Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

The actual behaviors of those in authority express and shape the actual values of the organizational culture.

the default functioning, the organizational DNA—dominate in times of stress and change.

“unseen culture” is more important than strategy, vision or planning in determining a congregation’s health, openness to change and missional conviction.

“Today’s problems are from yesterday’s solutions.”

If the strategy conflicts with how

a group of people already believe, behave or make decisions it will fail.”

JR Woodward writes, “While management acts within culture, leadership creates culture.”

“The idea of getting people moving in the same direction appears to be an organizational problem. But what executives need to do is not organize people but align them.”11 As we will see, the more aligned an organization is, the healthier it is.

In a healthy organizational culture, people feel free to have candid conversations, to suggest new strategies or ideas, and to take risks and experiment.

three critical elements in the leader’s own

functioning for contributing to a healthy organizational culture: clarity, embodiment and love.

As soon as an executive team builds the cohesiveness that comes from trust, they immediately start laboring for clarity of shared values, purpose, communication and behavior in every decision throughout the organization.

shared values are the organization.

the primary work of technical leadership is clarifying and reinforcing shared values.

While this certainly includes lots of communication (what Brafman and Beckstrom call “maintaining the drumbeat of the ideology”),16 it is also about education (teaching the values), wise collaborative discernment (determining when missional effectiveness requires change)17 and perhaps most importantly mutual accountability for living out those values. Or what I like to call “embodiment.”

“direction aligned with purposes”:

“Don’t change anything in the infrastructure yet. Just start living into the new way of being. Start functioning differently and let’s see what happens.”

“How does culture change? A powerful person at the top, or a large enough group from anywhere in the organization, decides the old ways are not working, figures out a change vision, starts acting differently, and enlists others to act differently.”

whatever success we had in creating a new, more collaborative culture began when the executive staff changed their behaviors and embodied the new culture.

It is a great paradox that love is not only the key to establishing and maintaining a healthy culture but is also the critical ingredient for changing a culture.

How do we change the culture of a church? What if the default way of functioning is one of self-preservation? What if the behaviors of the leaders have created a culture of entitlement rather than discipleship? What if the church culture is focused on preserving American Christendom or worse? When the church’s default behavior, way of functioning, its organizational DNA is now hindering the very thing that must be done to fulfill the mission God has given us, how do we change it? And if “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” then how do we change the culture before we are eaten alive?

You have to birth something new.

The most critical attribute that a congregation must have if it is going to thrive in uncharted territory is a healthy organizational culture.

When leaders are perceived as technically competent, they gain credibility in the eyes of their followers. When they are perceived as relationally congruent, trust is established. When credibility and trust are mobilized to create a healthy organizational culture, then we are ready to embrace the thrilling and daunting task of entering uncharted territory.

Competence. Trust culture

Those who follow Jesus embody fluidity, adaptation, and collaboration. It’s what we call the third-culture way. Adaptable to changing circumstances. To challenging cultures. To complex crises and problems. If there’s one quality that matters most to the fate of the church in the twenty-first century, it’s adaptability. Dave Gibbons, The Monkey and the Fish

“geography of reality.”

When a mental model dies, a painful paradigm shift takes place within us. It is disorienting and anxiety making. It’s as if the world as we know it ceases to exist.

Meriwether Lewis makes no comment

a...

that world-rearranging moment in his journal, but Sgt. Patrick Gass describes his reaction some days later, saying that they “proceeded over the most terrible mountains I ever beheld.”3 This is exactly the moment that the church faces today with the demise of Christendom and a changing topography of faith. In this new culture a ne...

It’s about loss, learning and gaps: “Adaptive leadership consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face.”4

Adaptive leadership is exercised in helping our communities “mind the gap” between our aspired values and our actions, between our values and the reality we face. It is a shared realization of a group’s inability to live out its own most cherished values with vibrancy and effectiveness in a changing context. Even more so, adaptive work pays attention to the deeper underlying causes that keep a group perilously perched in a state of inaction.

This mode of leading raises up and sheds light on the competing values that keep a group stuck in the status quo. For churches, competing values like caring for longtime members versus reaching out

to the unchurched, assuring excellence in mini...

versus increasing participation with more volunteers, giving pay raises to staff versus bringing on a new hire, assuring control and unity versus collaboration and innovation entail conflict about things of equal or near equal value. Because they are both valued, the competition for resources and the decisions that need to be made can put individuals and congregations into a most vulnerable moment. Like a person with one foot on the platform and one in the train, the moment of adaptation exposes the gaps within a system and forces the leade...

Making hard decisions in the face of competing values is what every explorer confronts when they go off the map and into uncharted territory. Through their technical competence, Lewis and Clark led their men up the Missouri River. Because of their relational congruence, the men became a corps, and when they stepped off...

When the world is different than we expected, we become disoriented. When the tried-and-true solutions to our problems don’t work, we get stuck. When we are faced with competing values that demand a decision which will inevitably lead to loss, we can get overwhelmed. At exactly the moment when the congregation is looking to the leader to give direction, the leader’s own anxiety and inner uncertainty is the highest. But this is the moment when the transformational leader goes off the map and begins to lead differently. This is when the transformational leader mobilizes a group toward the growth they will need in order to face the disorientation and find the capacity to reframe their shared identity in a new expression of their shared mission.

These skills include the capacity to calmly face the unknown refuse quick fixes engage others in the learning and transformation necessary to take on the challenge that is before them seek new perspectives ask questions that reveal competing values and gaps in values and actions raise up the deeper issues at work in a community explore and confront resistance and sabotage learn and change without sacrificing personal or organizational fidelity act politically and stay connected relationally help the congregation make hard, often painful decisions to effectively fulfill their mission in a changing context This capacity building is more than just some techniques to master. It’s a set of deeply developed capabilities that are the result of ongoing transformation in the life of a leader.

But I’m trying to point out that when we get to moments of deep disorientation, we often try to reorient around old ways of doing things.

We go back to what we know how to do. We keep canoeing even though there is no river.

When our old maps fail us, something within us dies. Replacing our paradigms is both deeply painful and absolutely critical.

This is the canoeing the mountains moment. This was when the Corps of Discovery faced for the first time the breadth of the challenges posed by the Rocky Mountains and came to the irrefutable reality that there was no Northwest Passage, no navigable water route to the Pacific Ocean. This is the moment when they had to leave their boats, find horses and make the giant adaptive shift that comes from realizing their mental models for the terrain in front of them were wrong.

They could have turned back. They could have returned to Washington, made their reports and told Thomas Jefferson that another crew more equipped to travel long distances through mountain passes should be launched on a different expedition.8 But they didn’t. At that moment, without even discussing it, Meriwether Lewis simply “proceeded on.” In so doing he offers us some ways of considering our own adaptive moments and the capacities we need.

they recommitted to their core ideology.

This is who we are, we say. If we stop being about this, we stop being. The Corps of Discovery was a military expedition with a mission to fulfill, a charge to keep and a commander in chief who had sent them.

they had a “passionate purpose”

“Their commitment to these higher purposes, which transcended the mere worldly aspirations of power, glory, ego, or money, shines through their journals, and it is clear they affected virtually every action and decision Lewis and Clark made.”

What are we really called to? Is it just to professional success or personal security? Is it merely to get more people in the church pews and dollars in the offering plates so our congregations can keep offering religious services to those who desire

them? Is church leadership nothing more than an exercise in institutional survival?

Or isn’t there a higher purpose, a set of guiding principles, a clear compilation of core values that are more about being a community of people who exist to extend God’s loving and just reign and rule in all the earth? This moment forces us to face and clarify our own core beliefs. And for each organization, this facing...