Michael has written a pamphlet entitled “You are a towel.”  His premise is that if you go to a hotel and the towel in the bathroom is dirty you will blame the hotel.  Then you will see everything else that is wrong with the hotel, the city and maybe even the country.  You form opinions, unaware that all the way along you are editing them and making subconscious assumptions about everything else connected with that towel.  However much the hotel might claim to be interested in customer satisfaction, if the towel is dirty and no-one is bothered, then you know the claim is rubbish.  The vision and the practice do not coincide.

He then suggests that in our organisations, each of us is like a towel. The values and qualities each of us brings to our organisation have a huge impact on the organisation and on perception of the organisation.  If that perception is not glorious, then what can be done?  The solution, Michael argues, is not to sort the towel, since there will always be another dirty towel.  Instead he argues it’s the vision and value of the organisation which needs to be understood and shared by and with all the people in the organisation.  ‘Passionate companies engage everyone involved in their organisation by inspiration. Everyone knows that they are the company…. there are no bits or parts of the company, and no unimportant people.  They have moved from “top-down” fragmented organisations to “centre-out” holistic ones.’ That’s what our little firm is – imperfectly – aiming for too.  This way, even if the towel is occasionally dirty, the ethos shines through, and the dirty towel is forgiven for being dirty, because you understand how that happened, and anyway, someone will care enough to sort it out.

The Church’s ethos – its value statement – is surely the command to love God and to love one another. Without this, everything else is pointless.  But so far, my perception is that there are a lot of dirty towels in the C of E priestly recruitment process through which VIT has travelled so far, the system is very poor at working out whether or not they are dirty, (despite the perception created) and has little idea how to clean them if it wanted to.  This suggests to me that the vision and the practice are some way apart.  What has Mr Wolff to say about this?

“If you don’t see consistent experiences, clarity and integrity, you are not realising your full potential….”

So there is work to be done: a start might be for this organisation, the Church, to have recruitment, training and personnel placement and management processes characterised by consistency, clarity and integrity.  If Michael is right (and I think he is) then this should give us something to pray for.

And, by the way, the towels in the remote house we are staying in on the Cowal Peninsula are excellent.

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