Understanding Technology as Culture

Preface
Technology Leadership Principles at TechMission and City Vision

by Andrew Sears

Preface

One of the goals for City Vision with our students is to enable them to adapt to the demographic changes that are happening in their urban ministries. For many students, there have been vast changes in the demographics of who they serve, but their ministry models have not caught up. Most often this is represented in their neighborhood or city shifting from being predominantly White to predominantly Black and Latino/a. One of the core competencies of City Vision is in training our students to lead a change management process to adapt their ministry.

There is another change that has happened over the past few decades that is also very significant: the shift to a technology-infused culture and the virtualization of society. With the values of Jesus, Justice and Technology, TechMission/City Vision primarily partners with what we call Jesus-Justice ministries. These ministries have been amazingly effective at applying the best cross-cultural principles in adapting to demographic changes as described above, but almost without exception, they have not done well in adapting to the cultural change in technology. In short, they have not followed their own cross-cultural ministry principles in adapting to the cultural changes brought by technology.

I have found that the concept of “technology as culture” is the most helpful lens to explain the need for this change to these ministries. These Jesus-Justice ministries now have a clear understanding that if the neighborhood suddenly became predominantly Latino/a and Spanish-speaking, it would be critical to have more staff that are fluent with that community. Unfortunately, these same ministries often do not prioritize having more staff that are highly fluent in technology as more of their clients are “digital natives.”

During the COVID pandemic, we all moved into a “neighborhood” where technology was the dominant culture. We were all suddenly thrust into a world where we were all living on Zoom. Some organizations quickly adapted if they had a culture permeated by technology fluency. Others just adapted their old non-tech native models into the online environment, often disastrously. Many parents, like myself, were horrified to see non-tech fluent teachers using Zoom to lecture elementary-age students using a camera on them using a blackboard for hours a day. That was the epitome of translating an old culture into a new environment.

The pandemic served as a wake-up call for many ministries on the importance of developing technology fluency in their core culture. Now, many ministries are implementing a change management process to help make that happen. The article below is a summary of how to apply effective cross-cultural change management processes to efforts to improve technology capacity in an organization. This was Chapter 7 in my doctoral dissertation that I wrote in 2013. I wrote this preface to provide a bit of updated context since I believe the principles explained below are even more important now.

Currently there is a generational transfer of leadership happening among many urban ministries. There are many cultural implications of this generational transfer, but one of the most significant will be in the attitudes of leadership toward technology. There has been a resistance to technology by the older generation of leadership in urban ministry that will change with the new generation of leadership. It will be important for these ministries to consider key principles of adopting a change management process to tech-infuse their organizational culture.

Technology Leadership Principles at TechMission and City Vision

TechMission and City Vision as a Learning Organization

Maxwell said, “Everything Rises and Falls on Leadership” (Maxwell & Covey, 2007). In a technology-driven world, everything rises and falls on technology leadership and having a technology-driven culture. Larry Page understood the importance of having a technology-driven culture when he fired all his project managers and replaced them with bi-lingual managers who were fluent in both technology and management. This chapter will focus on key leadership principles for Christians leading in technology.

Leadership in a technology-driven industry means being able to reinvent yourself every three to five years, because any organization that does not reinvent itself becomes obsolete. In 2010, 60% of Apple’s revenue came from products that did not exist three years before (Dedin, 2010). Apple successfully grew from each technology by deploying what is called “innovation extensions,” which are where a company continues to grow exponentially by launching its next product at the peak of the adoption cycle of its previous product. At the peak of the iPod sales, Apple launched the iPhone, and then extended that to the iPad. Now that Steve Jobs is gone, many have questioned whether Apple can continue this.

On a much smaller scale as an innovative technology driven nonprofit ministry, we have gone through similar innovation extensions. We call these three waves of innovation extensions in our history TechMission 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 as shown in figure 22. We started with TechMission 1.0 in nontraditional education in providing vocational courses addressing the digital divide. TechMission’s first program was the Association of Christian Community Computer Centers (AC4). Part of what we learned from AC4 was that computer centers were the innovators and early adopters in using disruptive technology to educate tens of thousands of individuals in low-income communities. We realized that the digital divide was only one part of a much larger educational divide that is driving most inequality. The more significant piece of addressing the educational divide was in mobilizing people.

