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Excellence in Sacrament Meeting Dan Duckworth Author of the Power Equation, Leading Saints Board Member

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Excellence in Sacrament Meeting Dan Duckworth Author of the Power Equation, Leading Saints Board Member Excellence in Sacrament Meeting Dan Duckworth Author of the Power Equation, Leading Saints Board Member Kurt: Welcome back to another session of Meetings with Saints Virtual Summit. Today we invite into the world of this summit, whatever we're calling it, Dan Duckworth. How are you, Dan? Dan: I'm great. Thanks, Kurt. ​ Kurt: Good. Well, most people that listen to Leading Saints may be familiar with your voice, but you're also the author of the "Power Equation," which I'm excited to get my advanced copy. I'm sure I'll get it. Dan: Absolutely. ​ Kurt: But also it's worth mentioning that you in the last few months, you're officially a member of our board of directors for Leading Saints. So it's awesome to have you there. Dan: I'm happy to be on board. I totally support the mission, and I'm excited to see where it's going from here. Kurt: Cool. Well, the best way for you to support this mission is for us to learn from you and that's why we're doing this here. Obviously, you write books about leadership, you talk about leadership. Anything else that will put you in a context that people aren't as familiar with Dan Duckworth? 1 Dan: Well, I've been teaching leadership for about six years. For the 15 years before that, I was leading change as a totally unauthorized change agent within organizations. And I say that because I started out with no authority whatsoever. I ended up serving as an interim CEO for a year. But the type of changes that I was making, even as an executive, were changes that nobody had authorized. They were deep changes. They were hard changes. And so when I transitioned to teaching change, I've really been exploring the past six years, how do I teach people the mindset about how to get other people to get things done? And so we'll talk about that today in the context of these meetings. Because when you reached out to me and said, "Hey, would you consider doing a spot about meetings in the church?" my first thought was leadership meetings, Ward Council, right? Kurt: Yeah, yeah. ​ Dan: Most of your listeners sit on Ward Councils or they will or have or whatever. And I've had my own experiences, and so I thought, "Okay, this is a great chance to take what I do with executives and their meetings and really think through the church setting." But as I was thinking about that and really pondering through that, I just kept coming back to the sacrament meeting. In my mind, I kept hearing, "It's the most important meeting in the church. It's the most important meeting in the church." And so I wanted to think more deeply about how to bring what I teach in the leadership setting to leaders who are thinking about sacrament meeting. Kurt: Love it. And I love the fact that you always say you didn't start out that you were authorized or someone didn't endow you with a title of some type. Because there's going to be people listening to this session and others think like, "Oh, wow, these are great ideas, but I'm not the bishop or I'm not the Relief Society president, what difference can I really make?" But I think that's a great example of just showing that you don't have to be authorized to create influence in whatever organization that you're in. Dan: Yeah. Some of the things we'll talk about today with sacrament meetings, that's a little bit more difficult because there is a bishopric and they are authorized to plan and execute and oversee the meeting. And so if you decide you want to change the way it works, and you stand up in the middle of it and say, "Hey, let's do something different," it's probably not going to go over that well. At the same time, if you wanted to have influence over the decisions that those people are making, that is completely plausible and possible. It's totally within the scope of your influence to go influence a bishopric if you want to pay the price. And we can talk about that a little bit in the context of the discussion today. Kurt: Cool. All right. I think we're starting with that you're going to articulate what the problem is or where do we begin to understand the problem so we can actually talk about fixing it? Dan: To give you a sense of where I feel the problem is, and this is just me, if you look at sacrament meetings in the church, the statistic that most people will throw around is the activity rate: what percentage of our members show up to sacrament meetings? And the statistics that I've seen over the course of the last few years, depending on where you live, it's somewhere between 2 20% and 40%. I think in the United States, it's a little higher. I think in some of the more developing areas of the church, it's lower like 20% to 25%. So you look at that instantly and you think, "Wow, how do we get more people to come to sacrament meetings?" That's not the problem I'm going to talk about today. Instead, what we're going to talk about is the people who are already there, what kind of experience are they having while they're in sacrament meeting? So if you look at the church handbook and the revised handbook - and I double-checked that once that came out to make sure that this language hadn't changed, what the purpose of sacrament meetings is the same - it says, "The purpose of the meeting is to deepen conversion in Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ." So if that's the purpose, that's the goal, we want our members to have an experience [00:05:00] with Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father. But I'll just say Jesus Christ, for brevity's sake. We want them to have this experience, are they having that experience? Here's where my sort of data points come in. I spent a year in an RV trailer with my family. We drove around the US, we went to a different Ward pretty much every week. And so in addition to my business travels and work travels and international travels, I've seen a lot of different wards and a lot of different environments, a lot of different socio-economic contexts within the United States. And what I can tell you is that the church congregations that I attended are pretty much all the same in terms of the level of engagement and the way the members are engaging. There's a little bit of a spread, few positive deviance, a few negative deviance, but for the most part, we're normal. So if I were to tell you, just looking at engagement, when we think about Gallup, they do the engagement surveys for the workplace for the employees and they say that 70% of the workforce is disengaged. And their definition or the way they describe disengaged is sleepwalking. That 70% of the workforce is either sleepwalking through their workday or they're actively disengaged, which means they're sabotaging the organization. And most members of the church who feel negatively towards the church, they're not going to sabotage, they're just going to not come to church. The ones who are there, we're talking about this disengaged population. If I were to ask you, Kurt, what percentage you would say are disengaged in an average sacrament meeting, meaning they're there but they're sleepwalking through the meeting? What percent would you guess? Kurt: I would say, and I want to make sure I don't use hyperbole here, but, man, if you were to push me on that, I would say 90% on average are disengaged in a sacrament meeting. Am I being too extreme? Dan: Here's just the data set for you. Okay? ​ Kurt: All right. ​ Dan: I was traveling with my wife last month thinking about this webinar that we were going to do, and so I found myself in an island community where the church is strong enough, strong community there. And so there's a really well-organized sacrament meetings. And as I'm sitting 3 there, I do what I've done for the last two or three years, which is the little sociologists to me starts to kick in, and I start to look for patterns and what's going on and why is this happening? Kurt: I'm glad I'm not alone, Dan. I thought I was alone. ​ Dan: You do the same thing, right? As I'm sitting there, I looked down my row and I noticed that on my row there wasn't very many people paying attention. Kurt: And you mean for visual cues, right? ​ Dan: Exactly. They're on their phone, they're talking to their neighbor - different things like that. So I watched for a while until I was sure that this was the state. That this wasn't like one blip, no one was looking. So I'm watching, "Okay, I can tell who's engaged, who's not engaged." Out of the 7 people across the entire, you know, whatever row we were in - we were in the fourth row - only 3 of them were engaged with the speaker.
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