15: Leadership in a Flattened World
Grassroots Culture and the Demise of the CEO Model;
Sally Morgenthaler
What is leadership in an age of unprecedented connectedness? When information is as accessible as the Blackberry in your back pocket? When the world no longer needs data brokers, when the word authority inspires only suspicion and revolt, and when business, political, and religious icons are deconstructed at the click of a mouse button? What does it really mean to be in charge of anything?
Nothing. Because, in the new and increasingly flattened world, being in charge is an illusion. Being in charge worked (and marginally so) only in a world of slow change, in a predictable universe where information (and thus, power) is ensconced in the hands of a few. But that world is gone. With the rise of the individual (the power of one) and the rise of the tribe (the power of one connected), all bets are off. From Al-Qaeda to the post-Katrina revolt to fragmenting retail markets to the small-enterprise explosion in India and China, we see the old world of “big and powerful” unraveling.
Still, we hang on to our illusions. We retreat into the old story: leadership as domination and control. Margaret Wheatley describes our desperate attempts to hang on to what is gone:
Ever since uncertainty became our insistent twenty-first-century companion, leadership strategies have taken a great leap backward to the familiar territory of command and control. . . . How is it that we failed to learn that whenever we try to impose control on people and situations, we only serve to make them more uncontrollable? All of life resists control. All of life reacts to any process that inhibits its freedom to create itself. When we deny life’s need to create, life pushes back. We label it resistance and invent strategies to overcome it. But we would do far better if we changed the story and learned how to invoke the resident creativity of those in our organizations. We need to work with these insistent creative forces or they will be provoked to work against us.1
Perhaps what Wheatley describes has always been a reality: human beings are simply wired to push back. Maybe the real shift is that now we have an unprecedented ability to do so. Now eighty-year-old Uncle Harold can post his very own book review on Amazon.com. Aunt Sarah can finally sell her Hummel collection, not at the neighborhood garage sale but on eBay. Now we have Google in our hip pockets, and our cell phones double as personal computers, televisions, cameras, video recorders, and stereo systems. Do we really get the significance of those sideways, post-terrorist clips from the bowels of a London subway system? Suddenly it actually matters that we exist, that we live in a certain place and time. No matter what our income or educational level, we can join the posse of several thousand bloggers and send CBS’s Dan Rather a group message. A big and terrifyingly audible message: “Dan, we smell a rat. We know too much. Get the story right or get out.”
Collective Intelligence
But there is another theory surrounding the success of self-managed teams that goes beyond mere social dynamics: people seem to make better decisions together than apart. They are collectively “more intelligent.” James Surowiecki, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, uses Google’s wildly successful search engine technology as an example. Google pushed ahead of Yahoo! and every other search engine in the early 2000s. At the core of the Google system is a calculating method called “PageRank”—an algorithm that allows the collected human wisdom of the web to cull for essential information and rate the results for relevance. Surowiecki explains: “In that 0.12 seconds, what Google is doing is asking the entire Web to decide which page contains the most useful information, and the page that gets the most votes goes first on the list. And that page, or the one immediately beneath it, more often than not is in fact the one with the most useful information.”4
Collective intelligence isn’t just about the aggregate human brain on the Internet, however. It is increasingly how the best business, scientific, and creative work gets done. In its internal operations, Google applies the same principle of groupthink that it does to its technology. Employees are encouraged to post ideas for new products on an internal website. Then colleagues vote for their favorite idea. Those ideas with the most votes get pushed to the top for strategic attention.5 In 2005 Google sponsored a contest that drew 14,500 eager programmers. The contest resulted in an entire library of competitive new products.
