Most organizations do not have an idea shortage. They have a learning problem. They keep asking the same people for advice, reading the same kinds of material, and trying to solve tomorrow’s challenges with the relationships that helped them get through yesterday.
Interpersonal research offers a different approach. It means identifying people and organizations that have already made progress on the problem you face, learning from their experience, and building relationships that continue to inform your work. AI, books, and published research can help you find those people. They cannot replace what an experienced practitioner knows but has never written down.
Key Takeaways
- Choose research sources based on whether your organization needs incremental improvement or a change in its underlying model.
- Use AI and published research to find strong practitioners, then learn from their experience and documents.
- Build both a broad peer network and a few sustained mentoring relationships.
- Seek ideas across fields and adapt them to your organization’s values and context.
Table of Contents
- First, Decide What Kind of Innovation You Need
- Find Sources That Fit Your Context
- Seek Out the Best People, Not Just the Easiest People
- Use an Action Research Pyramid
- Use AI to Narrow a Broad Field Into a Shortlist
- Build Relationships That Help You Level Up
- Turn Individual Interviews Into a Community of Practice
- Look for Innovation at the Intersection
First, Decide What Kind of Innovation You Need
Before you start looking for experts, get clear about the problem. Are you trying to improve an existing model, or does the model itself need to change?
Incremental innovation improves what you already do. If a nonprofit needs stronger fundraising, better volunteer management, or more effective aftercare, it may learn a great deal from organizations doing that work well. Associations, program networks, consultants, software providers, colleges, books, and peer communities can all be useful sources.
Radical innovation becomes necessary when improving current practices is not enough. Perhaps your ministry model was built for a cultural setting that has changed. Then the question is not simply how to run the program better. It is whether your assumptions about the people you serve, your context, and the program itself still fit.
Do not jump to radical innovation because it sounds exciting. If your organization is struggling with basic performance or a shrinking budget, becoming excellent at its current work may be the more urgent task. It is difficult to build a whole new model while neglecting what needs attention today.
Single-loop and double-loop learning
This distinction connects to single-loop and double-loop learning. In a single loop, you observe outcomes, assess possible corrections, develop an action strategy, implement it, and see what happens. You are improving actions within the existing framework.
In a double loop, you examine the framework. What assumptions shaped the strategy? Does the organization’s vision fit its current context? In a ministry setting, that may mean reconsidering practical theology, cultural adaptations, mental models, and the form the ministry takes. It does not mean discarding everything valuable. If you gut a house to rebuild it, you may still want to keep its frame.
That difference changes where you look for help. Incremental learning often comes from established peers within your network. A fundamental change may require ideas from outside it, or from emerging innovators inside your movement who have begun asking questions others have not.
Find Sources That Fit Your Context
A good model is not necessarily a model you can copy. Its value depends on what transfers to your organization and what needs to be adapted.
Consider a rescue mission learning how to serve in a largely post-Christian city. Tim Keller’s Center Church model and City to City network may offer important insights into ministry in that kind of setting. But a church serving an upper-middle-class population is not the same as a rescue mission working across social classes. Theological tradition, organizational form, and the people being served all matter. Learn from the model, then ask where it fits and where it does not.
For a substantial shift, I would look across several kinds of sources:
- Thriving peers in similar settings: Find organizations in your network that are making progress where comparable organizations struggle, and investigate what they do differently.
- Historical and global examples: Ask how organizations in your tradition have adapted when circumstances changed before.
- Related fields: Missiology, practical theology, cultural studies, and the sociology of movements and innovation can help you see beyond one organization’s practices.
- Experts outside your usual circle: A person working in a different field may understand part of your problem better than someone with a familiar title.
The goal is not to collect impressive names. It is to identify sources of learning aligned with a specific need.
Seek Out the Best People, Not Just the Easiest People
In work that depends heavily on experience and judgment, a great deal of important knowledge is tacit. Practitioners may know how to make a program work without having written a book or article explaining every decision. That makes the quality of your interpersonal research heavily dependent on whom you seek out.
Interviewing three convenient colleagues can be a start, but it is not a serious search for best practice. Ask who is doing exceptional work in your country, in your field, and in a context like yours. Then narrow the question to the domain you need to learn.
If I wanted to study fundraising at a rescue mission, I would consider Denver Rescue Mission. If my focus were aftercare, I would look at Hope Gospel Mission in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Those are different learning needs, so they point to different organizations. The same principle applies to residential recovery, counseling, a catering social enterprise, or a program director preparing to become an executive director.
Look for both Christian and secular experts where each can contribute. A Christian leader may help you think through how faith and organizational values shape your decisions. A specialist outside Christian ministry may have deep expertise in the technical work. You do not have to pretend that one person can answer every kind of question.
Be bold about asking for an interview. Being a student can open doors because people understand the desire to learn. But respect the opportunity when you get it: research the person and their organization first. Read what is publicly available so your conversation can address the questions you cannot answer with a basic search.
Use an Action Research Pyramid
I think of this work as a pyramid. AI research provides a broad starting point. Authoritative books and research deepen your understanding. Model organizations, their documents, expert interviews, and mentoring bring you closer to practice.
These levels work together. AI can help you map a field and locate promising organizations. Books and journals can clarify concepts and test your thinking. But if your goal is to change how your organization operates, you eventually need to learn how people are actually doing the work.
Once you establish a trusted relationship, you may be able to learn from a model organization’s strategic plan, fundraising plan, business plan, or program documents. Those materials make an interview more concrete. Instead of asking a director for general advice, you can ask why they designed a particular process and how it has worked in practice.
