POSIWID?! Bob, is that a typo? No, please recall that I promised yesterday a way to think about what our focus actually is, not what we say it is. POSIWID is a term introduced by Stafford Beer in the early 2000s:

The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does (POSIWID).

Not what we say it does or what we hope it does but what it actually does. Beer wrote:

There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. – Wikipedia: The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does

For example, if you observed a church over several weeks, what would you say its purpose is? The church might have a mission statement tucked away in a drawer somewhere, but what would your observations about the church’s activities lead you to believe its mission is?

I posed that question to a leader in a Christian mission, and his immediate response was something like:

To get as many people to attend the Sunday morning performance as possible.

Exactly. What about the average American Christian? Or you and I? Do we live that differently from our neighbors? Another formulation of POSIWID is the familiar adage:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. – Wikipedia, DuckTest

Back to focus. What’s yours? What’s mine? Maybe we need to look at our behavior to find out. Jesus said it first:

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. (Matthew 7.15, 16, ESV, emphasis mine)