In The Wisdom of Crowds Surowiecki contrasts traditional, top-down decision making with collective intelligence:
[The wisdom of crowds] . . . helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have. The wisdom of crowds has something to tell us about why the stock market works (and about why, every so often, it stops working.). . . . It’s essential to good science, and it has the potential to make a profound difference in the way companies do business. . . . We feel the need to “chase the expert.” [But] the argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd (which, of course, includes the geniuses as well as everyone else) instead. Chances are, it knows.6
Surowiecki’s summary of the scientific collaboration involved in the discovery of the SARS virus is riveting. On March 17, 2003, after China had announced the spread of an unknown and deadly virus, the World Health Organization embarked on an unprecedented effort termed the “collaborative multi-center research project.” By April 16 they announced their findings: the Corona virus was the one that had caused SARS. By isolating it so quickly, they were able to save the lives of potentially millions of people. The most incredible aspect of this project, however, was that no one was actually “in charge.” Surowiecki explains:
Although WHO orchestrated the creation of the network of labs, there was no one at the top dictating what different labs would do, what viruses or samples they would work on, or how information would be exchanged. The labs agreed that they would share all the relevant data they had, and they agreed to talk every morning, but other than that it was really up to them to make the collaboration work. . . . In the absence of top-down direction, the laboratories did a remarkably good job of organizing themselves. The collaborative nature of the project gave each lab the freedom to focus on what it believed to be the most promising lines of investigation. . . . And the result was that this cobbled-together multinational alliance found an answer to its problem as quickly and efficiently as any top-down organization could have.7
Missing the Memo
Significance, influence, interaction, collective intelligence—all of these values describe an essential shift from passivity to reflexivity. We are no longer content to travel in lockstep fashion through life like faceless, isolated units performing our one little job on an assembly line. This attitudinal shift is nothing short of revolutionary. True to form, Western Christendom seems oblivious to its implications. But it is the entrepreneurial church (congregations of roughly one thousand and above) that seems particularly clueless about the shift from the passive to the reflexive. And this, despite all its posturing about cultural relevance.
This disconnect shouldn’t really surprise us. Large-church leaders have been trained in the modern, command-and-control paradigm for thirty years. Here, organizations aren’t seen so much as gatherings of people with a common purpose but as machines. There is no irony here. Machine parts don’t have minds or muscles to flex. They don’t contribute to a process or innovate improvements. Machine parts simply do their job, which is, of course, to keep the machine functioning.
The mechanical paradigm or organization largely explains why modern church leaders are trained as CEOs, not shepherds. Sheep have their own ideas of what, where, and when they want to eat. They may not want to lie down by quiet waters and go to sleep at eight. They just might want to check out the watercress down by the streambed. Or they might want to head out over the next ridge and see if there are any other flocks out there. Conveniently, machine parts don’t get ideas. They just get to work, and they work according to specification.
Church members who don’t comprehend this three-decade shift in leadership paradigms are frustrated that their CEO pastor is so self-absorbed. They were looking for a shepherd—albeit, one with a big name and a big flock. Instead, they ended up with a “my-way-or-the-highway” autocrat—a top-down aficionado whose ecclesiastical machine whirs only to the sound of his own voice and functions tightly within the parameters of his own limited vision.
One doesn’t have to be on the pastors’ conference circuit long to figure out that prime-time clergy (ages forty to fifty-five) are marinated in this kind of thinking. They have been told repeatedly that this is the only leadership model that will ensure success. (And make no mistake—in new millennium America, success equals the greatest number of seats filled on Sunday morning.) Theirs is a mono-vocal, mono-vision world—one that affords the most uniformity and thus the most control. It is a world of hyperpragmatics where the ends (church growth) can justify the most dehumanizing of processes.
Pity the member who questions the machine and develops any significant influence. Sooner or later that member will be disposed of—shunned, silenced, and quietly removed from any position of authority on staff, boards, worship teams, or within the most lowly of programs. Unwittingly this member has run headlong into an industrial age anachronism: “the great man with the plan” methodology. And he or she has lost.
But it is not only individual members who lose. It is God’s kingdom and the waiting world that is being sacrificed, sacrificed on the altar of pastoral ego. The question is, how long can these antiquated, top-down systems last? As long as people will let them. In a push-back world, hierarchy can function only in the womb of passivity, which may be good news—at least on the survival level—for big religion. Because, if there is anything the entrepreneurial church is good at creating, it is compliant cultures—those Stepford-like minicities populated with otherwise savvy, creative human beings. Yet these otherwise savvy children of God somehow missed the memo: they have a brain, a voice, and a Jacobesque call to wrestle, not only with the living God, but with whatever institution claims to hold all truth inside its too perfect confines. Is it any wonder that megachurches proliferate in areas of the country where the church attendance percentages are well above the national norm?8 This is not quantum physics. It’s the law of supply and demand. Entrepreneurial churches thrive in the most churched areas of the country because they are populated with the already churched, not the unchurched. And their leaders know this, despite their incessant outreach-speak. They know who their real target market is. It is hothouse Christians. And if hothouse Christians are anything, they are passive.