Right at the peak of the hype around the digital divide, we “pivoted” to TechMission 2.0 and successfully redirected all of our strategy to mobilizing people for education using websites like ChristianVolunteering.org and AmeriCorps interns. Because investment in nonprofits addressing the digital divide had peaked, we saw most of our peer organizations close, while we grew tenfold in our social impact to the community. Over the next 10 years, we provided over 500 full-time interns and over 75,000 volunteers, primarily education to almost 25,000 at-risk youth through after-school and teen educational programs. In this pivot, we effectively stopped investing in AC4 to focus on the innovation extension of TechMission 2.0.

We realized that with the long-term trend of governments toward fiscal austerity due to entitlements and increasing hostility toward faith-based groups that government funding of nonprofits was about to peak, so we again pivoted to TechMission 3.0 to focus on disruptive innovation in higher education. We realized that the market for technology educating the poor is entering the early majority and late majority stage. As predicted by Geoffrey Moore (1991), most of the nonprofits involved in addressing the digital divide did not succeed in “Crossing the Chasm,” which is the term he used to make the transition between the early adopters and mainstream. Our theory is that the disruptive innovation of online education had improved in quality enough that we could use it as a part of an accredited college. In this pivot, we effectively stopped investing in our TechMission 2.0 programs to focus on the innovation extension of TechMission 3.0. We walked away from a grant from AmeriCorps that made up more than half our budget in order to be able to focus on innovation.

In 2008, TechMission acquired City Vision College. The college was originally called Rescue College and was started as the education arm of the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions. City Vision started very small with only one Bachelor’s degree program focused on training Urban Missions (accredited by the Distance Education Training Council). It has since grown by an average of 20-30% per year, and now has added Bachelor’s in Addiction Studies and Nonprofit Management, as well as a Master’s in Technology and Ministry.

Organizations that want to lead in a technology dominated field have to be learning organizations (Senge, 2006) that focuses on developing leaders in technology. It is because we believe that “success rises and falls on leadership, that we developed the Master’s in Technology and Ministry to be a learning organization that prepares future Christian leaders in technology.

Getting my doctorate and completing this dissertation is a part of my own race and TechMission’s race against the machine. Our goal is to help our staff, students, and interns to advance in this race. I encourage all of our staff and interns without a degree to get one, and those with degrees to get the next most advanced degree. This is allowing City Vision to add graduate programs as undergraduate programs become increasingly commoditized. As the organization advances its learning, it is staying ahead of the commoditization that is happening to the lower levels of higher education.

Having worked in the technology field for 20 years, I have both seen and had to make management decisions related to automation. In the early days of TechMission, we had many interns doing very routine tasks. Now, most of those interns have been replaced by a few very intelligent staff. This represents the same pattern of automation identified in these books discussed previously that the work of 5 to 10 workers of average education and intelligence are being replaced by the work of 1 to 2 workers with extraordinary intelligence and high levels of education. Realizing the justice implications of this, I initially tried to fight this trend at TechMission by continuing to have larger numbers of interns doing routine tasks. The problem was that the technology was advancing exponentially and the cost of interns continued to go up, so that the tech-intensive, few workers solutions in some cases would boost productivity two to four times over the labor-intensive option. Resisting this trend seemed to be like “pushing back the tide.”

We decided that strategically rather than trying to fight this trend with continuing to follow labor-intensive strategies, we would have to adapt to become more of a learning organization (Senge, 2006). That has enabled our staff to advance their own education as a way to avoid being obsoleted by automation. We made a strategic move by moving from an organization focused on social services to a university focused on educating those in social services. The reality is that all of our staff at TechMission and in all parts of the economy are in a “race against the machine.” The only solution is to become a learning organization and to pursue a strategy of lifelong learning. I have believed that spiritually, everyone is either growing or dying as there is no standing still. It appears that the same truth applies to the economy and education; everyone is either learning or becoming obsolete. There is no standing still in our learning intensive societies.

Another reason why we developed the Master’s in Technology and Ministry is that we believe that just as the world experienced a great migration from rural to urban, we are experiencing a migration into a virtual and technological world. Just as we needed to develop new methods of ministry for urban communities, we need to develop new methods of ministry for a tech-dominated world. The goal of our Master’s in Technology and Ministry is to equip leaders in a tech-dominated world. The following are some of the leadership principles that we learned in our experience at TechMission that helped form the basis of our Master’s program.

