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Part One:  Understanding Uncharted Territory

The World in Front of You Is Nothing Like the World Behind You

There are five vital lessons that every leader of a Christian congregation or organization has to learn to lead in uncharted territory:

1.  The on-the-map skill set: No one is going to follow you off the map unless they trust you on the map.
2. Leading off the map: In uncharted territory, adaptation is everything.  Adaptive leadership, helping us understand that adaptive challenges require learning, facing loss and negotiating the gaps of our values and actions.  A key leadership principle, recognizing the mission trumps and the central leadership practice for uncharted territory is to start with conviction, stay calm, stay connected and stay the course.
3. Relationships and resistance: You can’t go alone, but you haven’t succeeded until you’ve survived the sabotage. Ed Friedman said, “You have not accomplished change until you have survived the sabotage.”
4. Transformation: Everybody will be changed (especially the leader). T. S. Eliot wrote that the “end of our exploring” was to “arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”  Success of a unified vision had given birth to an overly centralized institution. The very unity, discipline and alignment needed to bring the church together to rebuild the campus around our vision were now stifling creativity, passion and energy.
5. Christian Leaders were trained for a world that is disappearing.  As Bolsinger explains, “For our church mission to win, I had to lose.” The changing world around us and even the success we had experienced had brought us to a new place where we would need a new strategy. To paraphrase Marshall Goldsmith, “what got us here wouldn’t take us there.”

Christians who provide leadership to businesses need just as much spiritual and biblical understanding of the priorities of the kingdom of God as they do the economics of market forces. Christians offering leadership in the marketplace, higher education, nonprofits or other sectors have to keep growing in our faith as much as we need to grow professionally. We can’t lead a Christian business and organization to further the mission of Jesus (seven days a week!) unless the Christian servant-leaders become more like Jesus (every day)!

Leadership is not authority. It is not the title or position that a person holds. Management cares for what is. Leadership is focused on what can be or what must be.

Here are three leadership principles that shape Bolsinger’s work in leadership development (mostly in church and nonprofit circles):

1. Leadership is essential.  Leadership is a way of being in an organization, family, team, company, church, business, nation (or any other system) that, in the words of Ronald Heifetz, “[mobilizes] people to tackle tough challenges and thrive.” Therefore, leadership is always about personal and corporate transformation.
2. Leadership is expressed in behaviors. Leaders act.  Leadership is mostly expressed in actions, relationships and responsibility. Leaders are “in the system.” That is, they have stayed in relationship with those they are called to lead.
3. Leadership is developed.  Any person who is willing to take personal responsibility, convene a group to work on a tough problem and persist in the face of resistance is a leader.  Leadership is learned in the doing and by reflecting on the doing.

As the good folks at the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center like to say, leaders must be able to “stay calm, stay connected, and stay the course.”

We are heading into uncharted territory and are given the charge to lead a mission where the future is nothing like the past.

Adventure or Die.

Conceptually stuck systems cannot become unstuck simply by trying harder.

Ed Friedman wrote in A Failure of Nerve, “In every field, in every business, every organization, leaders are rapidly coming to the awareness that the world in front of us is radically different from everything behind us. In the words of futurist and Distinguished Fellow of the Institute for the Future, Bob Johansen, after centuries of stability and slow, incremental change, in less than a generation our world has become VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. This VUCA world will only become more so in the days ahead and will require all leaders to learn new skills.”

Christian leaders today are sitting in meetings, reading reports and conversing with colleagues about a brutal truth: All that we have assumed about leading Christian organizations, all that we have been trained for, is out of date.

Spirituality has become wildly popular but so deeply individualistic that the fastest-growing “religious affiliations” among those under thirty are “none” and “spiritual-not-religious.” It’s become apparent a missional mind shift alone doesn’t lend itself to the capacity building that actually brings change.

Steve Yamaguchi, the dean of students at Fuller Theological Seminary, says that when his spiritual director took a flying lesson, he asked the instructor why they use flight simulators so much. The instructor said, “In the moment of crisis, you will not rise to the occasion; you will default to your training.”

