False assumptions distort our view of reality and lead to poor and inadequate leadership initiatives, and church leaders are not immune! Many false assumptions are so deeply embedded in our culture’s narrative and worldview that we’re not even aware of them. For instance:

• Every observed effect has an observable cause. Simple logic can be applied to reach correct conclusions.

• Even complicated phenomena or dilemmas can be understood through analysis. If we get more data, then we can figure this out. That is, the whole can be understood by taking it apart and studying the pieces.

• Sufficient analysis of past events can create the capacity to predict future events.

Whether we’re aware of them or not, these false assumptions make it difficult to understand and deal with complexity, and cause us to simplify our response. We may become paralyzed, hoping for some better answer by another round of data, or we may linger in nostalgia, believing that the good old days can come to life again. But there is another way!

Recently I introduced Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT) and began to draw out the implications for ways to imagine the practice of leadership. I suggested that church leaders need to practice three distinct forms of leadership – vision, pastoral, and administrative – which give greater dimension to biblical principles of leading.

Yet CLT offers more for people reflecting on their practice of leadership. It helps us move beyond commonly held assumptions to seek out the reality of our contexts. The reality for most of us in congregational or ministerial contexts is that things are not just complicated – they are complex. Complicated problems can be teased apart. A skilled mechanic can disassemble an airplane, find the broken part, then reassemble the plane. It is complicated, but with the expertise of experience and training, something complicated can be sorted.

However, many challenges that organizations and congregations face are not complicated; they are complex. By complex, I mean that the situation possesses multiple interacting causes. It is not merely a matter of taking apart an engine with a finite set of pieces. Rather, complex environments have multiple systems interacting with each other. You cannot dismantle a church conflict or a pastoral situation or a conversation about the vision of your congregation into a finite set of pieces. If so, then an expert – a mediation consultant, therapist, or visionary – could simply step in and make a pronouncement. All would be well!

I think most of you know full well that church life is far too unpredictable. Expertise is not always sufficient! That is because church leaders are often wrestling with complex systems. The best we can do, as Roberto Poli suggests, is to “dance with them.” [1]

So CLT presents leaders with a way to imagine adaptivity – to move in new ways on the dance floor. Rather than trying to figure everything out or utilizing old models, CLT would suggest probing with new “safe” experiments that allow leaders to test what is constructive and helpful. Church leaders do not have to have all the answers – mostly because we cannot possibly know all the answers. Bringing imagination and experience together fosters new possibilities to explore. Thus CLT offers “a view of leadership as an emergent, interactive dynamic that is productive of adaptive outcomes.” [2] Such a posture suits Christian leadership well in some foundational ways.

First, Christian leaders happen to believe that the real leader is God, not humans. Adaptivity is central to our self-understanding; we assume the posture of learning and flexibility, because God is a God who does surprising things.

Second, to faithfully respond to God’s action and the messy realities of our churches and of the human predicament, Christian leaders know and practice a certain responsive, or dance-like, way of being in the world.

Detailed planning five years out makes little sense in light of God’s action. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Christian leaders should never plan ahead. Rather, it means that that work becomes much more tentative in light of changing circumstances and responsive to what we are seeing in others and in our contexts.

So rather than thinking we can figure it all out, effective leaders live more loosely and more lightly with where things might be moving. We acknowledge that much of the environment we inhabit as Christian people is changing (for better and for worse). But this reality doesn’t particularly concern us, because we believe that God is always faithful in God’s work in the world. CLT reminds us to live nimbly and adaptively. Churches are usually better served to try small experiments; probing and exploring new possibilities, then learning from those probes, will give us hope and courage for the future. New initiatives and ways of being in the world make a difference. Though we cannot predict what will happen, we do know that God is always faithful!

Blessings in your practice of leadership!

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[1] Roberto Poli, “A Note on the Difference between Complicated and Complex Social Systems,” Cadmus 2 (2013): p. 142.

[2] Mary Uhl-Bien, et al, “Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting Leadership from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Era.” The Leadership Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 4 (2007), p. 299.