How Digital Transformation Can Serve People's Needs

The landscape of ministry is changing rapidly. Digital transformation has become essential, but it can't be done through technology alone. Leaders need a mindset centered around the people they aim to serve.

What does it mean to build digital tools that truly meet people's needs? The concept of human-centered design offers a framework. It starts with empathy - deeply understanding the experiences of end users. Imagine if before creating a new discipleship program, you first listened to the spiritual journeys of young believers. How might that shape your approach?

The empathy stage leads into defining the problem you aim to solve. Too often organizations presume they already know the solution. Prototyping and iteration bring assumptions into reality. Testing light, small versions allows direction change based on feedback. Failure becomes a teacher rather than an ending.

The empathy mindset applies not just to digital tools but to AI and other emerging technologies. As AI grows more sophisticated, how might it shift ministry? Content that organizations once owned may be disseminated in new ways. Rather than reacting fearfully, the opportunity is to pay attention with humility. AI may change the methods, but the gospel remains.

Shifts in society and technology create openings to reach new generations. Post-COVID, many young leaders hunger for authentic faith experiences. When the ground beneath us shakes, when the soil of old assumptions turns over, it allows for new seeds to take root. May we have eyes to see the opportunities and hearts willing to join in what God is doing now.

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Transcription

00:00:05
            

Well, how's it going, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Holy Donuts podcast. I'm your host, Matt Lombardi, joined today by my good friend Corey Unger. Corey, how are you doing, man? Doing awesome.        

00:00:15
            

Awesome. Well, Corey is the former vp of digital solutions with Servant IO, along with numerous other organizations where he served in helping ministries think through growth, digital transformation, all the things that are critical to do ministry in the 21st century. So, Corey, thanks so much for joining me today, man. Could you just give our audience a little bit of a background on you, how you got into kind of the digital space and specifically serving ministries in that role? Sure.        

00:00:43
            

Well, it's honored to be here, Matt. It's going to be fun, interesting, interesting, maybe set of stories. I don't know that I knew that I was going to be working in the intersection of technology. I had been a denominational leader for a while, and then I started working in networks, working behind the scenes all the way up to work in some settings where people were in governmental settings, a couple presidents in countries where they had these really challenging problems. And I was part of a couple think tanks and then found that some of the problems were needing to understand the human network side of it.        

00:01:22
            

But then also what were the tools and technologies that institutions and organizations were using. So out of that work, found myself working adjacent to things like large, distributed, federated platforms and AI and all that stuff. Now, I came into it with an eye to what are the human interactions and where do the technologies fit in. I've been doing that for probably about the last five to seven years. But in the last two years, I was working with Servant IO, who is a digital transformation consultancy.        

00:01:55
            

And really what servant does is servant does a section of strategy for the organization. They also do design and creative as well as data and engineering. What they really serve is those ministries and platforms who have pretty large scale, like reach larger organizations that serve many churches, more so than building a single website for a church. So it's been an amazing journey because serving really servant fish that niche of caring for, connecting the church at the technology level and trying to bring it into the modern era because it's, and there's others out there doing it. Servant is just one of many, but we as servant really are in a unique niche.        

00:02:37
            

So it's pretty honored to be there. So, yeah. So in that role in working in the world of kind of digital transformation and working through helping these organizations think through, how do you, how do you, you know, have better platforms that serve tons of organizations? Are there any, any strategies, any things that you've worked on that you think are absolutely mission critical for people in the nonprofit, the kind of church space to know about, or some things that have been interesting to you that you'd like to share with the audience? Sure.        

00:03:09
            

Yeah.        

00:03:12
            

The word, the phrase human centered design is one of them. Often when you build technology, you think that your problem is that you don't have a tool. And that may be the case, but quite often is that we don't understand a process, and it's usually a process around people. Good design, good technology usually tries to fit into making life easier. What is it?        

00:03:38
            

To reduce some friction, and often churches or organizations, there's so much intuitive and very relational work that's happening when you build technology. It's probably one of the best things you can do is start thinking from the end user, the last person, what are they feeling on the ground? So human centered design thinking, all those things are extremely helpful. That's one side of things that I'd say. If you go to design thinking, empathy is the first thing that you start with.        

00:04:11
            

If you're in the world of solutioning whatever it may be, whether it's digital or it's working with donors, if you raise your empathy, you'll find that you start to understand the audience you're trying to reach. That counts for digital. It also counts for just about everything else. So that's one. The second would be is even though there's all the hype and the buzz about AI right now, it's getting, you know, you look at Nvidia stock and, yeah, I think they're doing.        