For most of us in ministry, our defaults that once worked so well are not working, and we become discouraged. So, what do we do? We talk longer—we preach more. We try harder—we go into our bag of tricks and bring out our best programs.

Congregational systems guru Ed Friedman writes, “When any . . . system is imaginatively gridlocked, it cannot get free simply through more thinking about the problem. Conceptually stuck systems cannot be unstuck simply by trying harder.” The answer is not to try harder but to start a new adventure:  adventure that requires adaptive capacity.

Reorientation: If you can adapt and adventure, you can thrive. But you must let go, learn as you go and keep going no matter what.

A Leadership Model for Uncharted Territory

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed. Romans 12:2

Reorientation: In the Christendom world, speaking was leading. In a post-Christendom world, leading is multidimensional: apostolic, relational and adaptive.

The Recovery of Leadership for an Apostolic Church

In their book The Permanent Revolution, Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim recover the concept that the church—literally, “the ecclesia”—is an apostolic movement.

Churches need to keep adventuring or they will die. We need to press on to the uncharted territory of making traditional churches missionary churches.

Traditional churches will only become missionary churches as those in authority (and even those without formal authority) develop capacity to lead their congregations through a long, truly transformational process that starts with the transformation of the leaders and requires a thoroughgoing change in leadership functioning.

The Christian community is about gathering and forming a people, and spiritual transformation is about both individual and corporate growth, so that they—together—participate in Christ’s mission to establish the kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Leadership requires shared, corporate learning expressed in new shared, corporate functioning. In order to act or function differently in a changing world, all true leadership will require transformation. To that end, all true leadership will be anchored in the principles of adaptive leadership.

Bolsinger focuses on developing the resilience and problem-defining and problem-solving capabilities—amidst disequilibrium—required for equipping a congregation for the missional challenges before them.

Adaptive challenges, by contrast, are those that “cannot be solved with one’s existing knowledge and skills, requiring people to make a shift in their values, expectations, attitudes, or habits of behaviour.” These are “systemic problems with no ready answers” that arise from a changing environment and uncharted territory. These are challenges leaders face when the world around them changes so rapidly that the planned strategies and approaches are rendered moot.

Here is Bolsinger’s definition of leadership: Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world. Leadership (as differentiated from management or stewardship) is about transformation and mission, about growing and going, about personal development and corporate effectiveness—simultaneously.

Transformational leadership lies at the overlapping intersection of three leadership components: technical competence, relational congruence and adaptive capacity.

Nothing changes until there is a change in behavior. Nothing has changed until people start acting differently.

Leadership into uncharted territory requires and results in transformation of the whole organization, starting with the leaders. Only as leaders are transformed and grow in competence, congruence and adaptive capacity do they have the ability to face the challenges of a new day, a new geography, a new set of circumstances and a rapidly changing world. God willing, as they do so, the result will be more personal and community transformation.

Part Two:  The On-the-Map Skill Set

No One Is Going to Follow You off the Map Unless They Trust You on It

Competence and Credibility

Transformational leadership does not begin with transformation but with competence. In reality, the opportunity to lead usually begins with technical competence.

Before calling a community to change and grow, a leader must demonstrate the ability to serve the needs of his or her charges right where they are. Before going into uncharted territory, the leader must ably navigate the map while fulfilling the expectations he or she has been authorized to accomplish. Another way to say this is: Stewardship precedes leadership.

Before people will follow you off the map, gain the credibility that comes from demonstrating competence on the map.

There are three basic tasks that leaders must exercise with technical competence before they have the credibility to go off the map into uncharted territory.  Leadership professor Scott Cormode often says to his students, “We don’t have followers; we have people entrusted to our care.”

1. Competent stewardship of Scriptures and tradition. In a presentation to Duke Divinity School in 2008, Ronald Heifetz put it this way, “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.”
2. Competent stewardship of souls and communities. To be truly credible we also have to be shepherds. We have to tend the flock and protect them, keeping watch over everyone God has entrusted to us (Acts 20:28). People need to experience the love of God as they are led into the mission of God. If they don’t feel loved, they will likely not let anyone lead them anywhere. Competent stewardship of teams and tasks. For most leaders, the organizational part is harder than the personal part.
3. Even more, while critical, the credibility of technical competence is not enough to lead genuine change, there must also be present a deep personal trust, which can only come through the relational congruence of a leader.

