Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

What are the key elements of our theology, tradition, ministry practices and organizational culture that must be maintained at all costs because to lose them would be to lose our identity?

What DNA can be discarded? What elements of our church life, while important to us, are not essential?

“People don’t resist change, per se. They resist loss,”

How can the church keep doing the things it is called to do, but in a way that resonates, connects, serves and challenges people who wouldn’t otherwise pay it any attention?

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.

We take experiences from our past and learn lessons—often the wrong lessons—from them. Specifically, we expect that whatever has been in the past will be the same in the future. That leads us to ignore “real information coming to us from our environment.”2

We did what most people do when faced with an anxiety-producing problem: we try to fix it as quickly as possible.

The first component of developing adaptive capacity is to realize that it’s a process of learning and adapting to fulfill a missional purpose, not to fix the immediate issues.

(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.

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.

When were you most excited or felt the sense of deepest connection to our church? What was happening during that time in your life and in the life of our church? What has changed in your life or in the church since then that may have affected your sense of connection or excitement about our church? What is one wish/hope/dream you have for the future of our church?

After gathering as many objective observations as possible, we then invite consciously subjective responses by looking for personal interpretations of the data.

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?

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).

everybody is connected to the whole through one or two points of contact. When church members have children in the program, are settled in a small group or feel connected to a particular pastor or ministry, all is well. We are a stronger community of faith for people who are into a routine and rhythm of life. 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. And even harder to detect is that it doesn’t happen immediately but occurs over about a year’s time.

The interpretation step is only productive if there is freedom to explore as many different interpretations as possible, and especially the opportunity to hear from usually ignored voices.

If we had only listened to the committed people, we would never have gotten to the heart of the issues.

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.

whatever the voice is that we are not hearing needs to be heard.

Some common competing values dilemmas are Do we serve our longtime church members who pay the bills, or do we innovate to reach new people and risk angering the stakeholders? Do we have a mostly professional staff that provides excellence in ministry program, or do we want a strong, involved laity to use their gifts? Do we want a centralized organization unified around clear objectives, or do we want a more creative, collaborative system that is nimble, innovative and able to experiment with new ideas?

The competing values in the worship decline was about the focus of our ministry: Is the priority taking the congregation deeper in discipleship (which had been my emphasis for the greater part of three years) or do we need to double down on creating a community with a stronger web of connections outside of the Sunday morning services?

Without question the hardest part of an adaptive learning process is to keep people from jumping to interventions too early.

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.

To be a true adaptive experiment, interventions must be aligned with the church culture and reinforce the church core ideology; they must be expressions of the c...

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. 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.

The interventions, while being modest and playful, also need to signal that more significant change is coming. These experiments will not go away if people get upset; we are not going back to the status quo. We are not going to rely on our canoes when we are facing mountains.

Innovative interventions will always be resisted. Most of us don’t come to church to experiment. 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.

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.

In a healthy Christian ministry, the mission wins every argument.

They quickly realized that this conflict was providing them with the opportunity to engage the larger church in discussions that would grow their adaptive capacity. They didn’t minimize the concerns and make an executive decision. They didn’t yield to the demands of powerful stakeholders in the congregation. Instead they used the discord around the drums to spark a conversation about something far more important than what kind of musical instrument to use.

“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.”

Families, companies, organizations and congregations are wired for homeostasis. The emotional processes, ways of relating and being, decision making, symbols, values and other parts of the organizational culture (see chap. 6) naturally work together to keep things the same.

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

The first question about leading into uncharted territory is not about change but about what will not change.

The commander’s intent clarifies the goal so that all strategies and tactics

intent is another way of describing the clear purpose and desired end state of a mission.

There is perhaps no greater responsibility and no greater gift leadership can give a group of people on a mission than to have the clearest, most defined mission possible.

What are we passionate about?

What do we have the potential to do better than anyone else?

What will pay the bills?

Having a well-thought-out, values-based conviction—an “As for me and my house” conviction (Joshua 24:15)—is not easy.

The leader in the system is committed to the mission when no one else is.

But what makes a leader a real leader is what we do when the followers start having opinions about our convictions.

the real challenge of leadership is not tactical or strategic but emotional.

The first step in adaptive change is “start with missional conviction”; the second is to “stay calm.”