With passivity an apparent requirement for participation in big-church America, it is no wonder that most new world citizens wouldn’t put so much as a tire mark on our parking lots. Maybe they get what we refuse to get: super-sized ecclesia is as much about power as it is about God. With luxurious facilities bordering on the obscene, organizational hierarchies designed to feed pastoral ego, and constituencies of the robotically religious (who else would tolerate living in a machine?), it’s not hard to figure out that one’s story, creativity, and opinions aren’t welcome. Newsflash: the “Forty Days of Honest Dialogue” campaign is not coming to your local suburban church-plex anytime soon. So much for relevance in a reflexive culture, the members of which will most likely keep driving past our edifices. No one has to tell a new world citizen that power-and-control religion is about monologue, not dialogue. It is about one leader’s vision; one take on what God is up to in the community, the nation, and the world; one single, often blurry, and out-of-context frame in this speeding movie we call life.
Sameness as Terminal Illness
Passive systems are systems of sameness. Yet sameness is eventually terminal. Ask any biologist and he or she will tell you that diversity and the adaptability necessary to sustain it are exactly what is required for living systems to thrive. Eliminate even a few species from an ecosystem, and the system begins to fail. So it is in human systems. We need difference, not because it looks good to the outside world, not because it is mandated at some denominational level, but because it is healthy. We think, work, learn, respond, and create better in the midst of a rich tapestry of the human family. Richard Florida, in his book The Rise of the Creative Class,9 researches those cities on the cutting edge of innovation, and they all have one thing in common: a high diversity of people groups and lifestyles. Surowiecki comments about our penchant for sameness:
Groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning because each member is bringing less and less to the table. Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives. . . . [They spend] too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring. . . . But, if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you’re better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are.10
Diversity may well be one of the primary keys to innovation, but it is hardly a lived value within entrepreneurial church circles, whether they are comprised of baby boomers or shaved-hair twentysomethings. In modern, mono-vocal religion, the lack of substantive influence by people of color, females, and singles is appalling. For instance, females make up well over 60 percent of the average entrepreneurial congregation’s constituency, while their representation as leaders outside the realm of children’s and women’s programs is usually less than 1 percent. Those few who are given staff or lay positions in nontraditional areas are rarely more than glorified clerks or assistants. The female staff member may have a plaque on her door that indicates she is a respected part of the “team.” She and her female volunteer cohort may even have their names in the bulletin as heads of programs, but they know what is really expected of them. It is to do the mundane, lower-level work of getting things done. Ultimately, it is to keep the lie alive—to feign diversity in a system that has no interest in actually embracing it.
The Neutralized Voices of Women
When it comes to women, what we are actually seeing within big-box church is the engineered neutralization of well over half of the human voices.11 And it is the case, not just in entrepreneurial congregations with an average age of forty or fifty, but surprisingly, in church plants with an average age of twenty-five to thirty. To quote Einstein, “No problem can be solved from the level of thinking that created it.” And that statement describes twenty- and thirtysomething church circles only too accurately. In the case of diversity, most young church leaders are blithely oblivious to their entrenchment in patriarchy and the command-control systems inherent to it.
The debilitating DNA of patriarchy—hierarchical organizational structures and their marginalization of the powerless—is tenacious, and to shake it loose will take an enormous amount of intentional, humbling work. But shake it we must, because the reality is this: hierarchy (command and control) fails to move the reflexive souls of new world citizens, regardless of gender or race. It simply ensures their absence. And in case we haven’t noticed, there are now a plethora of spiritual experiences waiting for them outside the cloning parlors of big churchdom. Carole Gilligan is right: “Hierarchy always creates an underground.”12 These days, undergrounds simply vote with their feet and go elsewhere, somewhere they can talk back, wrestle, contribute, make a difference, have a voice, challenge Dan Rather, or join a prayer circle on Beliefnet.
If we really can’t accept the reality of the flattened, antihierarchical world described in Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat,13 then perhaps we should take a look at Scripture and see what God had in mind. Jesus flattened the universe to reach it. God Incarnate—the Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Infinite—leaves the realms of glory, subjecting himself to human existence and pouring himself out for the sake of all creation. This is hierarchy confounded, power and position undone. And Paul’s impassioned plea to the Philippians encapsulates this divine deconstruction of dominance so perfectly that, to this day, it is considered to be the great prayer of the church—one of the clearest and most compelling expressions of the gospel in any form. Yes, according to Jesus, the world is indeed flat. He flattened it himself.
In your relationships with one another, have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had: Who, being in vary nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!
Philippians 2:5–8 TNIV
Jesus’s flattened world was no more clearly evident than in his relationship to women. He didn’t draw them out just to comfort them or even to elevate them out of their oppression. That he did, but first and foremost, he drew them out for the sake of the kingdom. Their obvious discernment, strength, vision, courage, and ready response of faith made them the logical forerunners in the spread of the gospel. Who they were qualified them for leadership, which is exactly why Jesus trusted them (and trusted them first) with some of the greatest truths of his Person and ministry.
