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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Why do we exist as a congregation, institution or organization? What would be lost in our community, in our field or in our world if we ceased to be? What purposes and principles must we protect as central to our identity? Wh...
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there is a critical moment to reframe the strategy
for the mission at hand.
It is a way of looking at the challenge before us through a different lens and in seeing it differently finding the possibilities for a new way of being and leading.13
No longer do social structures support church life or give preferences to Christian tradition. But, in a more pluralistic public square, where there were many different voices and perspectives offered, we have an opportunity closer to Paul’s at Mars Hill (Acts 17), engaging the philosophies of the day, or to the early Christians’, whose movement gained credibility
(and converts!) at least in part because of the way Christians cared for people during some of the worst epidemics.14
They relied on new learning. At the heart of adaptive leadership is learning. To put it bluntly, if you are not learning anything new, it is not adaptive work. It might be a good, necessary, wise, even vital strategy. But if your group is addressing a new challenge with an old solution, relying on a best practice or implementing the plan of a resident expert, then the solution is a technical one, not adaptive. Again, this is the place where so many churches’ missional initiatives get stalled. We gather in large groups, we bring in consultants, we do workshops, and we create a list of missional
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In moments of uncertainty and disorientation, leaders own internal adaptations; that is, the work that leaders themselves have to do to clarify their own motives, identity and mission is the necessary precursor to the work that the entire community will have to do. When a leader and a people together resist the anxiety that would lead to throwing in the towel or relying on the quick fix, but instead look more deeply—recommitting to core values, reframing strategy and relying on learning—this enables them to gain the just-in-time experience necessary to keep the expedition going.
At the heart of adaptive leadership for the church is this conviction: The church is the body of Christ. It is a living organism, a vibrant system. And just like human bodies, human organizations thrive when they are cooperating with the wisdom of God for how that system is designed, how it grows and how it adapts to changing external environments.
That is what adaptive leadership is all about: the way that living human systems learn and adapt to a changing environment so they can fulfill their purpose for being.
This is what adaptive leadership is all about: hanging on to the healthiest, most valuable parts of our identity in life and letting go of those things that hinder us from living and loving well.
In uncharted territory—where no one knows what’s ahead—vision is about accurately seeing ourselves and defining reality.
leadership vision is often more about seeing clearly what is even more than what will be.
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.”
Energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world.
A local congregation is not just a collection of individual people but also the love, commitment, values and mission they share. A
developing adaptive capacity is to think of our churches as a body with particular and unique traits that must be honored in any change process.
When describing a church’s DNA, we are talking about the particular pieces that make up the church’s identity and mission—the critical, essential elements that make a congregation who they are. It includes elements like core values, essential theological beliefs, defining strategy and mission priorities. Code is neither healthy nor unhealthy in itself, but the culture that comes from a church’s code can be either positive or destructive.
Relationship and purpose are expressed in as wide a variety of ways as the diversity of the people (the elements) that make up the system. In the same way that love in one family may be expressed in big hugs and in another through home-cooked meals, in one church mission may be expressed in door-to-door evangelism and in another through starting a tutoring program. In other words, in the same way that each person is different with a unique DNA, each congregation has its own organizational DNA that affects its relationships and purpose.
At the same time, if we tried to become more like the megachurch or the Greek Orthodox Church to attract the people who would more naturally fit in those churches, we could
potentially bring division and disruption to our church instead of growth. This whole
People will be more open to change if they know that you understand and value who they are—even if they are not conscious of their own connection to the code.11
Just as we discussed in chapter seven, for Lewis and Clark, water route was not as essential as discovery, and for churches, before we consider changing or adapting anything, we must first determine what is truly sacred.
“People don’t resist change, per se. They resist loss,”
To learn and adapt we need new, creative experiments in relationships and purposes. Although the old solutions may have been good and effective once, the old solutions are inadequate. When we are experimenting with new solutions within a living system, we are doing so with something that has a history, is alive and precious, and must be handled with care.
