Last week I was privileged to spend an evening with friends in Pasadena celebrating the publication of my new book Missional Mapmaking (Jossey Bass/Leadership Network). Nina Lau Branson cooked some extraordinary Asian food with amazing rice pudding and other things for desert. I felt so honored with the presence of the group. Scott Cormode and I were sitting on a chair beside each other as he fingered through the boom. Scott is the Hugh De Pree Professor of Leadership Development at Fuller Seminary and a very talented, gifted teacher. We were comparing notes on issues around leadership development and teaching when both of us, almost in the same breath, noted the biggest challenge we face in the classroom and with leaders in the field is how to teach and innovate culture change.
I experienced this again in a number of other meetings and events over the past several weeks. In a group of executives I realized that one of the defaults that shapes many of us in leadership is the search for some method or program that will provide solutions to problems. I talked about this default we have to 'hit the bullseye' as if there was some object out there that, if we could just name it correctly (leadership with authority or a vision statement with a well executed plan) we would solve most of our problems. I remember the consternation on some people’s faces when I said we are in the kind of new space where there just aren’t any 'bullseye' out there to hit and this was, in fact, a wrong way of thinking about leadership.
I experienced this again in the classroom last week where good leaders were eager to know what the bullet points looked like or wanted to make sure all the content was being properly covered. These were good leaders and there is nothing wrong with bullet points or content; but, when we find ourselves in a new space, a place of leadership where most of us have never been before, these ways of discovering how to lead are less than helpful. We need a radically different set of criteria to lead in the new space we now inhabit.
What leadership needs to look like in this new space was brought home to me this week as I watched Olympic athletes in my hometown of Vancouver. For most of the them the difference between competitors is in the practices they take on and the discipline with which they practice and practice and practice the skills and habits of their sport. That’s what distinguishes the great from the ordinary even more than innate skill or bodily form.
In the end, culture change is about apprenticing and then working with new sets of skills and practices then working them and working them and working them. We are convinced that the new leadership we need to cultivate isn’t primarily about more knowledge and content; it's about how you form learning communities that are apprenticed into new skills and habits.
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