Problems
Every organization has problems. Some of these problems are small (e.g. finding a new supplier, or expanding into a new overseas market). Some of them are big problems (e.g. a new technology may render your core product obsolete, or your nonprofit's flagship project is actually creating more harm than good). An organization's long-term success depends on its ability to solve the large problems.
As a general rule, large organizations focus the bulk of their energy on the small, short-term problems while neglecting the large-scale problems. We avoid difficult problems because they're psychologically uncomfortable. Dealing with a small problem makes you an innovator and leads to substantial improvements in your key metrics. Dealing with a large problem may reveal that your entire department's work is obsolete. Solving a lot of small problems makes you promotable. Attempting to solve a large problem may leave you branded as a heretic.
In the Adventist church, we face a long series of large problems that receive a relative pittance of attention. For example:
If you're curious what your organization's large problems are, pay attention to the excuses executives and department leaders give when they explain poor performance in their annual reports. When enough people have the same problem, it becomes a "trend" or "societal shift" your organization is dealing with. Labelling your large problems as trends in society doesn't solve the root problem (your organization still needs to fix the problem in order to survive), but it absolves you of responsibility for fixing it.
Solving Large Problems
Small problems usually have an obvious solution. Project going well and needs help accelerating? Allocate more funds. Running low on key personnel? Do more recruiting trips. Key people keep leaving? Raise salaries. Department keeps having issues? Fire or relocate people. Small problems are solved by taking an existing solution that's worked elsewhere and applying it to a new setting. Large problems require new solutions that don't exist yet (going from 0 to 1 instead of 1 to n, as Paypal co-founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel explains in his book, Zero to One). They require technology, which I define here as "a breakthrough approach to accomplishing a specific task that is sufficiently cheaper/faster/etc (whatever the relevant metric is) to be able to solve your large problem at scale."
Because large problems require new solutions, they require a different type of problem solver. New solutions aren't found by people specialized in management because the typical administrator has spent their life optimizing for solving small problems with known solutions. New solutions are found through extensive research and rapid experimentation, most often through small teams of capable people working together (see GYC, church planting teams, startups, etc.).
For the Adventist church to systematically find large-scale solutions to deeply-embedded large problems, we first need to identify the most important problems, and then dedicate significant, walled-off (from bureaucracy) resources to solving them. I don't know how to make that happen, but it's an important enough problem to merit investigation.
What are the Most Important Problems in Your Field?
The late mathematician Richard Hamming, who worked on the Manhattan Project, won the third-ever Turing Award (the Nobel Prize for mathematics), and made several ground-breaking contributions to the mathematics, habitually asked scientists in other fields, "What are the most important problems in your field?"
While he reportedly often asked this question to troll his fellow scientists for not working on whatever problem the answered with, the question reveals a deep focus on problem selection in his research. He recognized that the only way for him to do breakthrough scientific research was to work on the subset of problems for which a breakthrough would be a meaningful contribution to the field. At whatever level of an organization you work in, inertia will constantly pull you towards the small, obvious problems that demand solution. The first step towards working on the large problems that actually matter is to identify the answer to the Hamming question for your field: "What are the most important problems in your field?" Then start finding ways to solve them.