Applying Mintzberg’s concept of Community Ships

Recently I interviewed Henry Mintzberg about his latest book ‘Understanding Organizations…Finally!: Structuring in Sevens’. Central in Henry Mintzberg’s work about organizations is the question how they organize themselves to get work done.

Although his research and examples largely originate from organizations in the private and public sector, in his latest book he also describes a special kind of organization that does not fit into one of these categories: ‘The Community Ship’.

According to Mintzberg, Community Ships have the following characteristics:

• Their culture forces the community to pull together
• Members of the community are considered to be more than employees
• The community is tightly knit and operates differently from other organizations in their environment (like a ship at sea).
• The community closes ranks to protect itself from influences from the outside world, or use its position for evangelism (‘to launch missives at whatever they want to change on shore’.)

Congregational church communities as Community Ships

In this post I apply Mintzberg’s concept of ‘Community Ships’ to congregational church communities.

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