00:04:38
            

I think they're doing okay right now. Yeah. Many, many countries in the world. Yeah, yeah. That, the scale of that and how it's going to impact the world and the church, I think is just something to.        

00:04:53
            

Is it to be fearful? I don't know. I think there's a lot of opinions on that, but all I know is that the printing press changed things a lot, and we're pretty happy with sola scriptura and having the, the Bible available to us. I think that because this is a shift on how information is disseminated, I think it'll inevitably have a similar kind of shift. So those would be two massive things would be, or two things to know is pay attention to how AI is going to change things and then, you know, really think about people.        

00:05:25
            

Yeah. So can you, for those who are not familiar with design thinking or, you know, centered design, and I know you kind of said pay it kind of summed up with empathy for the end user experience. If you're an organization out there and you typically just build campaigns, products, services around, well, anecdotal things that we see, oh, well, we think there's need for this or that. How do you get started with this kind of design thinking? That's going to be a little bit more of a framework of how you build.        

00:05:55
            

Could you kind of walk just the basics of how someone even gets started with that? Yeah, I mean, if you look up design thinking on Google, everyone's going to find it. So I'm not going to walk through the entire process, but I'm going to talk through the premise of design thinking. It came out of Stanford University. A guy named George Kimball built it out, or was one of the people that built out Stanford to build design thinking.        

00:06:19
            

Where it usually starts off is this world of empathy, not just feeling the emotion of something, but living in the shoes of a group of people, whether that's trying to create a solution. It's kind of like when you go to exegeta city as a church or a community as a church, and you want to learn who is that community? Who are you going to serve? In design thinking? That is the process of gaining empathy to understand the other groups that you want to work with.        

00:06:43
            

There's a couple steps in it and there's six or seven steps in it. The middle step is going to be this step of prototyping, because every time that you think you have a solution, a lot of times your solution is a solution that you might be perceiving but it may not be what the people want. Yeah. So imagine if you build your church program, your discipleship program, or you have an idea that this campaign is going to do a certain thing. You go and you listen, you empathize, listen to a whole bunch, and then you want to design, and then you want to prototype.        

00:07:11
            

And the prototype. One of the probably skills of prototyping within design thinking is to say, I might be wrong. I thought this solution was going to work and your prototyping should come back and go, maybe it wasn't. So lots of feedback. You don't even have to be building product to leverage it.        

00:07:33
            

It's a Matter of listening well and trying something out and seeing what happens. Did that resonate with them? And then once you start actually getting things prototyped out, you then can start building and then getting constant feedback from that build. So you prototype out. You want to build it out.        

00:07:52
            

Now, the process that I find is really helpful there is that you get you closer to the root cause problems or the root cause? Or what are the opportunities? Often we build with a lot of presumption, like we think we have the solution, so we go build it. We spend a bunch of money design thinking as a process. Imagine at the highest level, it's like, listen, learn, build.        

00:08:21
            

Yeah, it is a little more scientific than that. And they get into like it's based on fractals and all this other stuff and how you build the right size teams and everything like that. But for the context of this, it's pretty much listen, learn, build. That's great. Well, hey there, holy donuts.        

00:08:36
            

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00:09:01
            

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00:09:30
            

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00:09:41
            

A lot of the ministries that we get a chance to work with or just that we talk to, right? I think would be a little bit nervous. When they build things, it tends to be we need to have certainty and we all move in the same direction. Because what if we build a prototype and it's wrong and invested all this time and money and we all look dumb, right? So how do you help organizations overcome some of those roadblocks when they traditionally have thought through, if we build it, they will come and we measure success or failure at the end of the project and we say, well, I guess that was a failure.        

00:10:13
            

Yes, no one wanted it, but they don't actually take that step along the way to prototype or sometimes prototype 234567 times. How do you help organizations kind of break out of that and think more along, hey, you got a prototype and learn along the way. It's a great question. You know, it's funny because depending on how big the organization is, they may, they, we as organizations may not have the muscle to slow down to realize that you may want to test a very small thing before you go build a big thing. So even using the concept of a prototype in design, thinking, it's supposed to be very light and very small.        