Leadership Principles from Urbanization: Incarnational Ministry and Indigenous Leadership Development

As we transition to the information age there is a massive, cultural shift that is happening rapidly. It can be helpful to learn the lessons of what Christians did right and wrong in responding to the Industrial Revolution. One of the biggest trends of the industrial age was the trend of urbanization. With urbanization, Christians in cities typically have not handled the changing demographics of urban neighborhoods very well. In the United States, urbanization created a tendency of White flight, which Christians were a part of as much as anyone. This and other historical factors led to the common critique of Christians in the quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. that “the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning” (King & Armstrong, 2007).

Much has been written about the changes in how new generations relate to technology. This phenomenon was covered in Growing Up Digital (Tapscott, 1999) and Martin Prensky’s article on “Digital Natives” (Prensky, 2001). The idea is that those born with digital technologies are “digital natives” as opposed to those who saw the technologies developed in their lifetime, who are “digital immigrants” who have to adapt to the changing culture brought by the technologies. Because I have spent the majority of my life living cross-culturally and have a lot of training in cross-cultural ministry and missions, I prefer to use the language of “Digital Natives” because it lends itself to applying the principles that Christians have developed for what healthy cross-cultural ministry looks like. This section will first look at the leadership principles from urbanization and will then apply those principles to the virtualization of society and digital natives.

Missions and urban ministry provide a very helpful framework for leadership of digital natives in the information age. As Christians, we are called to be “in the world but not of it” (paraphrasing John 17:14-19) In the past several decades there has been a growing movement of Christians whose response to urbanization is incarnational ministry, which has been popularized by John Perkins and the Christian Community Development movement. The idea behind incarnational ministry is that we follow Jesus’ example and live among the poor in urban communities. It recognizes that we are called to suffer in the pain of others, as Jesus did, rather than withdraw from it.

Another key principle of missions and urban ministry is that of indigenous leadership development. The history of missions can largely be described as struggling to take hold when it is brought by outsiders; however, it thrives and grows rapidly once the Gospel is contextualized in a local cultural framework by indigenous leaders. Because of this, indigenous leadership development is a key principle of all missions and cross-cultural ministry.

The story of my parents’ lives and my own life shows the challenges of urbanization and principles how to effectively lead in an urban environment. I grew up in a low-income part of Kansas City. Both my parents were raised in rural environments. They came to the city with rural sensibilities such as when you are on the farm, you can just let your kids go unsupervised outside. In the city, if you leave your children unsupervised outside, they are likely to get into trouble and get hurt. I saw most of my friends start using drugs and having sex in elementary school, largely because they also had rural parents that left them unsupervised. The problem was that we had parents that didn’t have the parenting skills they needed to live in the city. This same pattern is seen across the world, both in the rural to urban immigration and in the immigration between countries (which often also includes a rural to urban element).

Now, I’m raising my children in an urban environment. I know the risks and know how to moderate those risks because I’m fluent in urban culture. I take my children to play in a park where people are smoking “weed,” but I am sure that I am with them to keep them safe. We do not let our children live most of their lives on the street unsupervised as my parents did. We enrolled our kids in day care with low-income kids, but we monitored the situation and moved them when one day care environment became too chaotic. What I have learned is that when raising my kids in an urban environment, avoidance is not the solution. That results in an ethnocentric view that all urban culture is bad. I also am cautious to not be too permissive and expose them to more than they can handle.

Similarly, at TechMission we have placed over 500 urban ministry interns to serve in low-income areas. As indigenous urban leaders, we are all street savvy. We tell the interns “walk down these streets, and don’t walk down those streets at night.” In a generation, we have moved from my parents being urban immigrants with no urban fluency to me as a native urban leader. At TechMission we followed these two principles of incarnational ministry and indigenous leadership development, which allowed us to run a national urban ministry AmeriCorps program that to our knowledge had the highest representation of indigenous urban leaders out of over 100 national AmeriCorps programs.

