Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

Making hard decisions in the face of competing values is what every explorer confronts when they go off the map and into uncharted territory.

adaptive capacity is also its own set of skills to be mastered. 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

So, I asked, “If we knew that Youth Sunday hadn’t worked to help teenagers feel more connected to the church, why did we suggest it?” After talking about it a while we came to the conclusion that we were talking about it, because it was the only thing we knew how to do.

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

And they had recorded that they had seen the spine of the Rockies looming before them three months earlier. Even that view had raised within Lewis the thought of “difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific,” including likely “sufferings and hardships.”

Lewis immediately cast the thoughts of perceived difficulties out of his mind, writing, “I will believe it to be a good comfortable road until I am compelled to believe differently.”

Lewis exemplified what happens to most of us when we are confronting rapidly changing circumstances: even though the evidence is around us, we cling to the previously held assumptions as long as possible

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.

A “system” is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose. Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

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.

to new foods when you arrive in a new culture. And you know you have to learn a new language or develop the skills for navigating an outdoor market in a foreign land. 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

My family system provides a helpful metaphor for any organizational system. Our churches and organizations are systems—organisms—with a unique life and vitality. They are not mechanistic religious production lines but bodies that need to be tended, cared for, challenged and strengthened so they can adapt to their environment. 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.

I can’t eat like crap and expect to live forever. This is what he learned from his grandfather. We have to learn from the leaders before us, and then adapt. God never changes, but we should change!

But leadership vision is often more about seeing clearly what is even more than what will be

leadership author Max De Pree has famously written, “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 system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.”

For a church this means that when the members, the relationships and the mission of the church are aligned and working symbiotically toward a shared purpose, the church functions well. People are both loved (relationship) and challenged (purpose). There is both a commitment to depth and authenticity (relationship) and space to welcome new people (purpose). There is an ability to accept people as they are (relationship) and to be continually transformed into the likeness of Christ (purpose). There is a deep desire to enjoy life together (relationships) and use our resources and energy to serve others (purpose).

“People don’t resist change, per se. They resist loss,” Heifetz and Linsky remind us.

We need 100,000 people in 100,000 garages trying 100,000 things—in the hope that five of them break through. Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“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.”

Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things, Laurence Gonzales

In the same way, most of us trying to bring change in a post-Christendom world are attempting to use lessons we learned in one situation that are keeping us from adapting to a new spiritual terrain.

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 their purpose for being.

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.

Very often I ask my coaching clients to consider the question, What is the song behind the words that is keeping us all dancing? In other words, what deeper tune of the church is getting played in this circumstance? What is going on in this situation that nobody is talking about but is affecting the whole system of the church?

What we discovered by taking time to get as many observations and then sifting through the interpretations is that although we had diminishing worship attendance, we didn’t have a worship service problem but were still right in the middle of a larger challenge we had been working on for five years. We also found that some of our other assumptions (“the church is declining because of denominational turmoil” or “People aren’t coming because Tod is preaching a bit less” or “The congregation is getting tired of Tod’s voice”) didn’t really have data to support them.

discovered a nuance to a larger issue that was completely unexpected: Our church was not particularly good at helping people stay connected through life and church transitions

But when life changes, or when the church undergoes a change (like a higher amount of staff turnover that we went through in the previous five years), the ties that bind people together and to the church are loosened or detached completely.

attendance, and, if not reconnected, the person drifts away. We discovered that we didn’t need so much to attend to our worship as to our web of connections

We needed to focus our attention not on how to increase Sunday morning attendance but on how to strengthen and increase more points of connection for people, which would enable us to better pastor people through life transitions

Then we talked to people who had already stopped attending our worship services and realized that none of those concerns were near the top of the factors that led them to become disconnected. If we had only listened to the committed people, we would never have gotten to the heart of the issues.

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 planes, they discovered that they were shot up most on the bottom of the plane, on the wings and near the tail gunner. So, the engineers made preparations for putting more armor there. But one statistician, Abraham Wald, challenged the underlying assumption by pointing out that the planes they were studying were the survivors—these are the planes that were not shot down. In other words, Wald said, this is exactly where we should not put more armor—a plane can survive even if shot up in the bottom, wings and near the tail gunner. So they needed to look at other areas of the plane to reinforce. Through several tests they discovered that adding more armor to the ailerons, engine, stabilizers and around the pilot made the planes safer. Only listening to a different interpretation allowed them to find the right solution. Survivorship bias is not only what makes us believe in the quick fixes offered by the diet industry or the magic of a celebrity CEO to turn around a company, but even, as one of my clients discovered, it’s what makes a church leadership council believe that to attract young adults to their church...

And the beautiful irony is that when a leadership group insists on hearing as broadly as possible, a harmony of shared notes that are present but right below the surface often comes to the surface.

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.

In short, when intervening in the system, there needs to be a clear sense that learning is the goal, that we are not making any big, permanent changes yet but simply trying out some ideas to see what we will find.

Even the idea of experiments raises anxiety. Most of the time the system will be inclined to shut down any experiments before they even begin. Growth, transformation and adaptation always means loss. Change is loss. And even experimental changes signal loud and clear that change—and loss—is coming.

Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line

Mature leadership begins with the leader’s capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny. Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve

Leadership isn’t so much skillfully helping a group accomplish what they want to do (that is management). Leadership is taking people where they need to go and yet resist going.

Leadership, as I have defined it, is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world

It’s about challenging, encouraging and equipping people to be transformed more and more into the kind of community that God can use to accomplish his plans in a particular locale. And often the very people...

develop the adaptive capacity that comes from living out a core, clarifying conviction: The mission trumps. Always. Every time. In every conflict. Not the pastor. Not the members of the church who pay the bills. Not those who scream the loudest or who are most in pain. No. In a healthy Christian ministry, the mission wins every argument.

The focused, shared, missional purpose of the church or organization will trump every other competing value. It’s more important than my preferences or personal desire. It’s more critical than my leadership style, experience or past success. It’s the grid by which we evaluate every other element in the church. It’s the criterion for determining how we will spend our money, who we will hire and fire, which ministries we will start and which ones we will shut down. It’s the tiebreaker in every argument and the principle by which we evaluate every decision we make. Denominational affiliation? Mission partnerships? Financial commitments? Staff decisions? Worship styles?

Indeed, experimental innovations are the key to surviving in a changing world.

After studying small companies that were able to stay in business seventy-five years or more, even as the world changed around them, Peter Senge concludes, “The key to their survival was the ability to run ‘experiments in the margin,’ to continually explore new business and organizational opportunities that create potential new sources of growth.”

Ronald Heifetz told a group of ministry leaders at Duke Divinity School, “Adaptive change is ...

But experimental interventions trigger resistance—internal resistance. Resistance within our community an...

Edwards Deming, “your system is perfectly designed to get the results you are getting.”

Start with conviction, stay calm, stay connected, and stay the course.