Gary's Newsletter 374: Leading in Times of Transition
Posted by Gary R Collins on Wednesday, March 10 2010 at 10:32 PM Comments 0
LEADING IN TIMES OF TRANSITION
Last summer, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown met with his colleagues to map out Parliamentary programs for managing the global financial crisis in his country. The process undoubtedly involved analyzing the situation, crafting a vision, and developing strategic plans to implement a remediation program. "In the meantime, offstage, increasing numbers of Labour Party members in Parliament were text-messaging and talking with each other on platforms such as Facebook with an entirely different set of narratives than those being spoken in the onstage world. The Internet had created a world with multiple channels of almost instantaneous communication where conversations outside the public discourse were shaping the outcomes of people's lives."
This example is from Alan Roxburgh's fascinating new book Missional Map-Making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition. Roxburgh argues that many maps (traditional ways of doing things) no longer work because the environment is changing. The people we lead are like crowds in a huge Middle-East market. They communicate simultaneously, sometimes in different languages, developing ways of thinking and doing business that no top-down leader can pre-determine or control. Focusing on the church, Roxburgh notes that the old linear create-a-vision then build-a-strategy approach, imported from business and technology, doesn't work with people who are flexible, interconnected and committed to taking ownership for their lives.
In graduate school I learned that "the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior." That is a cognitive map that worked when life was relatively stable and when top down leadership and education were the norm. That does not apply any more. In times of transition, unpredictable change and exploding interconnectedness, we need new life-maps and models for leadership, ministry, and caregiving. These should be consistent with biblical principles and scientific data, but aware of the transitional world where we live. Otherwise we remain talking among ourselves about how things need to change, using the same familiar linear maps or models, failing to realize that we are shrinking from relevance. Maybe we need more people like the Old Testament leaders of Issachar who "understood the temper of the times" and thus knew the best directions to go (I Chron. 12:32).
