Kishkumen wrote: ↑Wed Jul 28, 2021 10:43 am
In your view is it just individual leaders who are the problem or is it leadership structure? Is Dehlin motivating the leaders to make better decisions or is he seeking radical restructuring?
Well, it would only be my speculation based on listening to his podcasts and knowing a few things about his professional background. I think we should really hear from John on this.
Corporate activism is a tricky business. It is all about leverage vs power. If you have leverage, you can force people with power to do things differently. If you can't get that leverage, you're just a survey respondent.
If you think like corporate activists, then all issues are the fault of leadership. So the public side of your campaign must convince as many people as possible that there is something deeply wrong with leadership. That may seem obvious, but just saying "they suck" or listing grievances doesn't get very far. You need leverage. Which means, you have to painstakingly connect every negative outcome and every missing positive outcome directly to a failure of leadership.
As a recurring corporate example: leadership does too many acquisitions that end up dilutive to the business over time, despite sounding good when executed. Disgruntled investors who want change can't simply complain about these outcomes as a matter of fact, because management will have a hundred reasons why it isn't their fault and the next deal will be a good one. So you have to go back through and figure out the meta-story, the forest from the trees story that captures why this team is unworthy of trust. So you go digging and learn through careful study of the SEC filings that this leadership team has only one KPI on which compensation is set: growth in total EBITDA dollars. You know that other leadership teams in this industry are evaluated based on a balanced scorecard which considers market share, organic profitability, and return on invested capital. The meta story, you learn, is that this company's leadership does bad acquisitions because they're perversely incentivized to do bad acquisitions, which is illogical and unreliable, but easily fixed with a good compensation consultant. There is your leverage.
So whether one individual is a crook, or an idiot, or suboptimal leadership structure, bad decisioning processes, faulty assumptions, perverse incentives, weak board governance, it's all just facets of the same gem. The gem being, all of the ways to apply leverage to get leadership to make hard changes. Alternative is take away their tickets to lead (get them fired) and elect new, better leaders.
In a sense, Dehlin is doing this rather effectively as a public activist. Every time a prospective member drops the missionaries, or a member stops paying tithing, goes inactive, resigns, or even shares a Mormon Stories episode with a friend, LDS church leaders lose the right to act as leaders for one more person. He's slowly kicking them out of their jobs, unless they change.
And we have seen a lot of change, right? But this only emboldens Dehlin to press for more. Eventually, either everyone will leave, which is a win for social justice. Or, leaders will finally fix the root of what causes harm to individuals and families. How far does that fix extend? Maybe in Dehlin's mind, it will never stop until we get a full apology and confession that they're just guys making things up with good intentions. Or rather, a democratic secular church leadership model. Who can say - I haven't heard John articulate the end game and that would be very interesting to hear from him.
So my view on "informed consent" is it's just one high-leverage point, but a pretty good one. Informed consent resonates with every age group. Kids. Youth. Adults. It hits right at missionary work. It impugns the integrity of leadership with marvelous succinctness. And importantly, the remedy is so easy, right? Just
be honest. Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It demands SEC-like transparency on history, finances, governance. All of it. If you consider leverage per word, "informed consent" might be the most brilliant and effective LDS activism slogan of all time.
And to be clear (per my catch-22 comment above), I think John is fully aware that the remedy isn't simple AT ALL. Not if the goal is greater church retention and membership growth. But Dehlin isn't like Value Act or Starboard going after a corporate target for aligned investment gains. He's more like an environmental activist going after Exxon to make the world a better place. Same playbook, different returns profile. John doesn't own stock in the growth of Mormonism, but he is personally deeply invested in a more positive outcome for Mormonism. He wants Mormonism to do less harm in the world more than he wants Mormonism to grow.
But informed consent is just one point John uses to apply leverage on leadership. Listen to just about any Mormon Stories episode and what happens? Eventually, he will run down the same litany of points linking bad outcomes to systemic failures in the LDS church leadership model -- individuals, structure, incentives, the works. He's reiterating his case, attributing all of the bad outcomes and the missing positive outcomes to failed management, all assembled and packaged in a leverage playbook. He is pretty consistent about repeating the message while continuing to collect more data to bolster the case. Church leaders are right to be afraid of him.
This is all just my opinion. Again, it would be helpful to hear from John Dehlin himself on this. Analogies are only as good as the storytelling power of the key overlapping theme. I would say the corporate activism analogy has relevance only insofar as John expects positive net benefits to Mormons and society at large through whatever causation exists between the leverage he's applying and "inspired" changes made by LDS leadership.