“When what you are doing isn’t working, there are two things you cannot do: (1) Do what you have already done, (2) Do nothing.”
the tendency is to double down at doing what we have always done and resist the new information that tells us that the circumstances are different and that more drastic change is necessary.
Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things, Laurence Gonzales
writes that the key to surviving in a world filled with unknowns is keeping a constant posture of “curiosity, awareness, and attention.” But, says Gonzales, we are not n...
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I realized that because I had one encounter with a bear and acted improperly—and got away with it—I was more likely to do it again. To my own potentially fatal peril.
I was in a truly different place. Most of my experience was invalid, and most of my so-called expertise was irrelevant. Indeed, my past experience, especially my past “success” could end up leading to my downfall.
Directional leadership offers direction and advice based on experience and expertise, while adaptive leadership functions in an arena where there is little experience and often no expertise.
Adaptive leadership, again, is about leading the learning process of a group who must develop new beliefs, habits or values, or shift their
current ones in order to find new solutions that are consistent with th...
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Adaptive leadership is an iterative process involving three key activities: (1) observing events and patterns around you; (2) interpreting what you are observing (developing multiple hypotheses about what is really going on); and (3) designing interventions based on the observations and interpretations to address the adaptive challenge you have identified.5
Just like a doctor who does not want to prescribe a medicine until she or he has done a proper diagnosis, leaders need to take the time to insure that they have clearly seen the challenge before them before attempting a new program or making a big change.
Leadership in the past meant coming up with solutions. Today it is learning how to ask new questions that we have been too scared, too busy or too proud to ask.
to get accurate observations, we must, as Heifetz and his colleagues say, “Look from the balcony and listen on the floor.”
While we try to get distance and perspective to see what is going on, we can only understand it fully if we also know the dynamics on the field. From the balcony, a quarterback who looks like he missed seeing an open receiver may be running a play that calls for that receiver to be nothing but a decoy. The quarterback’s “mistake” may actually be part of the play.
Leaders must be able to withhold interpretations and interventions long enough to be listeners who also have the vision to see the deeper systemic realities at work in the organization.
Listen to the songs beneath the words. In the interpretation stage we look for patterns we wouldn’t normally notice. As we gather the interpretations, the leadership group also begins to question the interpretations themselves. Is this a recurring theme or just one perspective? Is there one loud voice that is drowning out others, or is there something we really need to hear that we have been unable to hear before? And even beyond those messages we listen for the unspoken emotion that creates energy in the speaker. Is there frustration, anger or sadness at work here? Is there an underlying
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We experienced firsthand one of the laws of a system: “Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.”11 That is, just like a hot water faucet that doesn’t immediately deliver hot water, there is a time gap between the cause (turning the handle) and when we experience the effect (receiving hot water). The tendency then is to overcorrect while waiting for the effect (so, turning the water even hotter), and the solution becomes a new problem (burned hands).
Our church was not particularly good at helping people stay connected through life and church transitions.
If we had only
listened to the committed people, we would never have gotten to the heart of the issues.
David McRaney, author of the book and the blog You Are Not So Smart, writes about “survivorship bias,” that is, the tendency to look only at the “survivors” or “stories of success” and draw conclusions about reality.14 McRaney discusses a group of World War II engineers who were trying to make bombers safer by studying the bullet hole patterns in the planes after returning from a mission. They knew that the planes needed more armor (and if they wanted it to fly they couldn’t put armor over the entire plane), so they tried to determine where to put the additional armor. When they examined the
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the tendency to talk a problem to death. Once a group starts talking it’s sometimes difficult for them to move to this third stage of experimenting.
Now is the time to get right into the middle of the muddled mess and communicate loudly and clearly that we are going to use these experiments to learn as we go.
The eventual solution will be a healthy adaptation of the church DNA. Interventions must not violate the code of the church (see chap. 8). Be clear on what will never change before you start messing with stuff.
Interventions should start out modestly and playfully. The early experiments should not cost a lot of money, disrupt the organization chart, upset the center of the church life too much or be taken too seriously yet. They should instead be opportunities to try some things and see how the system reacts.
