Part Five: Wise Leadership, Positive Deviants, and Strange Attractors

Working for wise organizations helps us live longer and healthier lives.

In earlier posts we explored the prevalence of burnout, compassion fatigue, and the compassion gap. All of this points to an organizational culture that is unwise and unwell. These are primarily macro-level structural features of denominations, rather than micro-level behaviors of people. In other words, we are structured for decline and dysfunction.

Is there a way for denominations to go on a journey of transfiguration? How might we change these antiquated structures to experience healing and renewal? Can NASA and SpaceX learn to live and flourish together?  

Returning to the research of Ardelt and Sharma which compared wise and not-so-wise organizations. They found a positive association between an organizations’ overall wisdom index and employees’ physical and subjective well-being scores. Wise organizations encourage wise leadership, and wise leadership, in turn, fosters job satisfaction, which benefits employees’ physical and subjective well-being (Ardelt & Sharma, 2021).¹ The study also reveals key characteristics of wise and not-so-wise leaders.

Not-so-wise leaders are often knowledgeable and possess strong cognitive skills but are primarily concerned about their own success with little regard for the well-being of employees. They often provide high salaries and bonuses to key elite team members, while lowerlevel employees struggle to make ends meet. The culture of the work environment becomes competitive in this scenario. “Winner takes all” is the attitude of unwise leaders, who are primarily motivated by money and power (Ardelt & Sharma, 2021).

Wise leaders, by contrast, have self-reflective and interpersonal skills in addition to knowledge and cognitive skills. Wise leaders strive to make good judgments that promote the success of all employees, even those perceived to be at the bottom of the pyramidal hierarchy. “We are all in this together” is the attitude of wise leaders, who are primarily motivated by supporting others, uniting people, and seeking overall human flourishing (Ardelt & Sharma, 2021).

The “compassion gap” described earlier is not only purely an organizational attribute, but it also has a micro-dimension… the human heart. The “compassionate dimension” of the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Model (3D-WS; Ardelt, 2003), provides opportunities and spaces for positive social relationships to encourage empathic and compassionate understanding, appreciation, respect, and support. Toxic leaders might be highly intelligent, skilled, and driven, but often lack compassion.

Jesus’s confrontation with the religious leaders of his day comes down to a failure of compassion. He called them “blind guides” (Matthew 15:14; 23:16, 24). Their eye condition was connected to their deadly heart condition, which is described as πώρωσις (pṓrōsis) hardened καρδία (kardía) heart (Mark 3:5; 10:5). In several of those encounters, Jesus highlighted their diminished way of seeing others. Organizational culture was structuralized as rigid, hard-eyed, dogmatic surety, and lack of care for the vulnerable and the marginalized. These attitudes led them to accuse Jesus of hanging out with unclean people and ultimately to indict him as a fraudulent messiah.

Surely, we can see here the clash between an unwise organization and a wise leader.

Denominational conceptions of organizational wisdom have been primarily focused on comprehensive knowledge and intelligence, but have often neglected the compassionate, pro-social aspects of wisdom. Discipleship processes and clergy training are often focused on the impartation of knowledge. Leaders master religious content and are charged with managing the existing system.

Some denominations can also suffer from a culture of nepotism that provides preferential treatment to a homogeneous group of employees, both in terms of information and rewards. Fruitfulness in ministry is secondary to an employee’s political savviness. An individual’s years of service on a variety of internal committees takes precedence over whether congregations have thrived amid their leadership.

Opportunities for advancement and development, seem allusive for most employees in denominational systems. Consider the institutional tendency for clergy with a track record of ineffectiveness in local ministry to be promoted as heads of sectors. Or consider entire departments on “vitality and excellence,” that have had no positive measurable results in areas of oversight. The lack of measurable results is often attributed to insurmountable societal shifts such as secularization, pluralism, post-Christendom, but this assumption disregards “positive deviance” and is likely a form of work avoidance.

Positive Deviance refers to an approach to social change based on the observation that in any organization there are “deviants” whose uncommon but successful strategies enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers, despite facing similar challenges and having no extra resources or knowledge (Beck, Contextual Intelligence, 2019). The activity of these deviants is often disruptive to the prevailing organizational status quo.

