Stallion or Sailor?

Those of us who lead do so with an intention to bring about change. To create a better world or a better product is in our blood.  Our orientation is to see what could be and then make it happen.

“Make it happen”. That sounds like we can control process and outcome. Is that possible?

The premise of this “Nomadic Leader” blog is that effective leadership requires a nomadic spirit. You can read more on that in my inaugural blog from Sept 2009. We live in a world that itself is constantly transforming, therefore its essential we develop the skills to see what is changing in our world, then change ourselves accordingly. Gone is the great man theory of leadership where he/she sits atop their trusty stallion as the consummate expert and ‘general’, charging ahead into the future, leading the troops to certain victory.

I recently came across another image besides the Nomad, to characterize the kind of leadership required in this day & age. The Sailor.  Credit to the authors of the book “Getting to Maybe” for this image.  These 'sailor skills' reflect the spirit of the nomadic leader and are an essential leadership skill of this age.

“We tend to prefer the image of the leader on the charging stallion to that of a sailor trying to navigate stormy seas. The leader on the stallion seems to be in control of his destiny, while the sailor has no chance of controlling a stormy sea. The sea is too powerful to overcome with force and too unpredictable to reliably anticipate. Instead, the sailor needs to be adept at reading the weather, understanding the patterns, reacting to changes and adjusting his sails”. (p 20; "Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed") 

I began my leadership life in the era of 5-10 year master plans, secured by a ‘stallion’ leader in place at the top. The attitude then was “come hell or high water we are going to make this happen”. That was the lingo of a true leader. I am not suggesting this age of uncertainty requires we ditch all long term planning. However, we do need a different leadership dynamic.  Here are some examples of how that dynamic is revealed in the life of a leader:

• Learn, learn, learn. Question, question, question. The moment you believe you know all there is to know and create a ‘certainty’ about things is the moment you relinquish the role of true nomadic and transformational leadership.  You have become a Settler. 
• Develop and tell a compelling story of the change you dream of creating. If you are going to get on a stallion at all, let this be what you champion! 
• Draw up your tactics in pencil. Unknown or emergent challenges & opportunities will require shifts in tactics so that you can better achieve your mission. Learn to tack like a Sailor. It may look like you are making many zigzag moves, but as long as it’s in the direction of your mission, you will make headway. 
• Talk to your employees/followers about trends and changes in real time. Keeping them in the loop, even if you are not yet sure what to do tactically, means they are better prepared in mind and commitment to make any shifts eventually required. Hold regular progress check-ins and 'status of our world' updates. Engage their input and you will find they are far more willing to adjust to changes than if you arbitrarily spring it on them. 
• Replace a need to control with toleration for ambiguity. That can be a painful transformation for some. On a practical level, it may simply mean stepping away from a knee-jerk decision and letting it sit for a day or so as a way of developing this tolerance. 

Are you suited to lead in this fluid world?

You are when you choose to be part of the dynamics of transformation rather than a separate figure sitting on a stallion leading the charge.

The Cautioneers

Just when I thought I had invented a new word, Google Search popped my balloon. Turns out the term ‘Cautioneers’ preceded my innovative musings. It’s the name of a band out of Toronto! It is also a term used by the Enneagram. Interestingly the Enneagram captured some of the essence of my (once innovative) meaning: ‘safe, secure, reliable, predictable, cautious’. I will take this definition & expand on it in the context of leadership, especially those who lead the followers of Jesus to their mission of restoring the world back to God.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a leader who occasionally demonstrates the characteristics of The Cautioneer. If we did not display some of these qualities (or was connected to someone who does), leadership and followership would be chaotic. Ask any follower of a purely idea-driven, “squirrel!” kind of leader.

However, to lead from the posture of a Cautioneer is what is bringing the church to a slow crawl in its mission to restore the world to Jesus. Shepherds and pastors by nature default to organizing systems and safe pasture for their flocks. These gifts dominate the paid leadership roles of the organized church. Thus, the resulting church has been defined and confined by boxes, programs and systems. It is certainly busy, but rarely is it found in the cracks of human experience and at the edges of society. There is still a “come to check out what we offer” mentality that drives the church’s mission. It’s safer that way, isn’t it? It’s a Cautioneer approach.