Preparing for the Unknown

It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another.

Ronald Heifetz said, “Adaptive processes don’t require leadership with answers. It requires leadership that create structures that hold people together through the very conflictive, passionate, and sometimes awful process of addressing questions for which there aren’t easy answers.”

In uncharted territory, trust is as essential as the air we breathe. If trust is lost, the journey is over.

What is a bold leadership move? Convening the team. Creating a holding environment of healthy relationships that will keep the work before the people. The ability to innovate, to be creative, to consider new options, to “shift habits, beliefs or values” requires “a sturdy, trustworthy space” fashioned out of healthy relationships.

“There is only one thing that builds trust: the way people behave,” say Dennis and Michelle Rea, experts in helping corporations rebuild trust after a tragedy or scandal.

Psychologist, executive coach and consultant Jim Osterhaus of TAG Consulting takes it one step further: “The irreducible minimum in leadership is trust, and trust is based on a leader’s own self-definition.”

Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst every crisis. Relational congruence is about both constancy and care at the same time. It is about both character and affection, and self-knowledge and authentic self-expression.

Relational congruence is the leader’s ability to cultivate strong, healthy, caring relationships; maintaining healthy boundaries; and communicating clear expectations, all while staying focused on the mission. As a former Army Ranger and West Point graduate said, “The mission first; the men always.”

In her article on “When Change Is Out of Control,” Margaret Wheatley notes, “There is one core principle for developing these relationships. People must be engaged in meaningful work together if they are to transcend individual concerns and develop new capacities.”

Eating Strategy for Breakfast

If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management or administration, one can argue that leaders create and change culture, while management and administration act within culture. Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership

The most critical attribute a congregation must have to thrive in uncharted territory is a healthy organizational culture.

Culture, as Andy Crouch describes it, is “what we make of the world.” It is the combination of “the language we live in, the artifacts that we make use of, the rituals we engage in, our approach to ethics, the institutions we are a part of and the narratives we inhabit [that] have the power to shape our lives profoundly.”

Numerous organizational writers have said something along these lines: “After working on strategy for 20 years, I can say this: culture will trump strategy, every time. The best strategic idea means nothing in isolation. If the strategy conflicts with how a group of people already believe, behave or make decisions it will fail.”

JR Woodward writes, “While management acts within culture, leadership creates culture.”

According to Patrick Lencioni, “organizational health” is the “single greatest advantage” any company, organization or congregation can have toward accomplishing its mission, and is perhaps the single biggest differentiating quality between successful and less successful organizations.

After affirming the discipline of a cohesive team that creates agreements and accountability, Lencioni then advocates three more disciplines for a healthy organization: “create clarity,” “overcommunicate clarity” and “reinforce clarity.”

According to business ethicist David Burkus, who compared the corporate and ethical cultures of Enron and Zappos, “People typically do not look to written codes for clues about how to behave; they look to others.”

Culture is shaped by the actions of people, especially the leaders.

John Kotter puts it this way: “How does culture change? A powerful person at the top, or a large enough group from anywhere in the organization, decides the old ways are not working, figures out a change vision, starts acting differently, and enlists others to act differently.”

Love is the most critical attribute that a congregation must have if it is going to thrive in uncharted territory is a healthy organizational culture.

Part Three:  Leading Off the Map

In Uncharted Territory Adaptation Is Everything

Navigating the “Geography of Reality”

Adaptive leadership is about “letting go, learning as we go, and keeping going.”

Reorientation: When our old maps fail us, something within us dies. Replacing our paradigms is both deeply painful and absolutely critical.

At the core of adaptive work is clarifying what is precious, elemental—even essential—to the identity of an organization. The core ideology of any group functions as both a charter and an identity statement, saying “This is who we are.”

For each organization, this facing-the-unknown moment asks us particular questions we need to answer honestly together:

• Why do we exist as a congregation, institution or organization?
• What would be lost in our community, in our field or in our world if we ceased to be?
• What purposes and principles must we protect as central to our identity?
• What are we willing to let go of so the mission will continue?

