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

03Black Swan Wargaming Scenarios

Based on the shift in meeting purpose to wargaming, three scenarios have been developed in light of the FY 25-26 Strategy Document.

Black Swan I · The AI-Driven Economic & Technological Cascade

This scenario evaluates Artificial Intelligence not only as a transformative force on internal workflows and global communication, but as the root driver of downstream economic, retail, and supply-chain disruption that in turn destabilizes the technological substrate WOF depends on. AI is both the accelerant and the shockwave.

Evaluated risks:

• Category Collapse — total commoditization of religious content if AI can generate high-quality books and courses in Bishop Barron's style at zero marginal cost, nullifying WOF's traditional value proposition.
• Ideological Displacement — risk of losing "humanity" in the evangelical process if a seeker's primary conversation partner becomes a machine, compromising the sacramental and personal nature of the mission.
• AI-Driven Retail & Publishing Collapse — AI-generated content floods Amazon, Audible, and other retail channels, collapsing discoverability and margin for human-authored Catholic publishing. Distributors change terms in response (royalty cuts, AI-content gating, algorithmic deprioritization).
• AI-Driven Economic Shock — rapid labor displacement, capital concentration, or an AI-triggered market correction reduces disposable donor income and devotional spend. A geopolitical AI arms race drives export controls, chip shortages, paper/logistics disruption.
• Technological Dependency & Cascade Failure — the same AI shock that destabilizes the economy destabilizes the platforms WOF rides on. A hyperscaler outage, pricing shock, or policy shift could paralyze integrated WOF operations in a single week.
• Digital Deplatforming — sudden suspension by YouTube or Meta, or catastrophic loss of member data on the Circle platform, as platforms use AI-driven moderation at scale and religious speech falls outside narrowing acceptability windows.

Black Swan II · Geopolitical Reputation Crisis & Coordinated Attack

Word on Fire is swept up in a major geopolitical event. As a key player in the defining global story of the moment, WOF finds itself in a position where every available option draws fire from someone. Partisans on both sides are unhappy with the positions taken, the allies, and the silences. There are no good options — only trade-offs between which constituencies are alienated.

Evaluated risks:

• No-Win Positioning — every public stance, including silence, is read as a partisan betrayal by some faction. Traditional communications playbooks fail because there is no neutral ground.
• Coordinated Reputation Attack — adversaries dig through history looking for tabloid material. Personal attacks on Bishop Barron and Father Steve. The 2022 crisis is weaponized as "proof" the organization is compromised.
• Organized Social Media Assault — systemic, coordinated attacks across X, YouTube, Meta, Amazon and Google reviews, podcast ratings. Review-bombing, mass reporting, dogpiling — some domestic activists, others foreign influence operations from Russia, Iran, North Korea, China.
• Cyberattack Campaign — probing cyberattack: DDoS against wordonfire.org and the WOF API, credential stuffing, staff phishing, attempts to breach Circle and donor databases.
• Platform Eviction — payment processors, email providers, and hosting providers face activist pressure to drop WOF. Deplatforming cascades — one eviction emboldens the next.
• Internal Shock & Staff Exposure — staff doxxed and harassed. Board members face professional consequences. Internal disagreement fractures the team at the moment unity is most needed.

Black Swan III · Runaway Success & Uncontrolled Hypergrowth

What happens when Word on Fire wins too hard, too fast. A transformational wealthy donor and a concurrent breakout product — one that appeals to Catholics and non-Catholics alike — hit at the same moment. Overnight, WOF is a multi-billion-dollar organization. The customer base grows 50x in a few short weeks. This is the positive black swan, and it is potentially more destructive than the negative ones, because the organization is pattern-matched and staffed for an entirely different scale.

Evaluated risks:

• Loss of Mission, Character, and Identity — the spiritual, theological, and editorial soul of WOF, built over decades around Bishop Barron's voice and Affirmative Orthodoxy, is diluted by the sheer volume of new hires, new managers, and new ideas.
• Vision Fragmentation — every new manager arrives with their own vision for what WOF is and should do. Pet projects proliferate. "What is Word on Fire?" becomes a question no two leaders answer the same way.
• Middle Management Infighting — resource competition becomes the main thing on most middle managers' minds. Political maneuvering and budget battles consume leadership attention. Culture turns from apostolic to corporate within a single cycle.
• Hiring Shock — quality of hire drops. Formation and acculturation of new staff is impossible at pace. Mission-aligned and mercenary, Catholics and non-Catholics, all enter at once with no time to discern.
• Marketing & Sales Overwhelm — systems buckle. Brand discipline collapses. Messaging becomes inconsistent.
• Development Collapse Under Upside — the team cannot keep pace with high-level donors trying to give. Calls dropped, follow-ups forgotten, good leads lost in the chaos. Seven- and eight-figure gift opportunities evaporate because no one returned the email.
• Technical Infrastructure Buckling — servers, WOF API, Circle, streaming, commerce infrastructure all buckle under 50x load. New converts hit a broken funnel.
• Supply Chain & Fulfillment Failure — third-party warehouses overwhelmed. Backorders stretch months. Review scores collapse.
• Donor & Community Trust Erosion — the experience of interacting with WOF degrades precisely when millions of new people are forming their first impression.

04The Schedule