Interestingly the metaphors that describe the world changing ways of Jesus - salt, light, yeast and seed – inherently must be scattered in order to effect change. Yet the Cautioneer leaders find ways to gather and ‘nurture’ these elements rather than risk scattering them around. Thus, their churches are often active internally and launch out on a few forays into the world to ‘pillage the village’ and gather new recruits. Their activity makes them feel and appear they are on mission. Reality check: Activity does NOT equal mission.

I have two questions to pose, with my own answers (lest you think I don’t think about this stuff). I’m eager to hear your own responses.

1. What happened to us?

2. Can we do anything about it?

My personal opinion about what happened:

• In the past few generations or so, increasing wealth enabled resources to be poured into gathering places and then staff to take care of them.
• These places needed ‘pastors’, basically leaders who could manage the place and the activities that would justify the existence of the place.
• ‘Place’ came to define ministry and a programming boom ensued, which then elicited the need for more staff. This was helped along by a culture sympathetic to Judeo-Christian values that were eager to receive these services.
• This became the norm and our colleges and seminaries followed suit by training people for the model, but not necessarily the mission.
• We woke up to the reality that we are not in Judeo-Christian Kansas anymore, and have tried to tweak our model to be ‘relevant’.

Now here we are, in an era where many are speaking out about this. Hirsch, Barna, McLaren, Bibby, Devenish, Platt, Wright and a host of others are in various ways calling us out to cast off the Cautioneer mantle and discover new ways of thinking and organizing so that the mission can be forefront. In spiritual gift terms, the apostolic/prophetic and evangelist mantle needs a renewal within the leadership community of the local & global church. FYI those gifts will inherently seek out new models, forms and ways of being.

Frankly, I don’t hold out much hope for existing church institutions to be able to make the change. (I do hope they try). Mission rhetoric abounds, but it’s calling out from a model resistant to change and unable to change because it won’t face up to the fact parts of it won’t make it into the future. I see some churches tweaking at the edges, but unable to create a wholesale change without a decades long time-window or a commitment to disruptive change.

So to the second question, what can be done?

INDIVIDUALS or GROUPS - Start something. Don’t wait around for the wheels of institutional machinations to catch on and support your idea. The story of church growth has more to do with innovators walking out to the edge of cities, towns and social networks than it does intentional institutional initiatives. 

• Caveat: Don’t do it alone. Find mentors and advisors to help guide your endeavour. The truth is plans go wrong for lack of advice but many advisers bring success (Prov 15:22). A lot of harm has been done by Lone Rangers. A lot of good is done when pioneers rely on other pioneers.

• Encompass Partnerships is designed to assist you start something. It’s one of the key reasons we started in the first place. Contact info@encompasspartnerships.org if you want to start a conversation

CHURCHES – Become a hub of innovation. Your ship may not be able to turn easily or fast, but you can launch smaller vessels that use your ship as a resource hub. Within your gathering most definitely are those who are wired to go to the edge, to seek out new places and spaces for the gospel and do things unconventionally compared to what your church currently defines as ministry. They are those who by nature and gifting are the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists. You have already lost quite a few of them because of inattention and asking them to squeeze into what is. They leave and typically go somewhere else, start something on their own, or leave the church altogether out of frustration. So, why not instead embrace them (not too closely, because after all, they are pioneers) and develop an approach that encourages and coaches their ideas?

• Leadership is to equip ALL followers of Jesus for the work for He calls them. However, clearly your church programming is not capable of reaching as far as its people can reach. I hope that moves you to seek the answer to: How then do we empower those people? Struggle with that one! The Spirit will guide you. I’m not going to provide a 3-point answer.

• Appoint a staff person, create a department, assign time & space among existing staff – whatever works in your corporate environment, which shows and speaks to innovators that you are open!

