Campus Crusade’s Adaptive Challenge
Posted by: Geoff in Campus Crusade, Leadership, Movements, Organizational TheoryI finally finished the paper, “Campus Crusade’s Adaptive Challenge“that will wrap up my writing for my current BGU class. Here is a description of what I tried to do.
“This paper will attempt to show that in the midst of the massive shift in current culture, Campus Crusade for Christ, along with the church in North America faces an adaptive challenge, necessitating leadership that might feel more radical than many would feel comfortable with. I will propose that in identifying who Campus Crusade “is,†we should focus on the apostolic impulse that resides in our DNA, and not merely our organizational values and proven strategies. Finally, I will also draw some observations from a recent trip to India that will offer suggestions as to how Campus Crusade should be approaching the gospel transformation in cities that now characterizes a global priority of Campus Crusade.”
Your comments, as always, are welcome.
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May 4th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
This adaptive change paper is thought provoking and relevant to my secular work.
It made the distinction between (a) operational (technical) challenges where operational leadership is well suited and (b) adaptive challenges (adapt or die situations) where adaptive leadership is best suited. I suspect that one really needs to separate acute adaptive challenges from chronic adaptive challenges. Perhaps, General Motor Corporation’s slide to second place behind Toyota is an example of an organization with a chronic adaptive challenge.
The brief mention of the adaptability of viruses prompted a few thoughts. Organic viruses are successful because they experiment quickly (random mutations) and exploit what they have learned (quickly replicate what works). Adaptability is characterized by speed as might be deduced from the work of Jason Jennings ( It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small… It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow: How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business by Jason Jennings, Laurence Haughton, Laurence Haughton). Note: the concept of speed inherently ties to the time scale over which change is observed.
In reading your paper, I could not help but wonder who are the competitors and what are the markets in which Campus Crusade competes? This question relates to your review of looking back and of DNA. My thought, in looking back it is often a challenge to differentiate (a) your core strengths that constitute your DNA from (b) from transient key strength which gave you a competitive advantage for a particular challenge or environment.
Transparency, intellectual honesty, and communication need to be (or become) part the DNA of an adaptive learning organization. This DNA is essential to situations where Industrial Age ‘command & control’ may be impractical. Greenville College (a Christian liberal arts college) appears to use Gallup’s Strength Finder to help students discover “their callings, their purpose in life, and how their strengths complement that.” Although I haven’t seen it used as such, it clearly could be an excellent foundation tool for an organization that wants to become more adaptive and thus wants to foster transparency and communication.
The discussion of the need to have young leaders to foster innovation raised the obvious outsider’s question of how do you currently measure success? Perhaps, the question is how to I sort the successful innovations from the indifferent or from the counterproductive innovations?
The discussion of the young having a different frame of reference from the existing leadership is true in the inverse. Hence, I suspect a learning organization fosters communication in order to leverage the different generational vantage points in order to help the organization’s adaptive advantage. On a related note, when I worked on a shipyard industrial engineering team we looked at histories of World War II for ideas because we too often found that our ‘new innovation’ was a half century old standard practice that simply had been forgotten over the intervening years. Cross generational learning can be valuable especially when seeking to be adaptive as there is a greater possibility of recognizing one’s unseen paradigms.
For organizational transformation the big take away is from complex adaptive systems is that transformation takes place on three distinct improvement horizons. The horizons are (1) focusing on core competencies and continuous improvement ,(2) making medium exploratory jumps that push out the boundaries of core competencies, and (3) placing a few big bets on potential giant leaps.
I really enjoyed the paper and frequently thought it reflected a better understanding of CAS than did Pascale’s ’surfing’ book.