Recently I was reading one of my student’s paper in the Fuller Theological Seminary's Missional Leadership Cohort. It was a well crafted piece. In the paper, Mark recounted one of Annie Dillard’s stories, An Expedition to the Pole that got my attention in terms of the core challenge (what we call adaptive) facing leadership transformation. I shared it with a group of denominational executives in Pasadena a few weeks ago and it was like lights suddenly going on in a dark room.
Dillard’s story, as recounted by my student, Mark, is about the ill-fated Franklin Expedition to the North Pole. Franklin left England in 1845 on two ships with a crew of 138 officers and men in search of the Northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean. Franklin and the crew knew they were heading out into unknown waters on a journey of discovery. The result of this famous journey has captured the interest of many since not one single member of the crew were ever found alive again. Their bodies were eventually found in shallow graves dispersed across the frozen Arctic land.
What happened?
A partial answer is found in how the expedition provisioned itself in terms of what it saw as necessary for the journey. These were brave, adventurous men. They belonged to an era of exploration and had some awareness of the risks that might lie ahead. One surmises they talked about those risks as well as the opportunities for discovery and commerce that potentially lay before them. Franklin probably spoke to many groups about the expedition and the challenges that lay ahead in a new time when old paradigms were falling and a new world emerging. In all likelihood, he also talked with those few other men who had sailed up to the Arctic. One can only imagine their zeal and conviction about how their journey was contributing to a new, emerging world.
But they all died! Clues to why this happened are in the manifest of what they took on the voyage. The manifest is a telling description of what these adventurers understood to be important and necessary for the journey. It captures the narrative in which they lived, a narrative that would destroy them because it made little sense in the environment of the Arctic. Franklin equipped his ships with a 1200 volume library, a hand organ that played fifty tunes, china place settings and expensive silver flatware. These early Victorian era Englishmen took their world with them. So important were these elements of their normal life in England that they only carried a twelve day supply of coal for their auxiliary engines, knowing the journey would last two to three years. So deep inside them were the habits and customs of their world which determined what they took with them when they abandoned ship to seek help. Bodies were found lying out on the frozen ice or in shallow graves with their silver beside them. Despite their brave commitment to explore a new way through the North West Passage, Franklin and his crew went with the assumptions of a 19th Century English world and it killed them in the new space they entered.
Here is an apt metaphor for what is happening to well intentioned people in local church and denominational leadership. The programs and techniques we bring with us to innovate mission-shaped life are like the china plates and library books that provisioned Franklin’s ship and shaped his imagination. The old binary opposites we create around missional change with their inside/outside, institution/organic, hierarchy/flat, and so forth, are like the familiar, precious silver on the bodies of those brave men lying dead in a vast, frozen loneliness.
This brings me to the tag line of this week’s newsletter. It comes from the critically acclaimed TV series, Mad Men about the people and relationships populating a Madison Avenue advertising firm in the early 60s. I bought the DVDs of Seasons 1 & 2 recently and am in the midst of “catching up” on the series.
Don Draper, the main character, is the creative genius of the company. In one scene (Season 2, I believe) he’s talking about the art of making advertising that sells and sums up his position by stating that the key to success is “derivatives with a twist”. In that moment I saw what most proposals and programs for missional leaders are - derivatives with a twist - the same old ideas with just enough new edge to make them feel different and avant guard. The problem with derivatives (more of the same thing only packaged in a different way) is that it’s like Franklin’s ship manifest when you’re sailing in unknown waters. Derivatives with a twist are about working at making existing patterns and programs work for you in a new world by repackaging them to sound, in the Mad Men genre, sexy and sellable with all the marketing abilities one can bring to the table. It’s like telling everyone the established, so-called “Christendom” church is no longer functional and that we have to get past everyone’s favorite whipping boy - ‘modernity’ - then offering people a simple formula for becoming missional. A derivative with a twist. Out there in this new space where we’re seeking to find our way, these formulas and programs are dangerous pump organs and bone china we carry with us at our peril.
Herein lies the challenge of forming mission-shaped leaders. How do we avoid being caught in the derivatives with a twist trap?
I was reading an article in the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine (November, 2009) by Megan McArdle entitled Misleading Indicators. The article provides us with insight into why addressing this challenge of leadership is difficult - we’re caught in a specific form of the derivatives with twist trap.