Christian institutions of higher education have had to follow a similar adaptation process to urbanization. They recognized that they had to develop new models to teach people to address new opportunities and problems. Now they are called Schools of Urban Ministry and urban campuses, and they deal with urban problems. The problem with that approach is that urban ministry programs can too often become marginalized ghettos within the academic community. Now Christian colleges in the United States are recognizing that with the changing demographics in America, children of color will soon make up the majority of enrollments. They are recognizing that the core of their culture will need to change. These principles of incarnational ministry and indigenous leadership development will be key to that process.

Digital Natives: The Demographics of the Neighborhood are Changing Again

The same leadership principles from urbanization also apply to the virtualization of society. While urbanization created a demographic, cultural change, this time the cultural shift is happening much more along the generational lines of digital natives and digital immigrants. This section will discuss principles for leading digital natives to follow the successful examples of how Christians responded to urbanization and avoid the failures of some responses of Christians to urbanization.

The story of my parents’ lives and my own life shows the challenges of raising digital natives and the principles on how to effectively lead digital natives. Given my age, I am one of the older digital natives. I grew up and spent much of my time on a Commodore 64 computer. Just as urban immigrant parents leave their children unsupervised in the city, my parents, as digital immigrants, left me completely unsupervised on the computer and online. The result was that I became a computer hacker. When many of my friends were arrested for computer hacking I got scared. I stopped all hacking and was never arrested like my friends were. I also was exposed to pornography at a friend’s house where their parents gave them unsupervised access to cable television, including channels with pornography. Later in life, I went through addiction recovery to reestablish purity after the impact that early exposure to pornography had on me.

Today many parents are digital immigrants. They allow their children to watch TV, play games, and go online with little or no supervision. The result of this is that 9 out of 10 children aged between the ages of 8 and 16 have viewed pornography on the Internet, in most cases unintentionally (Livingston, 2004). The information age is bringing many benefits, but it also brings problems like gaming/tech addiction, pornography, online affairs, online predators, cyber bullying, and online fraud. I know a lot about these dangers because TechMission developed SafeFamilies.org through a United States Department of Justice Grant to help protect children from these dangers.

For some parents, the solution is to completely unplug their children and avoid technology, which I think is the technology equivalent of White flight. My view is all technology is bad is as ethnocentric as saying that all urban culture is bad. I remember having a friend growing up who never played a video game; honestly, he was a social outcast. It was like he spoke a different language than the other kids. I’m concerned these children will be like children who grow up with over-restrictive parents, and then once they are on their own, they are like “sheep before wolves” and go wild. The solution is to parent with informed balance between the extreme permissiveness and extreme avoidance. The challenge for most digital immigrant parents is that they need to learn the language of their children.

I am raising my children with an attitude toward exposing them to technology and its problems very similar to my attitude toward exposing them to urbanization and its problems. As a digital native, I am fluent in digital culture. I know what “streets to avoid” in the virtual world and how to protect my children. I give my children unlimited access to their iPads, but I ensure that they only have access to educational games. We provide non-educational games as we would dessert—reserved for special occasions. I monitor the effect that media has on my children and remove it if it starts to harm them. As a result, I am raising children with extremely strong digital literacy skills that are growing up in the virtual world but are not of it. My hope is that this early immersion in technology will help them as my early exposure helped me to become a leader in the tech world, but in their case I hope to minimize more of the negative aspects by more involved parenting in their technology use.

Incarnational Ministry Among Digital Natives: Become a Jew to the Jews and a Geek to the Geeks

What does it mean to contextualize the gospel to techies and the digital native generation? There are a lot of ways to do that. One is to start with the language of that group, people should immerse themselves. We all have an ethnocentric view of technology that is tied to our generation. This is captured in the quote by Alan Kay: “Technology is anything invented after you were born; everything else is just stuff” (Kay, n.d.). If we understand technology is a culture, then we understand that our own view toward technology will be generationally specific, so we can avoid being ethnocentric.

Paul is often misquoted as saying “I became a Jew to the Jew and a Greek to the Greeks.” While that quote is not exactly what Paul said, it does contain the core of his strategy of cross-cultural missions. Because of this, that phase is the foundation of all effective missions. Just as Jesus met us as we are, we are called to meet others in their own cultural contexts. An immigrant to another country will never be native to that country, but they can become bilingual and bicultural as effective missionaries do. The same principle applies toward digital immigrants living in the information age. They should learn the language and culture of digital natives and attempt to become bicultural and bilingual.

