The Inverted Donut, the Lattice, and the Starfish: Designing the Organizational Architecture for All

The Inverted Donut, the Lattice, and the Starfish: Designing the Organizational Architecture for All

Peifeng Mary Tzen Ho | 2016

Abstract

All Nations Family—also known as All Nations—is a mission organization that exists to start church planting movements among the least reached peoples of the world, as part of the global church endeavor to finish the Great Commission in this generation. All Nations currently has two sending hubs which have workers church-planting in 34 countries. To be part of finishing the Great Commission in this generation, All Nations believes that it must train and send more local and near-cultural workers, not just Western cross-cultural workers. Therefore, All Nations aims to multiply 40 sending hubs and church planting communities in strategic cities and locations around the world to mobilize more local and near-cultural workers to ignite church planting movements over the next ten years.

This paper seeks to design a global organizational architecture for multiplying hubs and church movements. To do so, this paper has: 1) analyzed the existing literature on organizational structure, global networks, lattices, federations, and loosely-coupled structures; 2) revisited the historical structures that propelled mission and church planting movements in the previous centuries, and 3) interviewed ten mission organizations and churches that are focused on multiplying hubs and catalyzing church movements. This paper concludes that All Nations—as a global mission organization focused on multiplication—require the scalable configurations of a federal “inverted donut” structure, a lattice structure, and a “starfish” network structure.