Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

leadership vision is often more about seeing clearly what is even more than what will be. As the former CEO and leadership author Max De Pree has famously written, “the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.”1 And perhaps one of the most important pieces of reality that must be first defined is the reality that every organization, indeed every organism, functions within a larger system. Seeing this systemic nature of all living things and seeing how one part of the system affects every other part is a crucial but often overlooked component of leadership vision. But to see the system, we must understand what systems are and how they function. An organizational system is the composition and interaction of the people, resources, interconnections and purpose of a group. So a congregation is not just the group of people who gather on a particular Sunday, or merely those who have their names on the membership roles, but the combination of people, their relationships to each other and the mission (or purpose for being) of this congregation. This combination of elements makes up the larger system, and as any one element, relationship or the purposes changes, the system must adjust. This system definition is assumed in the working definition of leadership we are using here: Energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world.