McArdle’s article is about how we measure our well being as a culture. The operative framework here links effective measurements (formulas) with defining and knowing success. She argues that most of the measurements and indicators we use are misleading. The most misleading of all is the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) a measurement that came into usage in the early part of the 20th century. She states;
The Great Depression and World War II created the modern world in a lot of ways. They also created the primary lenses through which we view it (sic. the GDP)... Unfortunately, that lens is a trifle distorted... (37).
GDP was never meant to be a measure of our well being, only a measure of production. What happened, however, is that we became enthralled with the Faustian belief that with the right measurements and formulas we could manage, predict and name our preferred futures. So much has this imagination shaped us that we seek to put a measurement or formula around those things that are fundamentally outside the realm of measurement or formula. We have been beguiled to believe there are metrics and formulas for everything and, if we manage them properly, they can give us effective, healthy outcomes. As McArdle argues so well within her own field, the last year or so has finally given traction like never before to the realization that GDP and notions of well-being are often radically divergent categories. Her illustration is worth quoting at length:
Think about a house, any of the millions that were constructed during the bubble that burst in 2008. Let’s make it a nice house: four bedrooms, 3.5 baths, with an attached garage and a quarter acre lot. During its construction, that house did its own little bit to boost the GDP. Lumber was purchased and swathed in fluttering robes of Tyvek. Tiles were pressed out of clay and nailed to the roof. Pipe was laid, glass was sealed into the window slots, granite was hewn from a Vermont mountain and shipped all the way to its kitchen counters. All of this output, which swelled the GDP (at least to the tune of its purchase price), has ended up in...nothing. The house, in an exurban cul-de-sac, sits empty while bankers, borrowers, and regulators squabble...GDP does not, and cannot, reflect the waste of enormous effort, and precious natural resources, that went into building something that suddenly no one wants. Moreover, it misses many other aspects of our existence (37).
But the default of measurement and formulas is powerful - they are the bone china, silverware and library the Franklin Expedition felt it needed in looking for the Northwest Passage. What we do is assume that if we have the right formula to make a missional church or the correct measurements to know what a healthy church looks like then we’re going to be successful. This is the modernity all the gurus tell us we’re supposed to be leaving behind. It’s the bone china and books on board the ship of our new vision and mission statements. If we can measure it then it’s real and it can be managed.
But we don’t travel in that space anymore. We can use all our old categories in a measurable world if we’re healthy (translate - successful in bringing people into the church); but, what are we measuring? Derivatives with a twist. The problem is the categories no longer connect with the swelling numbers who no longer care about or have time for the church. We can measure worship, evangelism, discipleship, small groups and so forth forever. We can parade our comparison charts and look at development in specific areas but all we’re doing is working on the derivatives with a new twist and having brilliant conversations amongst ourselves. The point is that when you sail out of the Victorian harbor north into unchartered waters filled with endless miles of treacherous ice, these measurements (good food and proper plates, good books to while away the hours) are pretty useless. We are in new waters where the formulas, no matter how mathematically accurate and socially scientific the testing, are practically useless.
For those who intuitively see this the question arises: What do we do? What does leadership need to look like? How do you plan in this new space? Without being self serving, that is what Fred Romanuk and I were seeking to address in the book Missional Leader. It will be further developed in my new book from Jossey-Bass coming out in February, 2010 called Missional Map Making and it’s presented again in the book Scott Boren and I just wrote for Baker, Introducing the Missional Church.
However, I also want to connect you with another book that is little known on this side of the Pacific. It’s called God Next Door written by an Australian friend, Simon Carey Holt. So much in this wonderful little book is suggestive of how we form a mission-shaped people in this new space without all the measurement and formula techniques. Simon’s book is new to North America, published by Allelon.
You may also be asking the question: If the measurements and formulas we’ve been using are derivatives with a twist (most of us intuitively know this is true) then what are the alternatives? This is a whole other conversation. Some of it is laid out in the books mentioned above.
In Simon Carey Holt’s interview you will get some clues to what an alternative imagination might involve. In another life Simon was a professional chef. He savors the joys of cooking. This is a wonderful, alternative metaphor to the measure/formula framework. Chefs savor the good things of the earth, they attend to what is growing about them, they are gifted in calling forth what is within an assortment of ingredients creating the space to let their flavors mix in order to be surprised by what is called forth in the cooking. This is leadership in the new space. Further, Simon also trained in spiritual direction which he has taught at Whitely College in Melbourne. In God Next Door he talks about the practices of entering, attending, dwelling and listening to what God is already up to in the neighborhood. No measurements needed, no formulas (modern or postmodern) invited!
Welcome to the unthinkable world where derivatives with a twist will get you killed.
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