Jesus first revealed his identity as the Son of God to a woman—and an outcast woman at that (John 4). She responded (at great risk) by evangelizing. It took a woman to understand that Jesus was to be crucified, even though Jesus had told his disciples what was to happen (Matt. 26:6–13). She responded (again, at great risk) in profound grief and worship, anointing Jesus’s feet with a perfume that had cost her everything and with her tears. Jesus affirmed her act as exemplary, as an act of leadership to the rest of the world. “I tell you the truth, wherever the Good News is preached in all the world, what this woman has done will be told, and people will remember her” (v 13 NCV).
Finally, women were the first to see the resurrected Christ (Luke 24:1–12). Was that an accident? Hardly. Again, Jesus trusted that not only would these women believe, but in believing they would do the hard thing—risk not being heard and not being believed. Which, of course, was the case. The consequence of their obedient, apostolic act—encountering the risen Son of God and voicing what they had seen and heard—was not much different from what women today experience within the patriarchy of big-church. Those women who see and hear God well and speak about what they see and hear can expect, in too many cases, to be dismissed.
Many women see and hear God well. But they also tend to see people well and the systems of relationships people create, whether in personal or business spheres. Business experts are now observing the remarkable feminine tenacity in the fight for collaborative systems. Their larger vision seems to be long-term, organizational health, with many sacrificing reputation and easy advancement to flatten top-heavy, unresponsive structures. Peter Senge, one of the world’s most respected voices on leadership and culture, is struck by the disproportionate number of women who are “making things happen,” especially when it comes to durable, organizational change. He observes: “Women managers and executives are leading many of the most important sustainability innovations. . . . They seem especially willing to take on long-term issues that deal with imbalances in the system as a whole.”14
Women also seem more comfortable with ambiguity, unpredictability, and crisis than their male counterparts. Not surprisingly, all three of these realities are inherent to the postmodern context. William Bergquist, in his groundbreaking book The Postmodern Organization, described the kind of leader that the postmodern world requires. And he places women at the forefront:
What will be the nature of the newly emerging postmodern leader? He or she will be one who can master the unexpected, and often unwanted. He or she (and more often, it will be she) must be able to tolerate ambiguity. Most importantly, the postmodern leader will acknowledge and even generally anticipate the occurrence and impact of rogue events (i.e., those unforeseen incidents that occur from within the system or outside of it).15
Is the anticontrol, relational, intuitive edge Bergquist describes here the sole hegemony of the female? One would be hard pressed to find such a view among sociologists and psychologists. Even populist works underpin a more holistic perspective. Malcom Gladwell, in his bestselling book Blink,16 proposes that relational/intuitive propensities—those necessary for effective systems thinking and certainly for handling irreversible change—are a common denominator of all humans. He contends that most of us, including many women, have simply learned to mute or silence right-brained information, especially in the modern era.
Muting Intuition
Psychologist Carol Gilligan is famous for her concept of muting—of editing the deeper, intuitive self. In her seminal book In a Different Voice17 (see also her latest work, The Birth of Pleasure16), she traces the severe editing of the relational/intuitive voice in males to early socialization. This socialization culminates at about age eight, when boys adopt a more distant, objectified interaction with the world—one that replaces interdependence with independence, and relationships with objects. This socially mandated flight from the relational in young boys also results in a constriction of the emotional range, an enforced editing of what are perceived to be “weaker” emotional expressions: sensing, caring, attachment, compassion, grief, and so on. The result is what Gilligan refers to as “voicing-over”: a pseudomale orientation to the world that is less attuned to the forces of connection and certainly less attuned to what we have come to know as right-brain operations. The strong attraction evangelical men have to neopatriarchal works, such as John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart,19 may actually be rooted in what Gilligan describes as the socialized amputation of the male relational/intuitive bent. In his book Eldredge actually romanticizes the all-too-familiar male caricature, the male cut off from the expressive and vulnerable self of early boyhood, the self-sufficient, invulnerable, impenetrable rescuer. Perhaps, when one has little memory of a complex self, caricature is the best one can hope for.
