Leading Change in the Church - Lesson 12

There's another thing to consider when you're looking at urgency, and that is life cycles. There's a specialist that has worked on life cycles. His name is Ichak Adizes, and he basically says that when change is needed within any organization, including the church, that's when organizations are most resistant to the change, because by that time they're expending their primary energy on sustaining the organization rather than pursuing the core competencies that brought it into being, in other words, the mission. 

Remember we said in the first course that every organization, whether it's a church or a business or whatever, has one thing in common, that is, the propensity to perpetuate itself, and the further an organization is up this direction and starts going down, the more energy it's spending on perpetuating itself. Now, by the time it gets to this point of stable and then aristocracy, early bureaucracy, and so forth, the time which it needs change the most desperately is the time when it's going to resist the change most ardently. 

Now, one of Adizes's greatest contributions to the field is the idea that churches can identify where they are in the life cycle -- follow this now -- they can identify where they are in the life cycle by the kind of leaders they tend to choose. That's fascinating. Do you hear that? In other words, they can tell where they are in the life cycle by the kind of leader they tend to choose. What does that mean? It simply means that when they're at this infant stage, the organization will tend to choose an entrepreneur type. When they're in this adolescence and prime stage, they will tend to choose an aggressive leader. As they start to go here and then they start decline, when the focus is on the propensity of the organization rather than so much the mission, what kind of a leader would they tend to choose? You tell me. Manager, and as they get down further, they tend to choose administrator, and so forth. So you can actually predict, so it goes both ways; you can predict the kind of leader that a church will tend to choose based upon where they are in the lifecycle. The trick is that one of the only ways for an organization to change this spiral toward, this decline toward death, in effect, or toward total irrelevancy, is to choose a different kind of leader, to choose a leader that is unnatural for where they are in the life cycle, and that itself is a massive change initiative. Does that make sense? 

STUDENT: That’s what the Bible Church has gone through over the last five years, or whatever, is that reinvention? I think.

Yep.

STUDENT: It was definitely on the decline for a while. 

So what was the upshot of it? What happened? 

STUDENT: We got a new leader, I think. There was a leadership transition that took place. 

Now, having talked about this sort of bad news, what I just shared with you, it's kind of depressing, isn't it, in one sense? I want to share with you now, however, an article that is not from a Christian organization, but is from Fast Company, that I won't ask you to read now, but you can take and read this later, but basically it is an article that came out of a medical school, and it was the study of heart patients, and these heart patients underwent heart procedures and were told that if they wanted to live, they didn't want to die, they needed to change their life behavior; they needed to change their way of living, and what they found is if you look at people after coronary artery bypass grafting, after two years, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle. So, the counterintuitive message of this article is ‘change or die’ message generally does not work. In other words, negative motivation does not tend to change people's behavior or their sense of the need to change. 

STUDENT: It's a fear, fear based. 

Fear-based motivation does not tend to work. 

STUDENT: At least according to this research. 

According to this research, and the reason I've used this is simply an example, but others would say this is very true in the change management world.

STUDENT: You need to convince people that this alternative future is something worth…

That’s right, it’s a positive, inspirational approach that is going to tend to raise people to a new perspective on a preferred future that's going to move people toward change. So that's what when we talk about establishing a sense of urgency, we can tend to hear that that's ‘we got to tell you, you're going to change, or you're going to die’ kind of thing. When we talk about all this life cycle stuff and we talk about -- the reality is most people will not change if all they hear is a negative message, change or die. 

STUDENT: Using that from a biblical perspective, if I say to you, either you accept Christ or you're lost, that's a negative.

Right. 

STUDENT: That's a negative sell. 

So, what does that tell us? 

STUDENT: Well, extrapolating from this, it probably is not going to work. 

I'm not going to go there, but I think the point is taken. 

STUDENT: Even further, if there's no motivation for you changing, you're not going to change because it's not something better than what you already have, and research and work with those who are alcoholics shows that the fear or the negative stuff doesn't work either. So how do we get folks to change? We give them something better than what they have got. 

