was war or peace.

On the other hand they also learned that some CSFs, which had been straightforward in peacetime, needed more attention in a crisis.

Sometimes this was simply because they were harder to achieve but sometimes it was because these factors had become more important to their customers in a time of crisis.

In their case one CSF was the ability of the customers to access their money – all of it if necessary.

In peacetime this is essential but also pretty routine; in wartime it became no less essential but it also became much riskier – not least in case many clients decided to withdraw all their funds.

People had to have confidence that the money was there. BBCF’s solution was to place huge piles of banknotes in view to reinforce the confidence the bank was financially sound.

We are used to the idea that what is critical to us is not shaped by events. But perhaps it is helpful to ask ourselves how a time of crisis affects both our ability to work on what matters most and  whether we should look at how we prioritize those aims.

So we have realised that loving community is essential, in normal times we know this but it’s built into our pattern of life anyway.

In lockdown we’ve had to make it a priority that demands more creativity and time from us.

Al Roumani was in post for four years; over that time the war shifted around the bank and its customers -  and so did the way that they evaluated and met their CSFs.

Let’s keep paying attention to how our priorities need to be met as things keep changing around us.

The Shifting Pareto Rule

A fascinating insight was on the 80/20 Pareto rule. He found that the ratio in a crisis shifted to 95/5.

So now, rather than 20% of clients generating 80% of revenue - instead 5% generated 95%.

Well, you could define a healthy church as one that is working to confound the Pareto rule – it’s not exactly in harmony with the idea of the Body of Christ – nevertheless it can be a helpful perspective.

So will we find a similar shift to 95/5 and what would that look like?

Al Roumani found that it was much harder to identify the 5%.

Of course there were fewer of them but they were also operating in a more extreme and polarized environment.

He found that the bank needed to rejig their information systems to keep track of the few highly significant people who flourished in a crisis.

Is it possible that we will find a small number people who really flourish in a crisis? How will be spot them and encourage them and learn from them? 

Listen widely and deeply to people

Al Roumani acknowledges the Arab tradition of strong leaders who polarise people – they are either right or wrong, there is no grey area.

In a crisis, however, it is essential to develop a more nuanced approach; to seek advice from people on the ground about what is going on, to treat mistakes as opportunities to learn, and to make sure that the back office people are not given the job pf improving the work of the front office people.

Although the church is vulnerable to the great leader fallacy too, we have the positive perspective of the Body of Christ to add to Al Roumani’s learning.

Since we know that each person is called to play their part, we’d expect to be learning from and respecting every disciple.

A time of crisis means a time of increased attentiveness and the expectation of a lot of new learning.

There will be church leaders all over the world right now discovering gifts in the communities that they didn’t know about.

Churches between leaders have often discovered this; and, looking back, I wonder if one of the best reasons for our church weekends away was to manufacture a regular crisis with a whole lot of unusual needs and opportunities to be met by unexpected people.

SMART may not be

Al Roumani has a perhaps unexpected view on what to measure and how to approach cost cutting in a crisis.

He sees how tempting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time based) measures can be, but his advice is not to get fixated on whether you have a money saving plan that is SMART; instead pay attention to how it will affect morale and the core values that you treasure.

No measure is smart if it undermines the positive elements of your culture.

His simple but telling example was the proposal to cut the free coffee that employees had access to.

In a culture where coffee is a key part of life and social bonding, this proposal was both SMART and stupid and ultimately rejected.

There will be a lot of reshaping of church at every level as a result of this crisis; SMART analysis will probably not be our most useful tool in thinking about what matters, who we are and what we aspire to be. A really important extra lesson for the bank was that

‘Cost cutting initiatives sometimes remodel processes and operations in such a way that they are able to work using minimal inputs. This does not work in a crisis.’

Crises demand the ability to be adaptive and flexible – sometimes the most efficient minimalist organisations don’t have the capacity to adapt.

One of the reasons why nature flourishes is the built-in complexity of creation.

Since we believe that there is a Creator, maybe we should see the built in complexity and the capacity to adapt and evolve as a lesson in how we should structure our organisational life too – with enough space and richness and generosity to respond to the turbulence of life.

Have clear goals and adaptable tactics

Al Roumani learned that it was important to retain a clear vision of what they were aiming at as a bank but to be flexible about how they achieved it.

This means that it is best to avoid over-planning.

You don’t want to bind people into tactics that become outdated; people need to know the end goal but they need to be adaptable in how to achieve it.

In our better moments as churches we are pretty good at this.

Our goal has been the same for 2,000 years – to proclaim that Jesus is Lord with our lives and our words.

However we have adapted and developed our tactics for times we are in (sometimes slowly).

Now is simply one of those times when the speed of innovation needs to increase.

Survival is not enough

One last – very valuable - insight from this book: other banks in Syria decided that they had to focus on survival but, says Al Roumani, ‘your goal cannot be not dying’. 

Some competitor banks stopped lending money or taking deposits because of the risks; he compares this to a supermarket stopping the sale of groceries … ‘

When you are in distress, you should never give up your core elements in the hope of surviving’. 

And so, he says,

‘The experience of crisis helped me never to fixate on mere survival, but always to think of growing, no matter what.’

Try this  - if we are thinking about survival we are thinking like an institution; if we are thinking about growth we’re thinking like the church of the risen Christ.