Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory
It’s an odd title. Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory refers to the kinds of changes that Lewis and Clark needed to make during their journey that were radically transformative of their assumptions and invalidated their experiences. Despite this, they persisted in finding the path to the Pacific Ocean and returned before Captain Lewis’ decision to end his own life.
The Context
Before we can explain the lessons and the analogy, it’s appropriate to review what we know about churches and their pressures. Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone shares the drop in attendance. His more recent book, The Upswing, echoes the same general decline. Putnam’s concerns are echoed by authors who are less secular. John Dickerson in The Great Evangelical Recession sees the problem as both inside and outside the church. Churchless takes a much more data driven approach to show that our beliefs are shifting. We’re seeing lower attendance and less giving.
Some of these changes may be generational, with Tom Brokaw explaining that The Greatest Generation is quite different than those that followed it. Chuck Underwood in America’s Generations is clearer about how attitudes have changed specifically away from religion.
All of this is to say there’s solid consensus that there are pressures making leading more challenging – and quite different than anything we’ve seen before.
Strange New World
The prevailing belief was that there was a water passage from the East to the West coasts of America. If this passageway could be found, it would open up trade and commerce. It was a task that President Thomas Jefferson believed Captain Lewis could accomplish for the young country. Lewis wanted Clark as his co-director on the journey, which the war department ultimately vetoed. This was a close kept secret, as Lewis and Clark co-led the Corps of Discovery without the Corps knowing who was “really” in charge.
Lewis and Clark worked their way across the country and encountered the Rocky Mountains and ending the hope that a water route could be found. Ultimately, they traversed the mountains and found the Northwest Passage. They had achieved their goal of reaching the Pacific Ocean but not in the way they expected.
Uncharted Territory
What is life but a journey into uncharted territory? Tod Bolsinger’s point seems to be that the world in front of us is radically different than the world we came from. It’s not that we’re exploring more of the same, we’re encountering fundamentally different conditions.
Instead of church being a foundation for developing good values, parents are taking their children to music lessons and sports teams. They believe that the best way to develop their children is to focus on these extracurricular activities. It certainly doesn’t hurt that these activities can matter in a competitive college application process. (See The Years That Matter Most for more on getting into the best college.)
Leadership
Bolsinger builds his perspectives on leadership on a broad base, including the work of Ronald Heifetz. (See Leadership on the Line for my review of one of Heifetz’ works.) Specifically, there is a focus on what Heifetz calls adaptive challenges. These are challenges that can’t be solved with existing, known, step-by-step responses.
For me, the literature on leadership is large. Northouse’s Leadership: Theory and Practice, Burns’ Leadership, and Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership are the top of my list for those who want to get a baseline understanding of leadership. However, the list of books that address leadership is quite long. Some, like The Leadership Challenge and The Leadership Machine, attempt to reduce the process into digestible chunks.
However, one Christian-focused leadership book that stands out as a complementary work to Canoeing the Mountains is Heroic Leadership. It challenges the assertion that we’re facing uncharted territory by sharing the world of the Jesuit order and how they integrated into radically different cultures to bring the good news to those who had never heard anything of Christ.
Leadership is often described as a relationship of mutual influence. When we’re influenced, we’re going to change, and this is particularly true of leaders.
Change
Bolsinger shares Heifetz’ perspective from a presentation, quoting, “Most real change is not about change. It’s about identifying what cultural DNA is worth conserving, is precious and essential, and that indeed makes it worth suffering the losses so that you can find a way to bring the best of your tradition and history and values into the future.” This is the heart of William Bridges’ model for change. All changes bring loss, and Heifetz guides us to focus the losses on the expendable parts of our identity. While we speak of change resistance, most people don’t resist change, they resist loss.
Bolsinger also references the work of John Kotter, who has his own model for bringing about change in large organizations. In addition to Kotter’s views on change, Bolsinger shares Kotter’s Buy-In book, which describes the inevitable challenges of getting buy-in when people have different perspectives.
