A Decade of Reorganization
(The comments below are from a paper I’m currently working on… and need to finish really soon.)
From my limited vantage point, I can say that Campus Crusade has been actively engaging the issues of organizational change for at least the last decade. We have talked for years about the danger of becoming an institution instead of a movement. We have also been trying to address the organizational inefficiencies that allow our various ministries to operate largely independent of each other. Recently, the transition of leadership from Dr. Bright to Dr. Douglas has spurred many healthy conversations amongst our own leadership and with other mission organizations.
As Campus Crusade prepares to move into a new era of ministry, in a world which is rapidly changing, we must not only ask if the proposed solutions will work, but whether our approach toward leadership is correct. From all appearances I would say we are approaching this change from Heifetz’s “operational leadership” stance. It seems as if we acknowledge the challenge before our ministry, and our approach is to look back to our tried and true strategies of increasing organizational efficiency and attempt to reorganize or restructure ourselves to health. However, if we are in an adaptive challenge, we may unknowingly be choosing to “die†instead of “adapting†on the order that is necessary to move us into this new era.
Adaptive Leadership for Campus Crusade
What would adaptive leadership look like within Campus Crusade? Adaptive leaders are people that can help transition the organization by moving it to the “edge of chaos.†This is the point of uncomfortable tension where an organization knows it must innovate, and when change is most conducive. Hirsh is helpful here:
“Such leaders don’t necessarily have to be highly creative innovators themselves, but rather people who can move the church into adaptive modes – people who can disturb the stifling equilibrium and create the conditions for change and innovation.†P. 257
We aren’t talking about creating chaos for the sake of having chaos. We are talking about managing distress such that a system is drawn out of its comfort zone, yet containing stress so the organization doesn’t become dysfunctional. The warning however is that the amount of distress and stress we are talking about will be different depending on whether your approach is operational or adaptive.
How would you introduce help introduce elements of adaptive leadership? Begin with younger leaders. We are immigrants into the world in which we find ourselves. They are natives. We had to learn how to use the computer. They were raised with it. We have to study the emerging culture. They live it. What is intuitive to them, we have to struggle to understand.
The current leadership of our ministry are godly people that the Lord has used greatly with all their considerable gifts, skills and talents. But our current leadership development culture and systems do not allow access for younger leaders to bring the perspective that is required for adaptive leadership in today’s context.
These younger leaders will bring new paradigms that will be more useful in ministry for the coming generation. These include new and helpful understandings about the mission we are to engage (Kingdom), the nature of the gospel message that we are to proclaim (holistic), as well as flexibility on the structures and forms that will support such an endeavor (blurring of church and parachurch). Later in this paper, I hope to bring some observations from a recent Bakke Graduate University class to these issues.