Leadership in Chaos

As Yvonne is away tonight at an Elders' meeting, discussing matters of transition arising from the lead pastor's resignation, I find myself reflecting on things that Alan Roxburgh raised in his book, The Sky is Falling!?!.

Much of our ideas of leadership are related to our ideas of strategic planning — they work well in environments where there is a sufficient degree of stability, predictability and controlability that one can reasonably move from a vision of a desired future, through the various stages of goals and plans, to achieve something approximating the intended end.

There are other environments in which the underlying presumed degree of stability, predictability and controlability simply does not exist. Some environments are truly chaotic — systems like the weather, where a very small change in initial conditions makes a huge change in the outcome. Other environments are not quite that chaotic, but do undergo periods of significant, unpredictable, discontinuous change — Roxburgh calls these environments times of transition. In these environments the classic strategic planning principles simply don't work. Nor do finely honed, hierarchically based leadership structures where each task is affixed to a specific position or function — even those these structures can be highly efficient in stable times.

In chaotic or transitional environments the highly structured leadership models fail, because they simply cannot bring the right skills, instincts, and perspectives to the situation in a timely and appropriate manner to adapt to the discontinuous changes that occur. Rather, in such environments we need leadership systems that are much more flexible and much more diversely based — who knows what particular collection of strengths and perspectives will be needed for the next thing that happens?

But a huge difficulty, it seems to me, is that such a diverse collection of "leaders" will typically have a hard time listening to, trusting, and following each other as the situations shift, unless a solid core of trust and understanding has been developed before hand, and maintenance of that core of trust and understanding remains consistently a high priority. To be sure, I firmly believe that this neglect of community, or as Roxburgh calls it communitas, is the principal reason for the disintegration of leadership in a prior experience of mine.

If this is correct, then it seems to me that the key leadership trait needed is that of keeping the overall leadership system and leaders, individually and collectively, focussed on maintaining a reality of communitas in all leadership activities and decisions. The key leader, then, for an entity operating in a chaotic or transitional environment is decidedly not an executive leader or CEO, but rather more what Roxburgh calls an abbott/abbess — one whose primary, or even sole, task or focus is in building, maintaining and strengthening true Christian community among the entire leadership team.

Regretably, I cannot point to any good examples in personal church experience that could serve as a model for such a system — and it is extremely hard to get people to buy into a process or system they have never seen in operation.

But it does give me a fresh appreciation of Jesus' high priestly prayer, where His desire for unity and community among His followers flows so eloquently and passionately. Maybe Jesus knew something about the turbulent times and environments in which His church would have to exist.