The Quest for Certainty

Currently, I'm reading The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. On page 157 of the former, she writes that in the 1960s:

The appeal of the Christian fundamentalists was similar to that of strict Hasidic sects in the Jewish community: They offered rules and certainty to some young men and women who had found only unhappiness where others had found personal freedom.

Back in the day, I was one of the youth who was revelling in the freedom of the time. Brought up UU in a diverse Washington, DC, congregation, when I went to the University of Wisconsin (Madison), during the turmoil of the late 1960s, I felt like the rest of the world was joining our free, liberal faith. In contrast to my felt sense at the time, Jacoby points out that the turmoil of the 1960s was the seedbed for neoconservatism, fundamentalism, and the Reagan Revolution.

In Outliers: The Story of Success and this wonderful video from the 2008 New Yorker Conference, Malcolm Gladwell points to a "mismeasurement" problem in many fields that is due to a misplaced quest for certainty in examining. While it's true that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior (the mantra of performance-based interviewing), the value of past behavior as a predictor varies with its relevance to the expected future behavior. Dividing a job into its component parts and testing each of these may not provide good results. Please see the Gladwell video for specific examples.

I wonder whether the complexity and the nature of the current UU ministerial examining process is not in part a consequence of the difficulties of some ministers and ministries. How has our UU history served as a seedbed for our conservatism in examining?

On the Other Side of the Interview Table

In this blog, I have mainly been focused on helping candidates prepare for the UU ministerial fellowshipping process and making recommendations for modifying that process. However, I have also started thinking about another use of examining that is often critical to success in ministry.

A little history first. I first became involved in an in-depth study of interviewing because a senior official at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) told me that he believed that improving selection processes, especially interviewing, was the more important action that human resources could do to most improve employment at VA.

This official based this recommendation on his experience in interviewing people for executive positions. He said that the executive interviewees consistency stated that the decisions they most often regretted were selection decisions.

Recently, several UU ministers have told me that one of the critical areas in which they feel least prepared is human resources. Selecting staff, identifying volunteers, and providing guidance to committees and boards are important roles in parish ministry. I even found that knowledge of human resources principles and practices enhanced my capacity to provide spiritual and emotional care to staff and patients as a hospital chaplain.

I'm not going to try to turn this blog into a human resources manual for ministers. However, I encourage my readers to look at the posts here from both sides of the interview table.

Comments about human resources challenges in ministry will be appreciated.