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Beaumont, Susan. How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season. 1st ed. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2019.
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FirstAuthor:: Beaumont, Susan
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Title:: How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season
Year:: 2019
Citekey:: beaumontHowLeadWhen2019
itemType:: book
Publisher:: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated
Location:: Blue Ridge Summit
ISBN:: 978-1-5381-2768-1 978-1-5381-2769-8
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Abstract
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Notes
How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season
Beaumont, Susan
Preface
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I couldn’t find much that helped leaders bridge the discernment work to their organizational leadership. What resources I did find were geared more toward business leaders, and I wondered why the world of business was generating better resources than the church on contemplative leadership.
An Introduction to Liminality
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Organizational life is full of liminal experiences—seasons where something has ended, but a new thing has not yet begun. Seasons where watching and waiting can be difficult, overplanning can be futile, and it simply isn’t helpful to pretend that we understand what happens next.
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The Christian story is, by design, an invitation into liminality. The hoped-for reign of God is already inaugurated in the figure of Jesus Christ, but not yet complete. We embrace an understanding of our eternal lives as liminally suspended until the final return of Christ. We have already been redeemed, but the fulfillment of that redemption will not be complete until the end times when Christ returns. Our theology frames an identity for us of semi-permanent liminality.
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Why then are we resistant to living in a liminal state? Isn’t it clear that God is working on us and with us in liminal seasons? Why is the disorientation that we experience so intolerable? Why do we stand outside of our own story and pray for liminality to end, when the liminality is itself an invitation to transformation? Our resistance stems from the fact that liminality always begins with an ending, an experience of loss. And humankind resists loss. We also resist the unknowing inherent in “not yet”—the loss of control over our own destiny.
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The words liminal and liminality are both derived from the Latin limen, meaning a threshold; that is, the bottom part of a doorway that must be crossed when entering a building. In Latin, limen referred to the stone placed on the threshold of a door that physically had to be mounted to cross from one space into another.[ 2]
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Consider the airport as an example of liminal space, a sort of non-space. People assemble in airports on their way to and from other places. The airport is a critical connecting point, but it is not a destination for anyone, except perhaps for the people who work there. When we are in the airport, we are neither here nor there, and we operate with a different set of behaviors than would be acceptable at home, work, or play.
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Liminal seasons require us to build the bridge as we walk on it.
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The basic models and processes that define Church are being deconstructed. They are crumbling around us. Some new ways are emerging, but we do not yet know what the new world order will be, what forms of institutional church, if any, will remain. We are surrounded by prophetic voices trying to point a way forward, but it is not yet clear which pathways we should follow and which we should be wary of. And we are tired. It is exhausting trying to keep the old structures intact, managing the anxiety of the transition, and making space for the birth of the new thing—all at the same time. Many in church leadership began their ministry when the old order held sway. They have clear memories of an institutional church that worked well. Some church leaders have only dim memories of those times from childhood. And still others know only the experience of liminality, like the Israelites born in exile who lived their entire lives separated from temple life in Jerusalem, unmoored from the historical center of their tradition.
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International consultants Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow call this type of work adaptive leadership. The core of adaptive leadership is regulating the pace of loss that people experience—to keep people from bumping up against their liminal tolerance limit. A leader doesn’t create or eliminate loss. Rather, he or she tries to control the pace at which people experience the loss. He or she protects people from experiencing too much of the loss at one time. In this way the organization continues its adaptive work and eventually moves toward reorientation.[ 13]
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The primary work in leading people through the liminal phase is to normalize the experience and to frame/ define the season as acceptable and even desirable. One of the most difficult aspects of liminality is that people don’t understand it and they tend to think of it as undesirable and aberrant.
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Liminal seasons are thin spaces, where the presence of the divine is palpable. Liminal seasons are ripe opportunities for communities of faith to deepen their practices of group discernment, to watch for the movement of God.
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Bridges teaches that true beginnings follow the timing of spirit, mind, and heart. A new start is not synonymous with a new beginning. The new start happens in response to an event—the building is opened, the new pastor arrives, the new worship service begins. A new beginning happens when the people are spiritually and emotionally ready to move out of liminality and into a new chapter of life. New beginnings continue to feel frightening to people for many reasons. The leader of a community emerging from liminality can expect these reactions:[ 22]
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Heifetz and Linsky describe many leadership challenges during a season of reorientation. One is the need to let the people do their own adaptive work. A leader cannot impose reorientation on a people not yet ready to yield. Solutions are achieved when “the people with the problem” go through a process together to become “the people with the solution.”[ 23] This requires more than changed minds—it requires changed hearts and behavior.
