Change, Leadership, Experimentation and Learning Environments
Had an interesting conversation about change today. The subject was small churches. The background subject was me being irresponsible. The church that I’m the current Pastor of has had its share of trouble in the last few years. At some point in the last 5 years it worshipped about 120 people on a normal Sunday. When I arrived in July it averaged about 50. The logical conclusion is that something is wrong.
Lou Gerstner (former IBM CEO) is semi-famous for the firestorm he elicited when he said ‘the last thing IBM needs is a vision.’ The point behind that statement was not that vision was un-important, but that IBM had more than enough visions, what it lacked was execution of any of them that would actually ring the cash register. With IBM then having posted the largest quarterly loss on record, Gerstner and York (CFO) had to restore some basic blocking and tackling before turning to strategy. I bring that up because the core disconnect that we danced around and fleshed out was that strategy was everything to my collegue. My position was that restoring some basic blocking and tackling got you to the point of being able to talk about strategy.
In restoring blocking and tackling my approach has been - in my collegues phase - shotgun. I would prefer experimentation or learning. What practices that are logically unhelpful are people in an emotional place to consider? What potential answers are they willing to consider? What to persue? The goal is two fold: 1) to encourage an open learning environment and 2) build the ownership of both problems and solutions by the congregation. Both of those goals don’t eliminate the emotional response, but they make it part of the considerations by the people who would have it. The approach is one of shared discovery and action. Acknowledge and Fix some of the fundamental problems, gain some good feeling from righting the ship and then build on that into a new vision.
I’ll continue with these thoughts, but for now the fundamental break was where does that vision come from? Does is come from an individual, or does it emerge from a group? I’ll argue that in some situations the second approach is actually faster and more helpful in reaching necessary change.
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