• WHO can you partner with to ensure these people are given guidance and have some wind blown into their sails? Encompass’ coaching can help fill that role, but we have capacity issues too. You could find mentors for these people among current/former international mission workers or others who have worked in innovative, idea & project-generating environments. Find people with great coaching skills (not advice-givers) who can help a person walk through their thinking about an idea.

Whether you are that individual with a passion, or the church wanting to empower that passion, be ready for one common outcome: It will get messy. The world is messy. People’s lives are messy. Oppressive systems are messy. Yet this is where we are called to live the Life and show the Way of the One who is the key organizing Truth for a restored world.

Harv

The Releasing Power of Constraints

How much is enough to get a great idea going?

The race to be entrepreneurial in our organizations is much like our New Year’s race to improve our personal lives. We see the need for change and then gather all of our great ideas to strategize a way forward.  The possibilities inspire us.

Yet – after the meeting, after the planning and initial buzz, nothing much happens.

In the context of businesses and organizations, whether profit or not for profit - the broad research on entrepreneurial starts (which includes intrapreneurs – entrepreneurs within an established organization trying to launch a new project), indicates they fail more often than not…to the tune of 70-90%.  

The usual suspect is resources:

• Not enough people  
•  Insufficient funds 
•  Lack of organizational support. 

Can I suggest a different angle on this?  

You may be failing at new ideas because you have TOO MANY RESOURCES.

Those with excess or even sufficient resources tend to invest primarily in the familiar.  In part that is to maintain the ‘formula’ that has brought them their current resource success.  Don’t mess with success. So, they may tweak at the edges and call it innovation, but it’s primarily maintenance of the goose that laid their golden egg. Research reveals that compared to resource-rich organizations, entrepreneurs and organizations with truly entrepreneurial practices are innovative in part because of their resource constraints.  

How can that be? 

Counterintuitively, constraints release you because:

• You must now focus on existing advantages.  What have you got in your hand right now without any further investment?  What are you great at?
• They move you to become truly experimental.  Think about the thinking that emerges when you are asking the question: “How could we get this done without any money or other resources? 
•  Rather than focusing energy on maintaining & resourcing the status quo, you are freed up to think about unmet needs, areas your current resources don’t address. 
•  It forces you to take a new look at your knowledge and resource base, and in so doing opens your eyes to new opportunities.

Your idea here

If you have a vision for something, but perhaps not the resources, will that stop you?  

Resource constraints may be the best thing that has ever happened to you.

Harv Matchullis

Visiontracks Facilitation & Coaching

harvey@visiontracks.ca

Track Your Organizations' Impulses

 

If you like where you are; if your organization is all about itself and maintaining stability & control at the centre, don’t read any further.  I won’t convince you to change.  You are the person who tunes the radio to their favorite station and then pulls the dial off the radio so it can never be changed. 

Enjoy your music.

But if there is even a hint of impulse toward serving someone or some purpose outside the space your building and people occupy, keep reading. 

Businesses often state they are about innovation for the ‘marketplace’.  Churches say they are about the ‘mission’.  Retailers focus on the ‘customer’.  Non-profits express their existence is for the ‘client’ or a broader social purpose.  Most state their organizational impulse is for a purpose or people beyond themselves.  Wonderful. 

However, if your impulse is truly beyond yourself, do your current organizational structures and processes reinforce & support  that?

Within our North American culture we pride ourselves on our ability to change with the times.  We believe we are innovative and flexible enough to adjust to the needs of our customer or target audience. Yet in the business world the field is littered with once-great, well known companies who have talked the talk but could not take the walk.  Blockbuster, Eastman Kodak, Sears and Yahoo are but a few of the big-name examples of companies with commitments to change but who did not adapt well.  I can identify a few non-profits who started with the most altruistic and noble of impulses, but as they grew in size they grew in complexity and along with it found they became bloated or myopic, and inevitably off course.

