Over-Programming

In Law of the Harvest, over-programming names the failure mode where every spiritual ailment gets “encapsulated as a program with pages of instructions,” until peripheral activity crowds out the core mission. Kyle’s notes draw the critique from Boyd K. Packer, who likened Church leadership to “a team of doctors issuing prescriptions” — each diagnosed moral or spiritual problem met by rushing “to the pharmacy to concoct another remedy.” The accumulating treatments are never reduced, producing over-regimentation, and “local leaders have been effectively conditioned to hold back until programmed as to what to do, how, to whom, when, and for how long.”

The deeper cost flagged in the book is that programs displace individual revelation: when programs are overemphasized, “the inspiration and the resourcefulness that should characterize Latter-day Saints” is at risk, and “the very principle of individual revelation is in jeopardy.” The page connects this to a Leadership-as-execution view (Drucker: “Popularity is not leadership. Results are.”) and to the idea that outreach leadership is a distinct skill from pastoral leadership — busy programs consume member time while member-missionary outreach goes undone. The book’s image: “any child can take all of the toys out of the closet… it takes wisdom to know which ones not to take out.”

Where this appears

• Law of the Harvest — over-programming as a core failure mode; Boyd K. Packer’s “team of doctors” critique that programs crowd out the core mission and put individual revelation in jeopardy