Bolsinger also quotes Margaret Wheatley: “It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be.” (See Leadership and the New Science for more of Wheatley’s work.) Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Peak explain how the people at the top of their fields got there. They simplify it to purposeful practice. The experts purposefully try to develop better skills. They hire coaches to help them find the perfect form, the perfect pitch, and techniques for solving the challenges of the field. Steven Kotler explains in The Rise of Superman how this continued progress can lead to feats that seem superhuman on the surface and only begin to make sense when viewed in the context of the work they did to develop that skill.
The message is that you don’t have to know exactly how the change will turn out – but you can continue to work towards better skills, relationships, and awareness of yourself, so that when an inflection point for change comes, you’re ready.
Holding Environments
Learning and growing occurs best in an environment with the right amount of psychological safety. In The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson explains how the reported rate of errors increased after making it easier and safer to report errors without fear of retribution. The confusing result is explained by the fact that the safety increased – and so did the improvement. In leading organizations, we need to encourage and even press those we work with to do more and better – but we must also make it seem safer and better to fail. It’s only by creating safety that we can help people grow.
In Play, Stuart Brown explains the critical role that play has in developing humans – and the characteristic safety that defines it. We need a degree of safety to allow learning to happen. We learn and grow along the delicate balance of safety and yearning for more.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
Bolsinger writes, “Long ago we came to expect that being part of a church community means biding our time, biting our tongues and being part of something that is at best well-meaning.” In the language of Albert Hirschman, he’s speaking of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Hirschman’s perspective is that, given a conflict, we have two options: exit the situation or use our voice to change it. It’s loyalty that mediates how long we’ll remain in the conflict before exercising the exit option. Bolsinger is speaking of a decision that our voice isn’t enough to change the situation, so we burn our loyalty – to the church and to Christianity – until we decide to exit.
The challenge with this is finding a way to have our voice heard. It’s a balance between a soft voice that isn’t heard and a booming voice that isn’t listened to. There’s a pathway through change that creates more spaces for voices to be heard. One pathway for church leaders to consider is the path of Nonviolent Communication.
Alignment Hedgehogs
Bolsinger elevates Lencioni’s perspective from The Advantage that alignment is a powerful advantage. He goes further to speak of Jim Collin’s perspective on hedgehogs – which know one thing very well – and foxes – which know many things. (See Good to Great.) Here, alignment is a good thing, but not an absolute. In The Difference, Scott Page explains the value of having different kinds of people at the table to get performance. Richard Hackman makes the same point in Collaborative Intelligence: we need multiple perspectives. At an individual level, Phil Tetlock says that the greater the ability to take multiple perspectives, the better predictors will be at predicting the outcome. (See Superforecasting.) Nate Silver makes a similar point about prediction in The Signal and the Noise. David Epstein in Range explains how generalists can triumph in a specialized world.
What does this mean to the church? It means that we should have a central alignment on core mission. Simon Sinek’s book, Start with Why, focuses on the need for a central organizing principle. We do need to find that central focus. Organizing principles can form the foundation of all we do.
Simultaneously, we must find ways to be open to changes and new and different experiences. Without these elements, we’ll become stale, calcified, and unable to adapt to the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world we find ourselves in. (See Focused, Fast, and Flexible.) He says that to birth anything new, it requires sex – which is the combination of two things to create something new.
Trust, Betrayal, and Relationships
Bolsinger quotes Dennis and Michelle Reina, “There is only one thing that builds trust: the way people behave.” In their book, Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace, they highlight the necessity of trust – and the expectation that you should expect betrayal – what Bolsinger calls “sabotage.” I speak of the need for trust, which leads to vulnerability and intimacy, in my post, Trust=> Vulnerability => Intimacy, Revisited. The relationships that we build through our continued consistency and persistence become invaluable tools when we’re faced with changes, challenges, and unexplored territory.
It’s Not Working
Bolsinger learned from an early coach, Kirk Kirlin, “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.” Too many people in leadership positions cannot lead into uncharted territory. Instead, they continue to do the things that have led to their organization’s decline, or worse, they freeze and do nothing. It takes courage to realize that change is required. It takes a willingness to accept reality for what it is. (See Advice Not Given.) When you see the mountains, you can’t expect to go Canoeing the Mountains.