TechMission’s strategy for technology fluency is very similar to many Spanish-speaking churches that want all their members to become bilingual. In these churches, native Spanish speakers are encouraged to learn English, and native English speakers need to learn Spanish. Some meetings are held in Spanish, English or both. This supports community among first and second generation immigrants that experience language and cultural generational divides.

Similarly, anyone who becomes staff at TechMission needs to become bilingual across technology. We use the term “techie” to refer to people who are bilingual and can both communicate with tech people and with non-tech people. If someone is a digital immigrant, they need to learn to speak some technology, which naturally happens through immersion at TechMission. In our orientation, we explain that we want all our staff to strive to be techies. We explain that the reason why people use the term nerd or geek to refer to techies is because those are terms used to describe techies that do not know how to communicate with non-techies. If someone has a tech background, they need to learn to communicate their concepts to non-techies. Staff who avoid identifying as techies and show signs of being technophobic or techies who cannot translate tech to normal people are penalized on their scorecard in staff evaluations.

By placing techies as the norm, it affirms the value of techies and encourages everyone to grow. We also help contextualize the Gospel through our Theology of Technology course. We describe Jesus as the first techie. We explain that the word the Bible uses to describe Jesus’ occupation is tektōn, which has the same root as where we get our word for technology. He used the tools of the day to build things. In doing this, we are contextualizing Jesus and the Gospel into tech culture in a way that validates their identities as techies.

Indigenous Leadership Development for the Information Age and Tech Tokenism

The top tech companies today like Google, Facebook, and Apple have one thing in common. They are able to recruit and keep the top technology leaders in the world. Much of Google’s recent strategy and acquisitions make little sense unless you understand the principle that if Google can appear to be the most exciting place to work for tech leaders, it will become the global leader in technology. Many articles have been written about how Google is becoming the “Bell Labs” of the current generation by attracting the top technology minds in the world (Litwak, 2013). As a tech architect, I recognize that part of the reason for this is that in the tech world a top performer can produce exponentially more results. This is summarized in the quote by Bill Gates, “A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer” (“101 Great Computer Programming Quotes,” 2009). The point is that these tech leaders and companies value techies immensely.

Much of my job for the past 15 years at TechMission has been to learn to lead Christian techies. To lead them, it starts by valuing them. As organizations attempt to change their tech cultures, it can be helpful to learn lessons from churches that try to make cultural shifts.

As many churches and ministries try to become “diverse,” they often resort to what is called tokenism. An example of tokenism is when a White church puts their one person of color in their congregation up front to do announcements, but nothing else changes about the culture of the church to make it more welcoming to minorities. Tech tokenism is when an organization that has a technology-resistant culture tries to solve its problem by hiring a techie but leaves the rest of the organization the same. The organization is full of digital immigrants who do not care to learn the new language of tech. The result is that even if the organization adds more techies, they are all marginalized into a tech division that does not affect the core culture of the organization. This failure of the core of an organization to adopt a new cultural context is why most organizations fail to adapt to technology shifts (Moore, 1991).

At TechMission, we recognize the importance of attracting leaders in technology. Right now, our top priority as an organization is our Master’s program in Technology and Ministry. The reason it is our top priority is that I recognize that TechMission will rise and fall based on the technology leaders we have in our organization. As many universities have found, one of the best ways to recruit the top leaders in an area is to have a strong degree programs. We want to have strong tech leaders, so our top priority is to create a program to train tech leaders.

Relationship of Digital Natives, Techies, Bilinguals and Age-Outs

Figure 23 uses a diffusion of innovation chart to explain the relationship between techies, digital natives, bilinguals and age-outs. The bottom part of the graph shows the standard theory of diffusion of innovation (Rogers, 2003) showing there is a normalized pattern of adoption based on how long it takes various people to adopt the technology (shown in the blue bell curve). People are groups as shown in the bottom: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. The top part of the figure attempts to relate the cultural groups discussed in this paper to when in the innovation cycle they typically adopt technology. In this graph, techies are typically innovators or early adopters.

