Monthly Archives: August 2009

Willow Creek Thoughts

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I’m chewing on my notes from the first day of the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, looking for patterns and the fingerprints of God. A couple of things jump out as I put the various threads from yesterday together.

1. Our current crises are opportunity. I knew that already, but it was good to hear Bill Hybels and Gary Hamel say it.

Hybels: How do gifted leaders react? With perverse excitement at the opportunities. These are perfect conditions for greatness to emerge.

Hamel: Should we wring our hands or thank God for the opportunity?

I think your reaction depends on whether you’re more concerned with defending the past or strategizing for the future. It also depends on how nimble you are. I think of Rudolph Guiliani on 9/11. He had a long-term plan for the city, though the average person in Orlando never heard about it or cared. That was the plan that no doubt led him to the meeting that happened to be right near the Trade Center that morning. But if Guiliani was anything, he was nimble as he reacted to the crisis, and greatness emerged.

2. Leadership in the future is going to look quite different. Gary Hamel and Jessica Jackley (founder of Kiva) both talked about a lack of hierarchy.

Hamel: It’s a challenge to build organizations that can survive without superhumans at the top. Leaders today are less concerned with control and more concerned with connecting, mobilizing and supporting. Their strategies are open and their hierarchy is flat.

Jackley: When you assume co-creation as a value from the beginning, top-down management doesn’t work.

If the hero leader is an old and failed model, as I’ve blogged about before, how do we move to the idea that a team can fill the impossibly long list of requirements for a CEO? Could you have different members of the team to cover the multiple roles of rousing public speaker, visionary leader, internal communicator, disciplined manager and caring, accessible, sympathetic boss? High-level leadership would sure look more attainable if we could find a way to lead in community.

3. Ideas need contribution. Gary Hamel had a couple of zingers, but one metaphor is going to stick with me:

Ideas shouldn’t develop like a pregnancy, where something happens in private and then a number of months later, out comes a nice package, but as a family picnic, out in the open where everyone contributes.

How do we get everyone — colleagues, clients, etc. — involved in our future? How can a large organization move to co-creation? Others have managed to reinvent themselves.

At lunch, one of our staff members pointed out that he’s been around long enough to see us move from bottom-up leadership to top-down leadership, and now we’re talking about bottom-up leadership again. I’m not sure we’re really back where we started. I think our world and our technology has evolved to the point that we now have the ability to co-create instead of individual brainstorming that has to be pulled together by an individual. It may have flavors of the old, but it feels new.

For such a time as then

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I blogged before about how David led where he was, long before he became king. I Chronicles 12 notes how he attracted followers at Ziklag and Hebron, many of them brave warriors who would serve with him long after he became king. But one group of men were singled out with a special gift: “men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.”

I think understanding the times is a rare and critical gift. If the leader himself doesn’t have that gift, he should add some men of Issachar to his leadership team. If we don’t understand the culture we’re working in and what our organization/church/business/country should do to take on the current and future realities, then we’re destined to extinction.

Mordecai was another biblical example who understood the times. He told Queen Esther, “who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this.” This passage is an excellent, well-worn principle for contextual leadership, but I recently heard a video blog from The Mission Exchange that gave it a new wrinkle.

In the face of today’s economic recession, Steve Moore suggests that understanding the times might mean a good, long look at merging with another organization or even closing down. As Steve says,

We often quote the phrase from the story of Esther, “for such a time as this.” Is it possible “this time” has come and gone for some organizations?

I wonder how many organizations or programs are still running on the fumes of a great vision that was perfect for the time it was created, but has since run its course. Part of understanding the times is to recognize when an old strategy doesn’t apply anymore. Men of Issachar know what needs to be done and what does NOT need to be done anymore. The next step after knowing it is to demonstrate the courage necessary to shut down an initiative or organization that is no longer relevant today.