00:10:49
            

So an example, it's similar to like lean startup where they have build, measure, learn stuff. It's this idea of, I forget if it was peapod, but they used one example in that book where they said, this gentleman went out to create peapod. And the way he got started was he walked around with a notepad. He walked to a person's house and said, hey, if I go get your groceries, did you pay me a couple bucks? And he basically got the groceries, came back.        

00:11:14
            

So what was his prototype? It was a notepad and a pencil and his gas money. Yeah, they validated it. It was like people were like, yeah, I don't have to go shopping. I love that.        

00:11:23
            

And then his next upgrade of prototype was he started using a spreadsheet. So prototypes are actually supposed to save you from tremendous amounts of cost where all of a sudden you thought a market was going to love something, or you thought that a group of people were really going to care about this program. So do a very light version of it and see if people are like, yeah, I do like that. You know, so ultimately, when it comes to stewardship in the church, this is a way to hopefully steward best because you make a couple estimations and then you can validate those and then go, cool, let's build now, God, I mean, God can always have you go a different direction to say, build an art because I know, send water, you know. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.        

00:12:04
            

No, that makes sense. That makes sense. Okay, so I moving on just to keep it because we could probably sit and talk for an hour, you know? You know, we could. So just to move on kind.        

00:12:14
            

Next question I like to usually ask our guests. What's a kind of macro trend you're seeing in the space right now in nonprofit ministry world? This guy really excited. What's one that's got you a little bit concerned if you're kind of getting the truth serum there? Macro trends, there's probably a lot of those.        

00:12:36
            

A macro trend that I think has me excited is that the next generation of young leaders are hungry and thirsty for not just authenticity, but really experiencing God and knowing one another. I find that there's a lot of opportunity in the next generation of people who are in generation is not just age, it's a season of people. Post COVID, I feel like we have an incredible opportunity to grow and just lean into where the Lord is moving. As a trend, often it's hard for us to move and then God disrupts us. You know, like if you look at the bible, how many times does God displace people, including his own people?        

00:13:21
            

Constantly. Yeah. So as a macro trend, I'd say that the encouragement to see that when, as hard as things are, when they get shaken up, there's incredible opportunity. So I see the trend of kingdom opportunity. Yeah.        

00:13:38
            

And that's a trend, you know, for me because, like, sometimes the worse, the more things get shaken up, the more, the more the ground. It's like the soil getting tilled up and turned over. It's a great place for new seeds. Yeah, that's awesome. So on the other side, opposite go.        

00:13:52
            

A little bit pessimistic for me for a minute. Pessimistic, wow. I would be super vulnerable or transparent on this one. I think our, and I'll include myself in this one. I think our own confidence that we know the answers to things that lead to polarization, whatever that means, whether that be political, spiritual, all these other things.        

00:14:17
            

I think if we're willing to let our mindset be humbled before the Lord and have the Romans twelve transforming of the mind, I think our own hubris. My hubris, our pride. I think pride is the thing that is concerning is like, are we willing to be corrected when the Lord corrects us? So. Good one.        

00:14:39
            

Yeah, so that's, yeah, that's, is it a concern? I don't know. God wins. It's a concern, but it's concern in the short term, right. That we wouldn't kind of walk into everything God's got for us, right.        

00:14:51
            

Or that we wouldn't. I mean, it's ultimately about, okay, God's going to win. He knows where he's going with his plan. Do you want to be part of it? Do you want to get the joy of being part of that mission?        

00:15:00
            

Or are you going to like, sit on the sidelines, right. And think, oh, I know better. So I'm just going to watch that go by me and look at the end of your life and say, man, I missed what God was doing in my generation, right. And so I think that's not, that's the challenge for all of us is say, hey, do you want to be part of what God's doing in this generation or do you want to sit on the sidelines and live with that regret of man. I could have been part of something that was really world changing.        

00:15:23
            

So, Corey, what's a resource you like to recommend? I know you're a big reader. You're a big learner. What's a resource? Podcast?        

00:15:31
            

Book article that you like to recommend to people working in industry space? I don't know that this one would be on the normal list. It comes to mind as you ask that question. Yeah, I love it. It's the book called Range, and the author is escaping me.        

00:15:50
            

I'm gonna look it up right now. Yeah, look it up. It's like David something.        

00:15:58
            

It's about general triumph in a specialized world. There it is. There you go. So that is by David Epstein. David Epstein.        