The “S-curves” show the percentage of adoption (from 0 to 100%) for digital natives (black line) and everyone (yellow). These curves show that the whole population of digital natives are very quick to adopt many new technologies (early majority), compared to the overall population. The other two groups are the bilinguals, which may adopt technology early or later, but will be intentional about becoming fluent in it. The last group, the “age outs” typically will not invest the effort to learn the new language, and the proportion of society using that innovation increases over time through retirement and death.

Techies are the natural leaders of digital natives in the tech domain. This does not mean that techies will be the natural leaders of digital natives in society in general. It only means that the tech leaders at Facebook, Google, and other tech companies are shaping the architecture of the world that makes them the de facto leaders of digital natives. Many digital natives will still avoid the identification as being a “techie” because they still associate it with pejorative terms like geek and nerd. If an organization wants to lead in technology, it needs to be able to attract the techies, establish a “digital native” dominant-culture, and strongly encourage digital immigrant staff to become bilingual with that culture

Case Studies of Why Technology Leadership Fails

In learning technology leadership principles, it can be helpful to learn from case studies of some examples of why technology leadership often fails in ministry. At TechMission, we have worked with building the technology capacity of hundreds of ministries through conferences, degree programs, and consulting. In this section, I will use some examples from our experiences to show how technology leadership can fail.

Ministry X and Tech Tokenism. Ministry X decided that they needed to make technology a priority. At first they hired a third party consultant, but they were only willing to spend about $1,000 per year, which was less than 1% of their budget. That consultant told them that the most important action they could take as an organization would be for the leadership and staff across the organization to become technologically fluent. They decided to hire internal tech staff, which took up about 20% of their budget. Their technology systems improved a bit, but they kept losing tech leaders. This ministry was not effective because the leadership at first did not invest in tech, and then only invested in tech tokenism. If they had applied principles of incarnational ministry by ensuring that their original leaders and staff became bilingual with technology, it is likely that they could have retained more tech leaders to enable them to succeed.

Church X and the Tech Law of the Lid. This church lived in one of the top technology hotspots in the world. It also had one of the largest technology ministries in any church. Unfortunately, the pastor of the church had an incredible vision for arts ministry but no vision for technology ministry and would not put any resources behind it. The result was that the top tech leaders in the church had to go outside the church to exercise their tech leadership. The technology ministry eventually disbanded. John Maxwell describes one of his principles of leadership as the Law of the Lid (Maxwell , 2007). Maxwell’s law of the lid is that a level 7 leader can only lead other leaders up to a level 6, so that their leadership level effectively sets a lid on the strength of their leaders. The same principle applies in the strength of a leader in technology. The organization leader doesn’t have to be a 10 tech leader to attract level 10 tech leaders (although it helps). The top leader needs to value technology enough to 1) become bicultural across tech enough to see the vision of other techies, and 2) be willing to put the appropriate resources toward tech to attract level 10 tech leaders. The “lid” becomes the leader’s ability to invest appropriate resources in the appropriate areas of technology needed to attract tech leaders. This church was full of level 9 and 10 tech leaders but only put resources needed to sustain level 1 or 2 tech leaders.

Relational Ministry X. This ministry recognizes that the “neighborhood is changing.” and if it does not improve its technology strategy, then it will lose its relevance in the next 10-20 years. The challenge is that its core competency is relational ministry. Because of that, nearly all of its staff are digital immigrants that are resistant to technology because it can become a barrier to relationship. As an organization, it has essentially defined its identity as being technology-resistant. The younger tech staff have tried to argue that the generational influx of digital natives in society makes the ministry comparable to a White, English-speaking urban church in a soon-to-be all-Spanish neighborhood. To succeed, the church would need to recognize change in the environment and stop defining its culture as a White English-speaking church. Similarly, the ministry needs to stop defining its understanding of relational ministry as being opposed to technology. The ministry experiences a slow decline both due to changing demographics and the increasing cost of having such a highly relational model. What needs to happen is for the top leadership to be intentional about changing the culture of the organization. The leader can either choose to create an integrated bilingual culture where everyone must learn the language of the other or create a “church plant” of a different culture within the organization. Many institutions of higher education do this by creating a separate online division with a distinct culture from the rest of the organization. This new organization can still retain much of the relational DNA of the original ministry, but it will need to consider questions like “What do very relational online courses look like?” rather than “We just cannot do online courses with our values.”