For church leaders facing this missional moment, the reframing of church strategy from a sanctuary-centered, membership-based, religious- and life-service provider to a local mission outpost for furthering the kingdom of God enables our congregations to discover a faithful expression of our corporate identity in a changing world.

At the heart of adaptive leadership is learning. To put it bluntly, if you are not learning anything new, it is not adaptive work.

My Italian Grandfather Was Killing Me

God has designed all aspects of life—including corporate life, communities, families, organizations and churches—to adapt and thrive in changing environments.

At the heart of adaptive leadership for the church is this conviction: The church is the body of Christ. It is a living organism, a vibrant system. And just like human bodies, human organizations thrive when they are cooperating with the wisdom of God for how that system is designed, how it grows and how it adapts to changing external environments.

That is what adaptive leadership is all about: the way that living human systems learn and adapt to a changing environment so they can fulfill their purpose for being.  It’s about hanging on to the healthiest, most valuable parts of our identity in life and letting go of those things that hinder us from living and loving well.

Here’s the working definition of leadership we are using here: Energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world.

Kevin Graham Ford explains, “Your members will resist any change that is in conflict with the church’s code. But they will also resist change if they don’t perceive that leaders are intentionally preserving the church’s code. By discovering and preserving your church’s code, you will give your members a sense of safety so that they will be more open to change.”

Ronald Heifetz suggests that at the heart of any adaptive work are three key questions church leaders need to wrestle with together:

1. What DNA is essential and must be preserved? What, in the words of Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, “must never change”?
2. What DNA can be discarded?  What can we stop doing or let die so we can free resources and energy for new forms of ministry? 
3. What DNA needs to be created through experimentation?

Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There . . . Then Do Something

One of Bolsinger’s early leadership coaches, Kirk Kirlin, taught him, “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.”

Perhaps a humble stance of curiosity, awareness and attention, as well as a healthy skepticism at our own success, may indeed be the first lessons we need to learn,

The first component of developing adaptive capacity is to realize that it’s a process of learning and adapting to fulfill a missional purpose, not to fix the immediate issues.

Adaptive leadership, again, is about leading the learning process of a group who must develop new beliefs, habits or values, or shift their current ones in order to find new solutions that are consistent with their purpose for being. At the heart of this work is a three-step process of “observations, interpretations and interventions.”

Heifetz, Linsky and Grashow describe it this way: Adaptive leadership is an iterative process involving three key activities: (1) observing events and patterns around you; (2) interpreting what you are observing (developing multiple hypotheses about what is really going on); and (3) designing interventions based on the observations and interpretations to address the adaptive challenge you have identified.

Reorientation: Leadership in the past meant coming up with solutions. Today it is learning how to ask new questions that we have been too scared, too busy or too proud to ask.

To get accurate observations, we must, as Heifetz and his colleagues say, “Look from the balcony and listen on the floor.”

Leaders must be able to withhold interpretations and interventions long enough to be listeners who also have the vision to see the deeper systemic realities at work in the organization.

Heifetz, Linsky and Grashow observe, “The activity of interpreting might be understood as listening for the “song beneath the words.”

David McRaney, author of the book and the blog You Are Not So Smart, writes about “survivorship bias,” that is, the tendency to look only at the “survivors” or “stories of success” and draw conclusions about reality.

Survivorship bias is not only what makes us believe in the quick fixes offered by the diet industry or the magic of a celebrity CEO to turn around a company, but it’s even what makes a church leadership council believe that to attract young adults to their church they should never have a worship leader who is over thirty (true story, sadly!), or to mimic the success of the megachurch down the street (who has a completely different code).

Without question the hardest part of an adaptive learning process is to keep people from jumping to interventions too early. Again, the desire for the quick fix is really strong. In short, when intervening in the system, there needs to be a clear sense that learning is the goal, that we are not making any big, permanent changes yet but simply trying out some ideas to see what we will find. Innovative interventions will always be resisted.

The Mission Trumps!

Leadership isn’t so much skillfully helping a group accomplish what they want to do (that is management). Leadership is taking people where they need to go and yet resist going. Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world. It’s about challenging, encouraging and equipping people to be transformed more and more into the kind of community that God can use to accomplish his plans in a particular locale. And often the very people who called us to lead them are disappointed when we do.