00:16:05
            

Ah. Thought it was esteem. Okay. So the premise of the book range and the reason that I think it's relevant to today is so many ministries and so many organizations have specialized their skills around being specialists in a particular area around knowledge. Like, oh, we're, we're, we're the experts in this thing that moves this bit of knowledge around, this bit of content, because think about how many things in the church are content driven.        

00:16:34
            

Yep, it's a lot, you know? And now all of a sudden, we have these shifting tides of how people distribute and deploy content. So people who used to be specialists in one season may not be specialists in the next. So there's going to be a. Could be a pretty substantive transference of how many people are being leveraged to do tasks that we used to do before.        

00:16:55
            

Yeah. Now the book range, talks about how generalists and specialists operate differently, and it really highlights that when you specialize in something, it talks about the 10,000 hours. You know, 10,000 hours. You become Tiger woods and you can play golf and be the best in the world, or Serena Williams. Then they talked about all these examples where there was these people who had done some of this musical instrument, some of this computer programming, and they did all these really adjacent things.        

00:17:27
            

But it was the creativity and the ability to see the patterns between all those pieces that some of those people would become the ones who actually went further than, or in some ways more integrated. It was a fascinating book because I've seen some people in my life that became absolutely essential because they knew how to integrate things. And the more these different tools and the different shifts in society, I see a rise of the need to know how to see how things fit together. And the people who know how to think and operate in those ways, I think are going to know how to use the tools that operate in those ways. So it's a little bit of a different book, but people who tend to see how everything's connected together on a spiritual level, you can say, that's John 17.        

00:18:15
            

Yeah. How does the body fit together? You know, I think there's going to be more need for people to integrate tools as opposed to be specialist as creating the tools. You know, that's so good. Yeah.        

00:18:27
            

And more and more, it's organizations need, I would say at least one or two people on the team. Right. No Matter depending on the size, that are generals that can kind of look across the board and say, okay, I know I'm not a specialist, but there's that curse of knowledge that happens when you are a specialist in a field where oftentimes you limit the possibilities. Cause you know too much. Right.        

00:18:47
            

And there's a. There is a. I think it was Marc Andreessen who had an x tweet, storm, whatever, whatever they're calling these Twitter threads now when it's x. About this the other day, that the hubris of most tech founders to think, oh, this will be easy, is a necessary requirement to innovation, because if they were actually specialists who knew how hard the task would be, they would never do it. But it takes that level of general kind of that range, right, to say, well, I know enough about this to be dangerous, and I'm just foolhardy enough to jump in with everything that, that actually allows real cool products to be built, transformation to happen.        

00:19:32
            

But that only happens we have people who are generalists who actually don't know the field maybe as well as they should. I mean, I think of someone like, you know, the most famous example right now is Elon Musk, right? Like, Elon Musk had never built a car before. He had never built a rocket before. He had never built a brain chip before.        

00:19:50
            

Yet being in general, is he able to see patterns across the board and lead teams that come up with some pretty cool, innovative stuff. So love that book recommendation. Love that's outside the box range. David Epstein will definitely put that in the show notes. Corey, if people want to connect with you, if they want to say, hey, can you come talk to our organization.        

00:20:08
            

About this, this stuff? Can you, can we work with you? Can we just connect on a virtual coffee? What's the best way to get in contact with you? What's the best way to kind of follow you on the Internet that's out there?        

00:20:20
            

I'm one of those odd people that does not do a lot of Internet things, even though I work in technology, so believe it or not. Corey Unger ctmail.com is my personal email, so that's probably the best way. It's funny, I did a lot of work for almost a, almost just under a decade where the work that I did was not really highly public in the front facing of things. And I just kind of built this process of just serve and work behind the scenes. And it was kind of, it was probably one of the more amazing things that I got to do because oftentimes when you walk in and serve people, there's usually like a hook like, well, what are you trying to like, what's the way?        

00:21:04
            

Like, how are we going to help each other and all this other stuff? I was in a particular scenario where I was working with a group who said, hey, let's support people behind the scenes and not actually try to get credit for anything. And, you know, literally no website, no business cards. But what I learned about it, at least on a personal level, is go where God sends you and serve behind the scenes and just be helpful to people. And so with doing that, I actually shut down all my social stuff.        

00:21:30
            

I think I have a LinkedIn page that makes sure that I can still say yes to people, but I don't use it. Yeah, that's about it. All right. So email for you is the best option. Corey, thanks so much for joining me today, man.        

00:21:40
            

Really appreciate it and always grateful for your wisdom and your insight. Awesome. Thank you.        

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