The Gathering

Key:   LC Leadership Council  ·  FS Father Steve  ·  BB Bishop Barron

01Primary Goals of the Summit

1. Spend time together, to work on the tough problems of the ministry.
2. Work through scenarios that stress-test how the organization decides under pressure.

02Father Steve's Guidance

• We need to form the organization to be prepared to change and move quickly at all times. This includes the capacity of the staff to move, adapt, and reinvent themselves when things change. True agility is what we should be reaching for.
• We should all understand what a black swan event is and what it could do to our organization — an event so severe and changing that no amount of traditional planning can avert its consequences. The theory was articulated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, starting in 2001, to explain:
  • The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events in history, science, economics, and technology.
  • The non-computability of the probability of consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
  • The psychological biases — individual and collective — that make people blind to uncertainty and to the significant role of rare events in historical affairs.
• We should avoid becoming static, stratified, rigid, and overly concerned with process and procedure over what is actually important.
• Everyone should operate within the fragile / robust / antifragile schema. This is what we as leaders need to build.
• Our organization needs to move from fragile, to robust, then to antifragile — where we actually gain and take advantage of chaos and disorder rather than just survive it.

Key reference

FY 25-26 Strategy Document

03The Schedule