The focused, shared, missional purpose of the church or organization will trump every other competing value.

The key question is: Does it further our mission? The mission trumps all.

Experimental interventions trigger resistance—internal resistance. Resistance within our community and resistance within ourselves. Systems seek to secure the status quo, to experience and maintain equilibrium. Families, companies, organizations and congregations are wired for homeostasis.

Here is the strategy for leading into uncharted territory. It is a maxim for the leader to live by and a goal to be developed within the larger leadership group. Start with conviction, stay calm, stay connected, and stay the course.

When you start with conviction, the first question about leading into uncharted territory is not about change but about what will not change.

Reorientation: There is perhaps no greater responsibility and no greater gift that leadership can give a group of people on a mission than to have the clearest, most defined mission possible.

In the military a principle is drummed into all officers: Everyone involved in an action needs to know the commander’s intent. The commander’s intent is not just the orders of what a unit or battalion is to do, it also includes the goal or purpose of the mission. The purpose of the commander’s intent is to empower subordinates to be able to achieve the goals of the mission if the circumstances change and they need to adapt.

Jim Collins describes this mission-statement conviction as a Hedgehog Concept made up of the intersection of three elements:

• What are we passionate about?
• What do we have the potential to do better than anyone else?
• What will pay the bills?

Write a simple proposal with an eight-word mission statement. The statement must be in this format: verb, target, outcome. And it can use only eight words.  It forces a conversation that helps build the adaptive functioning: What words are most important? What are we really all about?

To be blunt, the leader in the system is committed to the mission when no one else is.

Take a Good Look into the Coffin

As Edwin Friedman reminds us, the leader’s own presence is the most powerful tool for furthering the transformation process.

When we enter the realm of adaptive work—working in uncharted territory—win-win often becomes lose-lose. Transformational leadership and the adaptive change necessary requires us to go beyond win-win to make hard, oftentimes forced choices.

An Executive Pastor once said, “As a church, we haven’t had to face tough choices like this, ever. For at least a generation we could solve every problem through addition. If we wanted to address a need, we just added a new program, a new staff member, a new line item in the budget. But now we don’t have the money and personnel to do that. We can’t solve our problems through addition, and we just don’t have any experience of solving problems with subtraction. This church leadership faced a truly adaptive challenge that caused them to develop new capacities for decision making, priority setting and dealing with the inevitable conflict and fallout that would come.”

Systems theory reminds us that “today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.”

According to Kotter, 50 percent of organizational transformation endeavors that fail do so because the leaders did not create an appropriate sense of “true urgency.” At the same time, Kotter reminds leaders that another paradox of leadership is that it takes time and patience to create true urgency—an approach that Heifetz and Linsky call letting an issue “ripen.”

In his book The Anxious Organization, Jeffrey Miller writes, “In and of itself, anxiety is neither functional or dysfunctional. It is a state of readiness to do something or other that may or may not be appropriate in response to a threat that may or may not be accurately perceived.”

For leaders this is the point to remember about anxiety: People who are overly or chronically anxious don’t make good decisions. When anxiety spikes we revert to more primitive ways of being. We fight, we flee, we freeze.

Transformational leadership is built on leaders making good, wise, discerning decisions for the sake of both the health and the mission of the community—decisions that reinforce the missional conviction—and this requires leaders who are able to stay calm.

To stay calm is to be so aware of yourself that your response to the situation is not to the anxiety of the people around you but to the actual issue at hand. Leadership requires a calm, confident presence in the middle of a highly anxious, instinctively reactive situation that threatens to burn everyone, because calm, like anxiety, is contagious. Anxious people scurry to quick fixes and work avoidance.

Peter Steinke writes, “To lead means to have some command of our own anxiety and some capacity not to let other people’s anxiety contaminate us; that is, not to allow their anxiety to affect our thinking, actions, and decisions.”

Consider focusing on a more modest goal than being perfectly calm: being just a bit less anxious than everyone else.