That's a preferred future model. 

STUDENT: Yes, initially, are they in favor of this? I mean, here, let's say I have a coronary artery bypass. I am dying and someone's saves my life by giving me the surgery. Man, I have a real passion to live. I would think initially I would say, yeah, I'm going to do this, but then it falls off real fast. 

Yeah, I mean, that's my experience. I don't know about you folks, but whenever I go to the doctor for my annual physical, he says, man, you’ve got to cut back on those doughnuts, or, you know, you're going to have to start taking more blood pressure medicine, and for the first week, it's really high on my agenda, but it tends to fade.

Back to your point, would it be safe -- well, I don't know, but one of the things that we could explore is, in today's world, at least, what would be the amount of people that would respond to the gospel as a result of compassion and the love of God as opposed to the threat of eternal damnation? I don't know the answer to that, but that would be an interesting study to do. I have hint, but I don't know. 

STUDENT: If somebody, all they offered me was hell and damnation, I would create a new paradigm that didn't include them. In other words, my focus would say they don't exist, a denial, whereas if somebody comes to me on the whole arena of grace, that is hard to deny. 

STUDENT: I would think, too, in our postmodern world, that definitely, grace would make more sense because of what you just said. ‘You're telling me all that, you’re just trying to control me for what you believe.’ 

STUDENT: And I don't believe that exists. 

STUDENT: Yeah, you are out here on the fringes, you're not in the real world kind of thing. 

STUDENT: But if you convince them that there's a better life than you're living right now, that's an alternative future that's better than it is, and so that's okay, well that, you might catch them, then, if then they’ll say, you know, no one's going to sit there over the course of life and say, well, I think my life is just great and I'm good with this; this is good enough for me. And I mean, somebody might say that, but it's hard to convince yourself of that all the time, so I think that’s... 

So, something to take on board, so when we talk about establishing a sense of urgency, it's not about a change-or-die message, necessarily, although there may be that behind it, but it's really helping people to begin to dream of a preferred future that is preferred to where we are now. That's the beauty of establishing that sense of urgency. Make sense? 

STUDENT: Like in the corporate world, you have different strategy behind investing and sort of focusing on different areas of your business, and you have these certain things that have been successful for years, but you don't actually invest in those because while they are profitable and benefiting your company right now, they are on a downward trend, or stable to downward trend in their life cycle, so those are cash cows, and you just kind of let that go, and you ride it all you can, but you're putting your investment in reinventing and those new stars that you're going to invest in, so you’re going forward, that are your ultimate future, but you sort of enjoy the good times while you have them, but you know that we've got to reinvent ourselves if we're going to keep going on. 

That's an excellent analogy. Here's what John Kotter had to say: “Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people's feelings.” (It's interesting, isn’t it?) “In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.” 

So that's about establishing a sense of urgency. Any questions, comments about that first step? 

STUDENT: I was going to say earlier on your diagram that went up and down, where the top is stability, it’s folks that are past that peak -- they're the ones that find themselves in that cycle - what is the definition of insanity, trying to do the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results? 

Yeah. I was working with a group in a denomination recently, and the statement was, we're in crisis, and I said, what do you mean by ‘we're in crisis’? And they said, what do you mean by that question? I said, well, there's two ways to look at it: One, are you in crisis because you feel like if you don't do something, the organization's going to die, at least in terms of respectability? Or are you in crisis because you're concerned about what the world will lose if you cease to exist? The last question is a question about mission; the first question is a question about perpetuity. Those are very different concepts of crisis.

I think that the second question can lead us toward a preferred future. The first question is really about how in the world do we stabilize this before we lose it all? And they're related, for sure, but people on the downward side of that often are thinking about organizational perpetuity; they are giving most of their energy to that, and mission has become very faded in their minds. That's typical. The longer, more mature an organization is, the more energy that goes toward keeping the organization running and less on the fundamental primary competence that the organization provides into the environment to start with. I know I'm using organizational language there, but I hope it's clear how it connects with the church.