Do the homework before the meeting. If a leader has made substantial information public, spending the interview rediscovering it wastes their time and yours. Use your preparation to reach the judgment, tradeoffs, and lessons that are harder to publish.
Use AI to Narrow a Broad Field Into a Shortlist
Finding excellent organizations can feel overwhelming. A two-stage research funnel makes the search more manageable.
- Scope broadly. Start with a peer list, an association’s membership, or a clearly defined organizational category. If you already have a list, collect the organizations’ websites in a spreadsheet.
- Search for the specific practice. If strategic planning is your need, look for organizations with thorough strategic plans rather than simply asking which organizations are “best.” Be precise about the type of organization and the work you want to study.
- Narrow to roughly five to fifteen organizations. Look more deeply at the promising examples and the evidence behind their apparent strengths.
- Identify people to contact. Use what you learn to find the leaders, program specialists, or other experts who can answer your remaining questions.
For rescue mission research, I have used a list of about 250 organizations as the broad starting point. City Vision’s Gemini research assistant can incorporate that list. If you are researching another field, build a peer list suited to it. You might also maintain separate spreadsheet notes for organizations with useful strategic plans, program materials, or expertise in particular areas.
Give an AI search enough context to be useful. Specify the role you are researching from, the kind of organization, and the practice you want to investigate. “Find strong Christian nonprofits” is vague. A request focused on strategic planning within a defined group gives you a more useful starting point for deeper research.
The shortlist is not the finish line. It is how you decide which organizations deserve closer study and which people are worth approaching.
Build Relationships That Help You Level Up
What got you here may not get you there. When you reach a new level of responsibility, the experience that made you effective in your current role may not cover the next challenge. That is when the right relationships become especially valuable.
Build a wide network of 20 or more loose relationships for learning about new practices, making introductions, and noticing changes across your field. Then cultivate two to five intensive relationships with people who can help you work through difficult decisions over time. Those may be mentors, consultants, coaches, or board members. For the intensive relationships, think in terms of ten or more hours of guidance in a year, not a single conversation.
If you are a program director hoping to become an executive director, seek out someone who has made that transition in a similar organization. Ask whether they would be willing to meet every couple of months. Not everyone will have the time, but the fit is worth seeking.
I learned this firsthand when we needed to develop master’s-level programs. I knew how to build bachelor’s programs, but I did not yet know how to raise the work to a graduate level. Jay Gary, who had expertise in designing graduate programs, became a mentor. Much of what I learned in that area came through that relationship. Later, when we designed a doctoral program, he also gave me access to a recent program he had developed so I could learn from it.
At City Vision, we also reached a point where our budget was not growing and I needed to understand a business-to-business strategy. I spoke with people experienced in that kind of sales, asking about their systems, procedures, staffing, and supervision. I built and revised a model from what I learned. Today, about 80% of our students come through partners.
Other needs called for different people: consultants for financial aid, legal questions, human resources, and accounting. I am a technical, introverted leader, so I also value board members with strong relational instincts who will tell me when I need to put more emphasis on people. An innovation network should not merely reinforce your strengths. It should help you see your limits.
Turn Individual Interviews Into a Community of Practice
Interviews do more than answer your questions. They can introduce people who would benefit from learning together. During my doctoral work on disruptive innovation in Christian higher education and the poor, I began a group with a few people connected to my doctoral committee. As I met others, I invited them to join. It grew to more than 100 people from different higher education institutions.
You do not need to begin at that scale. Start with the domains you need to learn, conduct individual interviews, and notice where people share a natural interest. Across a doctoral program, that might mean 25 to 50 interviews on different topics, with some relationships developing further.
A useful community of practice needs a sensible boundary. People in similar roles at comparable ministries may immediately see why they should talk to one another. A collection of unrelated roles and topics is harder to sustain. Aim for a group whose members would appreciate being in the same meeting even if you contributed little beyond the invitation.
When documents enter the conversation, clarify permission. Is a strategic plan shared only with you, shareable within the private group, or public? Do not assume that receiving a document gives you permission to distribute it.
For a group meeting, provide an agenda and questions. Share relevant documents when appropriate, then give people room to contribute and learn from each other. A brief presentation of your own work can help establish context, but it should not consume the meeting. The exchange is what makes the community worthwhile.
Think about distribution while you build the network, too. If you hope your work will eventually inform workshops, webinars, publications, or a conference session, relationships with practitioners and associations can help it reach the people who could use it.
Look for Innovation at the Intersection
Sometimes the best idea is a hybrid of two existing approaches. Blue Ocean Strategy describes the possibility of combining elements from different markets to create something distinct. Cirque du Soleil, for example, brought together aspects of circus and theater.
At City Vision, we have tried to combine the depth and recognized credentials of a Christian university with the practical relevance and customization of urban ministry conferences. The combination involves tradeoffs. Online learning does not reproduce the same in-person community as a conference. But it can make sustained training more accessible. Some of our partners have had as much as 25% of their staff participate, and one increased total staff training time fourfold.
There is another kind of intersection in Christian work: integrating expertise from a general field, such as counseling or business, with theological commitments and the needs of the people you serve. At City Vision, our values include Jesus, justice, and technology. For another organization, the defining combination may be different.
Ask which two or three commitments make your context distinctive. Then seek experts across those areas rather than expecting one established model to contain the whole answer. A secular specialist may understand the field; a Christian leader may help with faith integration; a practitioner serving a similar population may understand the context. The innovation comes from learning across those boundaries and doing the work of fitting the pieces together.
The central discipline is simple: define what you need to learn, find people who are further along, prepare well, and keep building relationships. Over time, your innovation network becomes more than a contact list. It becomes a source of correction, practical knowledge, and possibilities your organization would not have found on its own.