Peter Steinke notes, “The leader’s ‘presence’ can have a calming influence on reactive behavior. Rather than reacting to the reactivity of others, leaders with self-composure and self-awareness both exhibit and elicit a more thoughtful response.”

Part Four:  Relationships and Resistance

You Can’t Go Alone, but You Haven’t Succeeded Until You’ve Survived the Sabotage

Gus and Hal Go to Church

No one would live in Boston without owning a winter coat. But countless people think that they can exercise leadership without partners. Ronald Heifetz, “The Leader of the Future”

Over the years of observing an actual family business, leading a church and being a leader in a Christian organization of higher education, Bolsinger has learned that the complexity of Christian organizations as family businesses requires more communication, not less, more clarity of agreements and even more difficult conversations to name and navigate the role conflicts inherit in such a system.

Six different teams reflect the different kinds of relationships a leader must attend to in order to bring transformation to the whole organizational system:

1. Allies. An ally is anyone who is convinced of the mission and is committed to seeing it fulfilled. In this sense, allies are inside the system.
2. Confidants. To be a confidant, a person must care more about you than they do about the mission of the organization. Therefore, healthy confidants are usually those outside the system who can give you honest feedback about yourself as a leader in the system.
3. Opponents. Potential opponents are stakeholders who have markedly different perspectives from yours and who risk losing the most if you and your initiative go forward.
4. Senior authorities. The key strategy for working with those above you in the system is, again, stay connected. Stay in relationship and close proximity with those above you.
5. Casualties. In any transformational leadership effort there will be casualties. You can’t go into uncharted territory without risk.
6. Dissenters. In true adaptive change there are no unanimous votes. Someone, usually a significant number of people, will say no, no matter what. These voices of dissent are extremely important at every step of the way. Dissenters have the uncanny capacity for asking the tough key question that you have been unwilling to face up to yourself or that others have been unwilling to raise.

In his book Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down, John Kotter encourages leaders to engage dissenters, not discourage them: “Don’t scheme to keep potential opponents, even the sneakiest attackers, out of the discussion. Let them in. Let them shoot at you. Even encourage them to shoot at you!” By doing so, you are giving dissenting voices a hearing, demonstrating respect for them and a confidence in your ideas (remember: the mission trumps, not you!).

Every visionary leader needs both a group to keep attending to the necessary work and a team to lead the transformation of the organizational culture.

A great idea needs at least two groups of people to see it through: the maintaining mission group and the transformation team. The transformation team is akin to what John Kotter calls a “Guiding Coalition.” This group will add effort to the inspiration. They are going to do the work of listening, learning, attempting and, yes, failing.

When leaders are willing to give up the myth of the lone individual with the inspiring idea and instead learn to build teams of shared inspired action, then the church will begin to see more dreams become reality. Here are some specific actions steps:

1. Give the work back to the people who most care about it.
2. Engage the mature and motivated.
3. Stay connected to your critics. From The Godfather we learned to “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
4. Expect sabotage.

Et Tu, Church?

Sabotage and Staying the Course

Ronald Heifetz wrote, “Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb.” The perceptive and caring leader will invariably wince at the three words in the center of the quote: your own people.

Friedman informs us that sabotage is not merely something to be avoided or wished away; instead, it comes with the territory of leading, whether that “territory” is a family or an organization.

Sabotage is natural. It’s normal. It’s part and parcel of the systemic process of leadership . . . Saboteurs are usually doing nothing but unconsciously supporting the status quo.

Reorientation: When on the map, leaders could assume that once an affirmative vote was made, the challenge of bringing change was finished. In uncharted territory, where changes occur so rapidly, leaders cannot assume success until after they have weathered the sabotage that naturally follows.

We are so focused on quieting our critics, appeasing or answering our accusers and shielding ourselves from the friendly fire that it often knocks us off course. While we need to stay connected to the saboteurs (“Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”), what actually keeps the change process going is investing even more time in those committed to growing, adapting and changing for good. Find other calm, courageous people and strengthen and support them.

Bob Johansen, who described the “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous” (VUCA) world, says “Leaders make the future.” (Check out my summary of his book here.)

Leading change is a process not accomplished quickly, and the moments of sabotage are the most crucial times in the change process. At this moment everyone in the system sees the leader’s true colors. Sabotage is not only a test of the leader’s resolve but also a test of the system’s resilience.

