Canoeing the Mountains
CANOEING THE MOUNTAINS: ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP
When Lewis and Clark reached the Continental Divide, they expected to find a river that would allow them to paddle easily to the Pacific Ocean. What they saw instead were the Rocky Mountains. That’s the type of challenge facing church leaders today. Canoeing the Mountains uses the legendary 19th century adventure of Lewis and Clark in their pursuit of a Northwest Passage as a metaphor to help pastors envision the fruitfulness of adaptive leadership.
Lewis and Clark experienced 15 months of hard travel, a seemingly endless string of days of backbreaking upstream slogging. Finally, their Corps of Discovery had come to the source of the Missouri River. They found what no person of European dissent had before them. After 15 months of going upstream they looked forward to swiftly being carried down stream to the Pacific Ocean. They could not have been more disappointed.
Running Out of River
Pastor, do you feel like a canoer who has run out of water? There is no route in front of you, no map, no quick fix or easy answer to what post-Christendom and post-pandemic holds?
Lewis and Clark discovered that 300 years of experts had all been completely wrong. Everything they had accomplished was only a prelude to what was in front of them. What lay before them was nothing like what was behind them.
Systemic Challenges
Have you signed up for training programs, enrolled in cohort groups, and brought consultants and speakers to your congregation to inspire and exhort? If the changes have left you disappointed, it’s not going to do you any good to paddle harder.
Today’s challenges are more systemic in nature and require broad widespread learning they can’t be sold through a conference, video series or a program. Adaptive challenges arise when the world around us has changed but we continue to live on the successes of the past. A radical response is required.
When Mind Shifts Are Not Enough
Bolsinger observes, “While I am indebted to the missional thinkers of our day, it’s become apparent a missional mind shift alone doesn’t lend itself to the capacity building that actually brings change.”
Conceptually stuck systems cannot become unstuck simply by trying harder. “For a fundamental re-orientation to occur,” encourages Rabbi Ed Friedman, “that spirit of adventure which optimizes serendipity and which enables new perceptions beyond the control of our thinking processes must happen first.”
Adaptation is required.
4 Insights To Adaptive Leadership
1. If we can adapt and adventure, we can thrive.
Leadership in uncharted territory requires both learning and loss, once we realize that the losses won’t kill us, they can teach us. The world in front of you is nothing like the world behind you,
2. No one is going to follow you off the map if they don’t trust you on the map.
Only when a leader is deeply trusted can he or she take people farther than they imagined into the mission of God. The leader’s responsibility is to shape a healthy organizational culture that allows a transforming adventure to be even possible.
3. The key leadership principle is: the mission trumps and the central leadership practice: start with conviction, stay calm, stay connected, and stay the course.
4. You can’t go alone, but you haven’t succeeded until you’ve survived the sabotage.
Saboteurs are usually simply people supporting the status quo. Change cannot be considered successful until after the sabotage has been weathered.
Read an eight-page summary of Canoeing the Mountains here.
That should whet your appetite to purchase a Kindle copy of Canoeing the Mountains.
An online, leadership course, based on this book, is in the planning for late summer. Details to follow. Please indicate your interest by commenting below or emailing bob@abnwt.com. Thank you.