I work with a Church here in Richmond where I manage and schedule the musicians for each weeks service. Along with this some other of my responsibilities are to select which songs we will play on a given Sunday, what new songs we should learn as we go forward, how (and if) to train new musicians, and how to spend appropriated monies. This would constitute the bulk of work for most positions like this, however there is an element to this position that I find more important and ultimately more rewarding, "Systemic Change". This I think is more an element of my character than it is a duty in my job description. I want to make it work better, I want it to be more effective, I want to change the environment in which I work by changing the way things work and the expected outcomes.
The difficulty I find in this, is that more often than not it is inappropriate to entirely dismantle social structures so that you can have a clean slate for the building of new ones. Their are too many people with too many attachments, too much invested, and too much nostalgia. Simply put there is too much "Social Inertia" already moving behind the traditional way of doing things. So what you have to do is jump into the drivers seat of a moving car, set a course, set the cruise, and then get under the hood through the glove box, and then get to work. You tweak this, and tighten that, remove redundant parts, increase efficiency and drop excess weight, now your moving a little faster than you were before! That means you have to climb back out through the glove box into the drivers seat and see if you've run over any one while you were under the hood.