Osterhaus, Jurkowski and Hahn describe Red Zone–Blue Zone decision making. The Red Zone is “all about me”; the Blue Zone is “all about the mission.” Blue Zone decisions are made as an expression of the core values and healthy principles, and further the discerned, shared mission conviction of the group. The key skill for staying the course amidst sabotage is to make Blue Zone decisions—no matter what.

A healthy system makes decisions that further the mission. Perhaps the hardest truth to swallow for most Christian leaders trying to lead change is this: You must choose principles over personal need.

All the best leadership literature emphasizes the need for courage. It takes courage to stay calm and connected in the face of friendly fire.

We want the positive passions and aspirations to overwhelm the negative, fearful voices that keep our families, companies, organizations or churches oppressed in the status quo.

Leaders inspire. The root word of “courage” is the Latin word for “heart.” The actions of a leader should give heart to a people who sometimes, amidst fears and frailties, lose heart (see Deuteronomy 20:3; Hebrews 12:3).

The paradox of transformational leaders is that the very conviction that causes the leader to be willing to “disappoint your own followers at a rate they can absorb” is what ultimately—when handled well—wins “your own followers” to join you in your cause. If we as leaders start with conviction, stay connected, calm and on course in the face of opposition, then others around us have both the time and conditions to take on these very convictions as their own.

Part Five:  Transformation

Everybody Will Be Changed (Especially the Leader)

How a Nursing Mother Saved America

Reorientation: Those who had neither power nor privilege in the Christendom world are the trustworthy guides and necessary leaders when we go off the map. They are not going into uncharted territory. They are at home.

The vast experience of women, persons of color and leaders from majority world contexts is as critical to the transitioning Western church as was Sacagawea’s to Lewis and Clark.

In a TED Talk seen over 1.6 million times, novelist Chimamanda Adichie reminds us that unless we are exposed to the diversity of the world, our default mental models will create a “single story” of the world, a narrative to help us make sense by making simplistic assumptions that make us comfortable and keep us from having to change. The danger, says Adichie, is that with a single story, we make assumptions about people who are different from us that allows us to keep them marginalized.

Leadership professor Scott Cormode teaches his students, “Leadership begins in listening.” This resonates with Gibbons: “To effectively carry Jesus’ gospel to various places around the globe today—more important, to be Jesus’ gospel—listening is required. We need to be sensitive and lead with an eager learner’s resolve.”

Just as Sacagawea’s voice as both translator and guide was critical to the captains of the Corps of Discovery, Christian leaders in a post-Christendom world need to engage, encourage and even insist that discernment and decision making begin with making a broader number of voices heard.

Without question, Lewis and Clark were unorthodox leaders who creatively combined the structure of military chain of command with the flexibility and adaptability that uncharted territory demands.

When organizations are talking more and more about the necessity of increasing trust, transparency and authenticity, women leaders take that for granted. “Men talk about building trust, women talk about building community,” said Jill Hudson, a recently retired senior leader within the national Presbyterian Church (USA).

“As the church moves into the community, they find that women have already been there. In the schools, in the parks with their kids, in community organizations, with neighbors,” says Kara Powell. “Community life is even more important today and women are already the fabric of the community.”

Sometime in the 2040s, the United States will become a true ethnic plurality. During that decade white Americans will no longer be the majority but one of several considerably large ethnic groups. Even more surprising is that those trends are actually higher in the church and especially in seminaries that provide the training for Christian leadership. While white, mainline and evangelical churches are in decline, racial-ethnic churches are growing and predicted to increase even more; seminary enrollments show increases only among nonwhite students.

Uncharted leadership survives and thrives by listening to the ignored voice (Sacagawea), by expanding the table of participation beyond what is imaginable (Sacagawea’s and York’s votes), and by discovering new worlds and seeing what will come (Colter’s exploration of Yellowstone), but mostly, the challenges of uncharted leadership challenge us to keep exploring and become someone completely different from when the journey began.

The End of Our Exploring

Reorientation: Exploration teaches us to see the familiar through a new frame. Exploration brings differentiation. Exploration requires us to become expert experimenters. Exploration demands our best selves.