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Leadership in a liminal season rarely looks outstanding to the random observer. In fact, leading effectively in a liminal season is incredibly dangerous work because people are generally not happy with the individual who guides them through the hard work of loss, grief, and letting go. People often want to reject leaders that are doing effective liminal work because those leaders are making them feel uncomfortable.
Deepening Group Discernment
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God does not exist to answer our prayers, but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God.—Oswald Chambers
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Our facility with prayer, silence, and stillness is so underdeveloped that leaders can’t imagine God might be speaking to them. Others don’t trust individual spiritual experience. They have been taught that the Bible is our only trustworthy source of revelation, or that ordained church leaders are the only qualified interpreters of Holy Spirit movement.
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Decision-making is grounded in logical thinking and rational discourse. Decision-making assumes that we have the capacity to understand and solve our own problems and that this works best by maximizing available resources and maintaining order. Group decision-making gathers leaders to debate organizational outcomes. Decisions are made as leaders work to resolve their differences, negotiating an outcome that will be acceptable to the whole—hopefully for the good of the whole.
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Discernment is different. In group discernment, participants adopt a stance of indifference to anything but the will of the divine as discovered by the group, setting aside matters of ego, politics, opinion, or personal interest. Discernment seeks out more than simple group agreement. The goal of discernment is to tap into the will and movement of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes that movement is felt palpably within a group—when a sense of divine Presence settles over the group in silence. Sometimes it is experienced more joyfully through a mutual sense of peace and rightness. Or it may manifest as a corporate sense of freedom, goodness, wholeness, healing, and reconciliation.[ 4]
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It takes a lot of preparation and intentionality to shift a community from the practice of decision-making to the practice of discernment. Preparing a community for discernment begins by exploring the community’s assumptions about God’s agency in the world.
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Discernment makes no inherent sense to people who believe that God set the world in motion and then stepped back to see how humans negotiate things on their own.
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God gives us choice, and the choices we make matter to God.
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Free will baby!
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The practice of sitting quietly with God is foreign to most. Leaders cannot be good discerners if they are not comfortable with stillness.
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There is often a lowest common denominator at work in groups gathered for collective discernment. The quality of the work in the room degenerates to the level of the least spiritually mature person in the room.
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Silence and solitude make way for stillness, but they don’t ensure a state of stillness. We can be outwardly silent and still be haunted by our own inner chatter. We can be outwardly alone and yet accompanied by a gaggle of competing inner voices.
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Kataphatic prayer is content based, built on the positive assertions we make about God. It uses words, images, symbols, and ideas to approach God.
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Apophatic prayer is content free. We empty our minds of words and ideas, simply resting in the presence of God with us. We acknowledge that God is bigger than our knowing, greater than our capacity to describe. Apophatic prayer rests in pure experience.
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Group discernment doesn’t occur spontaneously. It requires structure and process. Without good process, all manner of human dysfunction may find its way into the conversational mix. We need a process that attends to the mystery of the Holy while minimizing the foibles of human bias and self-interest
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Differentiating between the preferences of one and the needs of the whole creates apprehension. Distinguishing between the true and false selves of the institution makes us feel unsettled. We need a container to hold our anxiety, while we tend to the Holy.
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A discernmentarian is a group spiritual guide who is well acquainted with the movements of discernment and the spiritual disciplines that help participants progress through the movements.[ 8]
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the framing of the issue is often a discernment unto itself and will often take as much time as the entire rest of the discernment process.
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Every discernment process needs to be grounded in guiding principle( s) that are important to the discerning body.
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Shedding involves naming and laying aside anything that might prevent the group from focusing on God’s will as the ultimate outcome. Shedding invites participants to name and release unhelpful biases and ego investments in the outcomes. The process of shedding must be encouraged at both the individual and the group level. The process of shedding is invited when we say, “What needs to die in me/ us for God’s gifts and direction to find room in our lives?”[ 10]
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Shedding invites personal indifference. Discerners suspend personal preferences because they don’t value anything as much as they value honoring the soul of the institution and knowing God’s will. Indifference does not mean uncaring. During discernment, one remains deeply committed to the subject and cares about both the conversation and the outcome. One tries to be unconcerned about personal ego, the pride of the congregation, the politics of people involved, one’s own comfort with the direction, or any personal advantage that may result from a shift in direction.