Social anthropologist Gerald Arbuckle in Refounding the Church: Dissent for Leadership, notes that creativity can exist in organizations in a latent way, but these ideas require application through innovative people, who he calls “dreamers who do.” He distinguishes between innovators and adaptors…

“Both are creative persons and needed, especially the innovative and refounding type; both threaten the group because they dissent from the acceptable ways of doing things, but it is the innovator that particularly endangers the group’s security.”^[1]

Positive deviants, identified by Arbuckle as “refounding types” are viewed with suspicion, minimized, or even exiled from the organization.

The prevalence of clergy burnout is not about organizational intent. Clergy are encouraged to practice self-care and prioritize home life, but structures work against this sentiment. Clergy (and dedicated laity) find themselves doing an impossible number of tasks, while seeing little to no fruit from their work. It seems we are spending a lot of time and energy doing the wrong things. Behaviors that are institutionally programmed and supported by prevailing metrics.

The affective/compassionate dimension of wisdom is exemplified by an organizational culture that serves all stakeholders and offers satisfactory work benefits, secure employment, and opportunities for close friendships at work to develop a spirit of community. While the intention is to create a culture of moral and ethical values and behavior, often denominations default to a strictly scientific/technological approach. Some denominations sustain pyramidal workplaces with strict layers of hierarchy to control employees and their work outputs through rules, policies, job descriptions, performance evaluations, and standardized procedures. While some level of these systems can be helpful, the overemphasis on planning and predictability suffocates positive deviation.

In denominations that skew heavily toward causal logic, leadership is categorized by technical expertise. The system is like a machine, when technical problems arise, we apply technical solutions from the existing knowledge base to fix what’s broken.

Wise leaders seek to reshape environments, and if unable depart from these environments altogether. Thus, wise organizations attract wise leaders, and wise leaders cultivate wise organizations (Ardelt & Sharma, 2021).

Wise leaders, guided by compassion, particularly for the disinherited and those being crushed by the system, utilize positive deviation to reshape or heal toxic culture, or they exit the environment. Not all clergy who leave institutional forms of ministry do so out of fatigue or disillusionment, they likely have the wisdom to exit an unwise organizational environment.  

Denominations often have a fairly consistent degree of “path dependency.” This refers to the past of an organization directing its future possibilities within a defined region. An attractor refers to a system’s direction of travel, or the specific subset of states that a social system may take, which corresponds to its normal behavior towards which it will naturally gravitate. Social systems are organized around these attractors: ideas and practices that have gained support.^[2]

One approach to leading organizational change is to cultivate small experiments on the edge of the system. The existing system is modified through establishing feedback loops, this refers to outputs of a system being routed back as inputs thus forming a loop. Seemingly small inputs eventually magnify into large scale transformation. Those experiments can become a “strange attractor” that send the entire system in a new direction, slowly over time.

The transformation of a system occurs when a “strange attractor” gathers enough support to successfully challenge the existing pattern of an organization. New attractors create destabilization in the system, and a kind of tug of war can occur between old and new. In terms of evolutionary adaptation, less than one percent of a change in an organism’s DNA can create either a devastating genetic disorder or a beneficial adaptation that leads to thriving for millennia to come.

Movements like Fresh Expressions are a gift to gridlocked denominations and congregations that are currently unwise and unwell. It allows space for positive deviants to run experiments that can become strange attractors for the system.

One of the leadership values in Fresh Expressions is the “practitioners’ ethos.” We plant our own gardens, eat our own cooking, and share experimental recipes. It is a commitment to both the dance floor and the balcony. We remain actively engaged in the dance of frontline ministry, experimenting, failing, learning, as well as spending time on the balcony. The balcony space is about contemplation and thinking systemically.   

In the blended ecology of church, these organisms live in symbiotic relationship, exchanging DNA. Over time, a new organism will result from these interactions. The new creation is not about discarding the old, or replacing it with the new, but renewal through transfiguration, preserving and amplifying the best of both.  

In the next post we will explore the kind of adaptive leadership this process requires. Stay tuned!

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[1] Arbuckle, Gerald A. Refounding the Church : dissent for leadership. Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1993. P. 109.

^[2] Moynagh, Michael. Church in Life: Emergence, Ecclesiology and Entrepreneurship. London, UK: SCM Press, 2017. P. 24.

1. Ardelt M and Sharma B (2021) Linking Wise Organizations to Wise Leadership, Job Satisfaction, and Well-Being. Front. Commun. 6:685850. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2021.685850