That spirit of exploration, the spirit of adventure that sometimes inspires huge risks and other times leads to questionable decisions, according to Edwin Friedman, is the key to breaking the “imaginative gridlock” that keeps a system locked into old mental models and outdated strategies even though the world has changed.

Perhaps this spirit of exploration—this adventure-or-die attitude—is the great gift uncharted leaders can give to the church in a post-Christendom world.

The true discovery of exploration is that we begin to see the world and ourselves differently from we had before. Discovery and exploration do not so much answer all of our questions as they help us to raise and consider new questions. This is critical for leaders in every circumstance.

This reframing or “an ability to think about things in more than one way” is perhaps the most critical skill for adaptive leadership. According to Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal, reframing is the hallmark of a truly great leader.

Bolsinger encourages his coaching clients to have a delicate balance, “You must bring yourself to your role, but you are not your role.” There must be a healthy separation of role and self to be a healthy, functioning leader in a healthy organizational system. This healthy separation of self and role is part of what psychologists call “differentiation.” Differentiation is the ability to have a sense of self that is distinct from one’s role, one’s relationships and the family or organizational system we are part of without having to disconnect relationally.

The fear of failure weighs heavy on all types of leaders, but perhaps even more so for pastors. When failing can mean losing your job (survival), community (acceptance), reputation (competence), even the possibility of failure can make us feel out of control.

“The leaders of the future need to continually cultivate a learning posture,” offers Steve Yamaguchi.  “Having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would.”

Most leaders are at their best when facing a challenge, and that the desire for safety and security can lead us into the most insecure, indeed, precarious personal positions.

Reorientation: While on-the-map leaders are praised for being experts who have it all together, uncharted transformational leadership is absolutely dependent on the leader’s own ongoing exploration, learning and transformation.

If you want to keep your church from dying, focus on your own transformation together, not on your church dying. Focus on the mountains ahead, not the rivers behind. Focus on continually learning, not what you have already mastered.

Leadership into uncharted territory requires and results in transformation of the whole organization, starting with the leaders.

Focus on how you need to grow in technical competence, relational congruence and adaptive capacity, and especially focus on what you need to leave behind, let go and even let die so your church can become more and more effective at fulfilling its part in God’s mission.

God is taking us into uncharted territory to transform us.

Reorientation Recap

• You were trained for a world that is disappearing.
• If you can adapt and adventure, you can thrive.
• But you must let go, learn as you go and keep going no matter what.
• In a Christendom world, speaking was leading.
• In a post-Christendom world, leading is multidimensional: apostolic, relational and adaptive.
• Before people will follow you off the map, gain the credibility that comes from demonstrating competence on the map.
• In uncharted territory, trust is as essential as the air we breathe.
• If trust is lost, the journey is over.
• When our old maps fail us, something within us dies.
• Replacing our paradigms is both deeply painful and absolutely critical.
• In a Christendom world, vision was seeing possibilities ahead and communicating excitement.
• In uncharted territory, vision is accurately seeing ourselves and defining reality.
• Leadership in the past meant coming up with solutions.
• Today leadership is learning how to ask new questions we have been too scared, too busy or too proud to ask.
• There is no greater gift that leadership can give a group of people on a mission than to have the clearest, most defined mission possible.
• When dealing with managing the present, win-win solutions are the goal.
• But when leading adaptive change, win-win is usually lose-lose.
• In uncharted territory visionary leadership is more likely going to come from a small Corps of Discovery while the board manages the ongoing health of the organization.
• In uncharted territory, where changes occur so rapidly, leaders cannot assume success until after they have weathered the sabotage that naturally follows.
• Those who had neither power nor privilege in the Christendom world are the trustworthy guides and necessary leaders when we go off the map.
• Those without power or privilege are not going into uncharted territory. They are at home.
• Exploration teaches us to see the familiar through a new frame and demands that we become our best selves.
• Uncharted leadership is absolutely dependent on the leader’s own ongoing exploration, learning and transformation.

May Bolsinger’s tips serve you well, as you enter unchartered territory. Keep shooting for the stars!