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Listening involves attending to the voices and wisdom of people in the room, as well as other relevant constituents who are not in the room. Listening also involves waiting in stillness for Holy Spirit wisdom to manifest. The listening phase of the discernment process can be as short as ten minutes in a single meeting, or it may last several months, depending on the discernment issue and the level of reflection warranted.
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I find it helpful to remind groups that the answers to their questions don’t lie in the data. The data help to inform the discernment, but at the end of the day the data will not tell leaders what to do. To symbolize this shift, after leaders have completed their analysis, I invite them to physically remove all reports, summaries, and survey results from our discernment space. I exhort them to trust that they have already learned what they need to know from the data. This creates an open space from which to continue the discernment process.
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The exploring stage of discernment is a comfortable stage for many groups, because it mirrors the brainstorming stage people are accustomed to in decision-making.
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Continuing with the best two or three options, the group weighs each possibility. The group is asked to suspend its analysis of each option and to receive Spirit guidance. Having completed a vigorous analysis of possible alternatives, the group yields to intuition, insight, and wisdom.
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When the options have been weighed and the group seems ready to make a choice, the group facilitator might check for consensus. Consensuses looks for group solidarity in sentiment and belief. A consensus choice is not the same thing as a unanimous decision (in which all group members’ personal preferences are satisfied). Consensus is also not a majority vote (in which some larger segment of the group gets to make the decision). In consensus-based decision-making, the group works with an option until every person involved in the choice can say: “I believe this is the best decision we can arrive at for the organization at this time, and I will support its implementation.”
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There is one final step in the discernment process, a step rarely encountered in traditional decision-making. We test by resting. Before the decision is shared beyond the discerning group, the group is asked to sit with the decision in stillness and prayer. Sitting with the decision near to their hearts, we invite participants one last time to check for consolation and desolation. Ask, “Is our decision God’s will, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else?”[ 13]
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A discernment process takes more time, energy, and intentionality than a decision-making process. Not all issues are significant enough to warrant this careful form of deliberation. However, when the issue is important or potentially polarizing, or requires significant buy-in, the process outlined here can be worth the investment.
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A community deepening its discernment practice is a community learning to get out of its own way. It is a community coming to understand that prayer is not simply a means of getting God to do what we want. Through prayer, stillness, and dialogue we place ourselves in alignment with God’s purpose for us.
Shaping Institutional Memory
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Our memories are not simply historical facts accumulated over time, or a recounting of our collective triumphs and tribulations. Our memories shape our identity. They are layered with interpretation and with the imposition of important values and beliefs. Our self-perception is as much about what we remember about our past as it is about any set of historical data about us. Similarly, the way that others perceive us is mostly based upon what they remember about us. Memory is central to self-awareness and other-awareness.
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Volf writes that to be a Jew is to remember the Exodus, and to be a Christian is to remember the death and resurrection of Christ.
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I believe that one of our agonies related to the current decline in organized religion is our fear that we are the weak link in the memory chain. We are the generation that may fail to pass the sacred stories forward. What if there isn’t a next generation to whom we pass our story? Who, then, will we be? Volf reminds us, “Take the community away and sacred memory disappears; take the sacred memory away and the community disintegrates.”[ 4]
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Revisiting institutional memories and tending to the ways in which we recount them is critical work in a liminal season. When we are between an ending and a new beginning, when we are neither here nor there, when we aren’t certain what to do next, we turn to our memories to make meaning of our experience. Where have we come from? How did we get here? What then should we do next? Our memories serve as a touchstone, a benchmark for evaluating the authenticity of our available choices.
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According to Volf, “The truth about the past is merely the story we find most compelling, either because it is attractive and useful to us or because it has been imposed upon us by some social constraint or subtle persuasion.”[
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The work of the organizational leader is to help the institution examine its own memory and to reinterpret its core stories. The reinterpretation must honor the truthfulness of what happened (as best we are able to reconstruct that truth), and it must shape the telling of the memory in such a way that the values of the institution are elevated, introducing important new values as needed. An effective retelling of the memory helps an organization figure out what it needs to do next, based on the best of its past identity.
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People who were witness to a series of events each tell their rendition of what transpired. Over time, those multiple interpretations of what happened are told and reduced to a single, “tellable” story by those in power, and that story becomes part of institutional memory.