Editing the authentic self is not only a male problem. Much of Gilligan’s work focuses on how girls edit themselves. She contends that girls begin the voicing-over process sometime around puberty. Anywhere from the age of ten to twelve, girls start a process of conscious silencing. But not only do they muzzle one sphere of knowledge as boys do, they muzzle both their rational and intuitive insights. The reason is simple. In our persistently patriarchal culture, females who know what they know and speak what they know—whatever the source of their knowing—are at risk. Early on, girls figure out that knowledge is power. And power, even in the new-millennium West, is still a male birthright. For a female, to know anything and then to speak what she knows is a fairly certain path to rejection. In “great man with the plan” circles, whether they are Dockers big-church or frayed-jeans hip, it is a sure path.
Yet what happens when women begin to release their voices? They begin to understand just how well they are wired to lead in the new “flattened” landscape. If the best leadership in the postmodern setting is connective, intuitive, and responsive at its core—if it is about the nativity of God’s work in community versus captivity to one person’s and one gender’s ego and agenda—then the gutting of female influence in the kingdom is not only brainless, it is suicidal.
Female Christ-followers who possess true leadership skills do not need to lead because it is politically correct. Neither do they need to lead to assuage what is most often a millimeter-thin veneer of male guilt. Women with leadership abilities need to lead because, more often than not, they get this new world and they get it really well. In a world weary of hyperindividualism, top-down systems, pedestal personalities, and I-win-you-lose dichotomies, the natural feminine resonance with the flattened world—conversation, collaboration, participation, influence, presence, collective intelligence, and empowerment—has raised the cultural bar for what true leadership is and does.
Leadership in a truly flattened world has no precedents. Never in the history of humankind have individuals and communities had the power to influence so much, so quickly. The rules of engagement have changed, and they have changed in favor of those who leave the addictive world of hierarchy to function relationally, intuitively, systemically, and contextually. Male leaders—yes, even the male leaders of entrepreneurial churchdom—know this at their core. They realize they’re playing a deadly endgame and that the hierarchical clock is ticking. More than that, however, they have a deep knowledge of another way of being, though they may rail against it, retreating for comfort into cardboard cutout versions of both leadership and masculinity. But if they’re honest, they know they have tasted the new essence that is required of leadership now. They know it in the recesses of their boyhood memories and in the experience of intimacy, art, music, story, film, hospital prayers, and all that human beings do best, together. Those who are up to the challenge of the new world will draw on that deep knowledge. And they will look to the marginalized—including women—not as necessary evils in a politically correct world, but as their own leaders, mentors, and guides. The brightest will finally dump the myth of the great man, park their egos, and follow the one Great Man into the relinquishment of power.
To Know and Be Known
Having found our long-lost voices, not only are we finding ways to push back, we are moving out of anonymity to a fledgling, halting culture of communities. Yes, we may still crave cocoon time, but the Starbucks “third-place” concept—whether real or virtual—has literally revived what it is to have a public life.2 From village-concept malls to Internet cafés, Listservs, chat rooms, match sites, video-gaming events, Texas Holdem parties, martini bars, and neighborhood 12-step groups, we’re trying to figure out how to be in conversation with each other.
We may not be at the level of mature exchange in all of these venues, but even our attempts at community say something. At our deepest levels, we want to know and be known; we want to put a stamp on life. And now that we’ve tasted what it is like to be noticed—to be connected and together, to make a difference—our expectation of influence is at an all-time high. Whether at work, in school, online, on our iPods, or at the Home Depot do-it-yourself design center, we want our stories, passions, preferences, and opinions to matter. And the most successful companies and innovations of the past fifteen years—eBay, Google, Amazon, Comcast On Demand, Match.com, Blizzard (multiplayer online video gaming), Starbucks, Netflix, Myspace.com, Apple’s iPod Nano and iTunes, Blackberry, and others—have figured this out. Creating interactive, personalized experiences for their customers is primary. But these companies don’t stop there. The value they have for significance—for participation and personal engagement—permeates their organizational structures as well. And the reason is as simple as the dollar sign. When their companies are interactive and self-organizing at their core, profits increase.
Leadership theorist Margaret Wheatley agrees: “We have known for nearly a half century that self-managed teams are far more productive than any other form of organizing. There is a clear correlation between participation and productivity. In fact, productivity gains in truly self-managed work environments are at minimum 35 percent higher than in traditionally managed organizations.”3
Why are self-managed teams more productive? If personalized participation is such a high value in our culture, it is going to be indispensable in the place where people spend most of their time: work. People want to have their opinions heard. They want to push back on company practices without having to fear that their job is at stake. And they want to belong—to know their cohorts care what is going on in their lives as well as their minds. Self-managed teams make for a better, more connective work environment, and in turn, more productive workers.
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