Much of the reason for this is that with time and success, people in groups, whether as businesses or non-profits, think less and less about the further development of ways to serve their original ‘outward’ impulses, and more about how to preserve what they have.  (By the way, that’s a natural tendency of all human beings).  They will walk and talk right up to the edges of change, but taking the step over into real change is rare.  Leadership talks about innovation in order to keep serving the needs of the person or customer, but leaderships' walk usually reinforces it’s about keeping the business or the organizations' status quo.  When you see a company driven by stock price over principle, or a non-profit influenced more by its donor-base than the needs of the people it serves, you have an indication of what I mean.  No one likes hearing this because we all live in the illusion that we are change-agents.  Our culture regularly streams out the message of change, but our collective rhetoric proves we no longer get the point.  Talk about change has become a cheap and easy way to maintain leadership currency.

But true leadership is about identifying and declaring current reality in light of where you want to go and then being bold enough to address the gap.

Conduct a brief audit of your own organization:

·         How do we expend our primary personnel resources?

·         What does our budget indicate to an outsider as our priority areas?

·         Where do most of our activities take place and what does that say about who and how we serve?

·         What gets celebrated in our organization and what does that indicate about what we value?

·         What are the top 3-4 areas where leadership expends their energy?  How does that define the core ‘impulses’ of our organization?

(Would you be bold enough to use these questions as a 360 of your organization?)

If the assessment reveals a significant gap, let me propose a solution:

An ongoing perpetual strategy for maintaining focus on your core impulses is to identify and release the people within your organization who already have the capacity for reflection, ingenuity and innovation.  I can tell you right now that there are people within your organization who are connected to your original impulses and who think about it...a lot.  How are they heard?  Is there a place for them?  They often exist a little ‘in orbit’ around the hairball of your organizational inertia.  Sometimes you might feel they work for you and against you all at the same time.  They ask too many questions.  They might even be complainers.  Their ideas are just a little too off the wall.  “Can’t they ever just put their nose to the grindstone and do the job”??

Yet they are a key to ensuring that you make whatever changes are needed to stay true to your original organizational impulse.  Rarely do the answers to needed change & innovation come from corporate strategy sessions.  Rather, they come from within individuals who are not only set free by the organization to think innovatively, but who carry within themselves the capacities for ingenuity. What you need to do as a leader is find a way to let them be themselves to examine, criticise, dream and innovate.  Come into their space once in a while and hear what they have to say.  Spin them off in orbit on a retreat, or in specialized task groups.  Ground them in the organizations’ core impulse, and then release them to discover how to stay true to that.  Feed them with the freedom of thought and innovation towards a grounded purpose.

 

The Jesuits, of all organizations, have the most to say to all of us about releasing ingenuity.  They were/are one of the most decentralized yet focused organizations on earth.  (You can read in detail about their founding principles and extremely dispersed organizational philosophy in a book by Chris Lowney, a former Jesuit himself who worked in the banking and non-profit industries.  His book is “Heroic Leadership”, 2003, by Loyola Press).  For them, ingenuity is the readiness to ‘cross the world’ at a moments’ notice in pursuit of a good opportunity.  It is the willingness to work without a script and the creative embrace of new ideas.  It is not achieved merely by developing the skills leadership pundits always champion for innovation:  imagination, adaptability, creativity, flexibility etc.  Rather, it is about adopting the demeanour, attitudes and worldview that make creativity and adaptation possible.  What is that stance? It is an “optimistic view of the world thoroughly shot through with (divine) love. Ingenuity blossoms when the personal freedom to pursue opportunities is linked to a profound trust and optimism that the world presents plenty of them.  Imagination, creativity, adaptability and rapid response become the keys for finding and unlocking these opportunities” (pg 128 – Heroic Leadership).

Ingenuity is NOT however the blind pursuit of anything new and creative.  It is in pursuit of a broader purpose or a core impulse that ingenuity takes on meaning.  The Jesuits had a purpose to ‘help souls’ and left it up to the ingenuity of their people to make that happen.  What resulted was a global kaleidoscope of endeavours, but all in pursuit of this purpose.

Your organization may grow to get involved in many things, but do they serve the core impulse of why you exist?  Reject the impulse of inertia.   As the leader, restate your organizations’ core impulse and release the ingenuity of your people to help you regain that ground and innovate your way back (or forward) towards the accomplishment of your primary purpose for existence.

Harv Matchullis