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In liminal seasons, organizations only have clarity about the past. The present is murky, and the future is unknowable. This condition can invite an unhealthy relationship with the past. We glamorize the past. We create thin narratives about how wonderful things were back then. Or we truncate our memories to block out experiences of pain and shame.
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All organizations have a relationship with their founding story, even if the present context is wildly changed and/ or the mission is radically evolved. There is something important about the values of the institution in the way that it tells its founding story.
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When the founding story is strong and positive, the role of the leader is to shape the telling of the story in such a way that it has relevance for the current chapter. The present-day story becomes an extension of the founding story. “They did that—so we do this.”
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When the founding story is problem saturated, it is the task of the leader to shape a redeeming story. Organizations tend to bury their problem stories, and the untold story infects the organization with shame. The presence of shame in an organization is like a festering wound that does not heal. Story has the power to clean the wound and promote healing.
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Glory-era memories are almost always told as very happy stories. However, caution is required with these stories, because they almost always reflect some very limiting interpretation of success.
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shame, the unhealthier the organization grows. To heal a spiritual or psychological wound, the wounding event must be remembered, and it must be remembered rightly.
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Story listening communicates respect and creates a bond between the storyteller and the listener. To receive the story of another is to bear witness to his or her experience. It is a sacred act. Telling and receiving stories breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence and the bonds that form us as community. When I tell you who I am and what is important to me about being here, I invite you into my journey and vice versa.[ 15]
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Finding the story and living the story is critical work for a liminal season.
Clarifying Purpose
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Humans cannot live without meaning. The greater our sense of uncertainty, the more desperately we grasp for a handhold, a shred of something purposeful that reminds us of who we are and what we are meant to do.
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In the absence of meaning and purpose, people become fearful. Fearful people will attach themselves to anyone who promises to reduce their anxiety. Often, this involves attachment to one who promises a return to the past—a promise to restore the glory days of the institution, without thinking critically about the ills of that era.
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Strategic planning is not the best way to clarify purpose during a liminal season. Traditional strategic planning makes linear assumptions about how the future will unfold. We are standing here, and we want to get there. These incremental steps will take us there. In liminal seasons learning and logic are not linear. We build the bridge as we walk on it.
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congregation who believes it is serving the world, the nation, the denomination, or even the city in which it resides is a congregation without clarity of purpose. Clarity of purpose requires narrowing in on context.
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An organization seeking clarity of context is likely to encounter resistance from those who don’t like the distinctions chosen. “If you are going to be about that, then what about me?” Gaining clarity about who we serve doesn’t have to result in the exclusion of others who are not in the target group.
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If core values are going to be useful, then they must be rooted in the lived experience of the organization. We cannot simply create a wish list of how we would like to be seen by the world. We must describe what we are actively trying to embody, who we are when we are at our very best. This means that core values must be socially validated—drawn from the experience of the organization and affirmed by its constituents.[ 5]
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In liminal seasons it is important for leaders to tend the gap between espoused and enacted values. The leader can adopt a wondering stance about the integrity gap. “We have a stated core value of ______, what do you suppose that requires of us right now?” or “Why are we choosing to do _____ right now, when our core values suggest that we ought to be doing ______?”
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In liminal seasons, when we can’t visualize our destination, proximate purpose is more useful than aspirational purpose. Clarity of focus about our next few steps is more important than a fuzzy picture of an unrecognizable destination.
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A leader in a liminal season must delve into the soul of the institution and touch issues of bread and salt. A purpose is credible because people can see that it is not a castle in the air, but grounded in their lived experience. It is rooted in the emotional facts of their current situation.[ 11]
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Finding a good proximate purpose (our next best step) is key to overriding or reconciling other competing purposes. A good proximate purpose lies at the intersection of identity, context, and values. When our passions, skills, and gifts are deployed in service to a clearly defined target community, an organization that works at this intersection will find energy and create focus.
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Congregations are most energized when they invest their limited resources in the small triangle of space that resides at the intersection of the three smaller circles: Identity, Context, and Values. An ideal proximate purpose is one that clearly captures our emerging identity, that addresses the context of our ministry now, and that honors the core values of our organization now.
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When congregations learn to live at the intersection of identity, context, and values, remarkable synergies emerge. Resources appear. Talent emerges. New constituents join the stream of energy.
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Hoping for growth is not a purpose, it is a desired outcome—attached to an unarticulated purpose. I have never seen a church grow simply because members wished for growth. Truthfully, most growth aspirations stem from constituents wanting more people, just like themselves, to help support the budget and existing programming. I have only seen churches actually grow in response to the pursuit of authentic ministry that served a contextual need. Chasing growth for the sake of growth is a knee-jerk reaction that lets a congregation avoid the hard work of clarifying identity, context, and values. It compels leaders to jump on everyone else’s bandwagon, chasing flavor-of-the-month programs that worked well elsewhere, but may have little to offer this institution.
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A leader trying to move an organization away from general aspirations about growth, toward a more specific purpose, can ask these questions. Growth to what end; what will growth accomplish that is central to our mission? Who will benefit from growth? Is growth possible or even desirable? Where will growth come from?[ 14]
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At the end of the day, discovering our next best step, our proximate purpose, won’t magically resolve liminality. We will still be disoriented. We still won’t have clarity about our ultimate destiny. However, we will have created enough energy and focus to continue building the bridge as we walk on it.
Engaging Emergence
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Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought.—Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
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Followers often turn on their authority figures when anxiety peaks. “Why aren’t you resolving this ambiguity for us? Aren’t we paying you to lead us out of this mess? Don’t you have any ideas about what should happen next?” Authority figures are often hooked by these expectations and scurry about trying to restore order and resolve chaos. They step in to manage the chaos as a way of demonstrating their leadership competency. In liminal seasons, the temptation to resolve chaos by restoring the status quo is seductive. Leaders think, “Let’s just bring back something that feels familiar to people, so they will calm down.”
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In a liminal season, the only way forward is through the uncertainty and chaos. The leader’s challenge is not to eliminate the ambiguity and chaos, but to embrace emergence—and stand with people during their confusion.
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To unfreeze (disrupt) the system and make way for adaptation, the balance between the forces that maintain the status quo must be upset. The driving forces must become stronger than the restraining forces. This may happen through intentional or accidental strengthening of the existing driving forces, adding additional driving forces, or reducing/ eliminating restraining forces. In short, the social equilibrium must be disturbed.
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At times, leaders may need to provoke disorientation because followers are too complacent with the status quo. People are ignoring the disturbance to their own peril and the leader must heighten their attention and dissatisfaction. At other times, leaders must settle things down a bit, because the dissonance has grown too strong and threatening.
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When people acknowledge competing commitments, they are more likely to let go of stability, to discover new ways to satisfy more of what we value.
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Innovation is the practice of designing or discovering new practices that will eventually usher in a new organizing principle. Innovation rarely occurs in a linear manner. It cannot be managed according to timelines and calendars. Rather, innovation is a messy and iterative process that needs to be protected and nurtured.
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Experimentation and learning happen best when we invite people to take responsibility for what they love about the organization and to act where they feel most passionate and engaged.
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It is helpful to think about failure as a necessary consequence of innovation. Failure is inevitable when we are doing something new and unexpected. What we know from science is that every outcome is equally important when testing a hypothesis. With every outcome we learn what doesn’t work, which means we are one step closer to discovering what might.[ 13]
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Naming something into being is a sacred act. Moses stood at the edge of the promised land and retold the people their story. He named them as the people of the covenant, God’s chosen nation. He linked their past with their present and their future. This is what effective leaders do. They tell the story as it unfolds. They imagine a hope-filled future based on what is being learned right now. They name what is emerging by integrating unfolding action into the core identity of the people (see chapter 5).
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Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”[ 18] What we have experienced in the past is likely to repeat itself, but never identically. Unfortunately, communities of faith often behave as if past experiences are naturally repetitive. “Our attendance was much higher when we advertised in the yellow pages. We should advertise in the yellow pages again.” In liminal seasons we need to learn new responses to changing conditions. Instead of repeating the past, we must iterate.
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Our effectiveness as leaders is not determined by whether an organization grows on our watch. Our effectiveness will ultimately be judged by the extent to which we attend to disorientation, embrace disruption, support innovation, and nurture coherence.
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Like those early Jews, we need leaders who can stand with people in their liminal state, leaders who can negotiate the noise, offer reassurance and hope, and gently guide the community toward the work that is theirs to do. The work is difficult, but also exciting. We stand on the frontlines, waiting and watching to see what God will do next. We can take comfort and reassurance from these words from Deuteronomy 31: 6, “Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. God will not leave you or forsake you.”