Change and Leadership

Harvard leadership professor Ronald Heifetz has identified two major approaches to change: technical fixes and adaptive change. In her fine book, Leadership Can Be Taught, Sharon Daloz Parks describes Heifetz' distinction between the two.

Leaders who change through technical fixes believe that problems can be solved "with knowledge and procedures already in hand." Technical leaders emphasize expertise, education, and experience as key to resolving difficult issues. They also think that solutions to problems already exist. Leaders must employ solid techniques or processes to make things right. In this model, a technical-fix politician would try to convince voters of his or her competence, management skill, and problem-solving track record.

In contrast, adaptive change-type leaders believe that complex problems "require new learning, innovation, and new patterns." In this mode, "leadership is the activity of mobilizing people to address adaptive challenges." According to this leadership theory adaptive problems are "swamp issues," complex problems involving multiple levels of difficulty that elude regular routines and established platforms. According to Parks, adaptive leaders "call for changes of heart and mind—the transformation of long-standing habits and deeply held assumptions and values."Tuesday, January 08, 2008

The Times They Are A-Changin (by Diana Butler Bass) (God's Politics - Jim Wallis Blog)

So how does Kevin Rudd fit in this typology?
A technical fixer with perhaps something of the adaptive mode trying to sneal out into the public domain?

The Importance of Ignorance

In the Preface to his recent collection of essays The Way of Ignorance and other essays (Counterpoint, 2005) The farmer, theologian, poet Wendell Berry makes the following observations:

But the essays and speeches in this book have been written with the understanding, hardly novelty, that our ignorance is irremediable, that some problems are unsolvable, and some questions unanswerable - that, do what we will, we are never going to be free of mortality, partiality,, fallibility and error. The extent of our knowledge will always be at the same time, the measure of the extent of our ignorance.

Because ignorance is thus a part of our creaturely definition, we need an appropriate way: a way of ignorance, which is the way of neighborly love, kindness, caution, care, appropriate scale, thrift, good work, right livelihood.Creatures who have armed themselves with the power of limitless destruction should not be following any way laid out by their limited knowledge and their unseemly pride in it.

The way of ignorance, is to be careful, to know the limits and the efficacy of our knowledge. It is to be humble and to work on an appropriate scale. (pp.ix-x)

Who says a virtue ethic is necessarily politically conservative? Berry is issuing a radical social and economic critique of contemporary society expressed in clear probing prose and rooted in close involvement with a particular place, land that he has farmed and a region that he has observed closely for most of his life. He is calling for a profound conversion in our way of life, and of our politics and economics.

A probing and peaceful voice

I have just discovered the peaceful yet probing poetry of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, essayist, novelist and social critic.

His collection, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 is written in a distinctive voice that is both peaceful and probing. He is an eco-theologian informed deeply by the Psalms and close observance of his own farm and the woods and fileds of his native Kuntucky. Consider the following:
VI
What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty.
To end travail and bring to birth,
Their new perfection in new earth.
At word of that enlivening
Let the trees of the woods all sing
and every field rejoice, let praise
Rise up out of the ground like grass.
What stood whole, in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall - field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath hymn.

Winning the argument is not the point - it is how we argue

According to James Allison the argument in the Catholic church about homosexuality is wrongly framed and seeks to develop his case as a gay by going back to the church's theological roots against those who claim to be traditionalists.

Leaving aside (for a moment) the merits of the particular issue that he is involved in, (that requires an extended consideration in another post, it seems to me that the point he then goes on to make is relevant to the way controversy and conflict are conducted with the church. The point he is making is about how we conduct conflict within the church. In most of the cases that spring to mind conservatives, liberals and those of us who struggle to articulate the peacemaking orientation of the gospels and the story of Jesus all need to revisit this issue.

My own hunch, he says, is that God is revealing to us that gay people, just as we are, are part of humanity and that it is as such that we re invited to share in the [God's] party. But I may be entirely wrong. Nevertheless of this I am sure, that being right or wrong is not so very important. Being so grateful that I am invited at all that I am quite determined to as warm, charitable and friendly as I can learn how to be towards those who completely disagree with me is terribly, terribly important; for its is by this that I will be judged.

If what I am saying is true then it is a fundamental point in this discussion that it is not how I defend ny own, but how I imagine, portray and engage with my adversary which is the only realy important issue at hand. ... Afterall our example is One who was happy to be counted among the transgressors so as to get across the power of God to those who couldn't understand it.

If this is the case, then the really hard work in Christian theological discourse lies in the theological sphere: creating Church with those we don't like. Or to put it another way; as a Catholic, the only way I could conceivably be right in what is recognisably a new theological and moral position, is if I show that how being right is nothing to do with me and how it includes an account of how we have all been wrong together, in which I too am on the side of those with whom I disagree as someone undergoing a change of heart along with them. (pp.169-170 in Undergoing God: Dispatches from the scene of a break-in DLT, 2006)

Christmas - a very political festival

Simon Barrow has drawn attention to the highly political character of Christmas and its subversion due to the alliance of Christianity with the powers that be. Following is an extract from his excellent blog FaithinSociety,- see the link attached to this site. the various commentaries he is pointing to start to spell out the implications of a recovery of the subversive character of Christmas.

Enjoy!

I expect to return to this theme in the context of Easter where the mystification of the politics of Jesus has gone much deeper into the liturgy and theology of the Christian community.

But the truth is that the alliance of Christianity with governing authority and dominant culture has inflicted the most damage on the subversiveness of Christ's birth. This is something Jonathan Bartley and I have been arguing in different ways over the past couple of weeks. See Jon's Church Times piece here, which roots the problem in our ongoing diagnosis of the ails of the Christendom mentality. Mine focuses on the biblical dynamic itself. We have also published provocations from Giles Fraser, from Methodist president Martyn Atkins (who I am delighted to see will be their general secretary shortly, and has a blog here) and from Rabbi Michael Lerner (mentioned below). Rowan Williams' BBC Radio 4 Thought for the Day is worth reading, too.

Anglicans in Australia

Tom Frame has done a good job with his most recent book Anglicans in Australia (UNSW Press, 2007) in telling a complex story well. At least that's my view as someone from outside the Anglican tradition though I confess to having spent a fair amount of time churching with Anglican communities.

It is a book that is distinguished by a good tempered tone. a deep commitment to the renewal of the Anglican church and a willingness to be clear about the difficulties facing the church. There is something deeply "Anglican" in the best sense of that term, about the tone and temper of the writing.

I shall look forward to the reviews by his fellow Anglicans and hope that they engage with Tom's argument in the spirit in which it has been written.

On the way through a number of questions occurred to me that arose from my perspective as one who has been deeply influenced in recent years by the Anabaptist tradition. A nest of overlapping questions seemed to be lurking just out of focus as I read the text:

• whether the Anglican Church in Australia has quite gotten over a hankering for Establishment?
  
• How willing it would be to revisit and acknowledge the ambiguities of the Christendom settlement? (there are a couple of unqualified references to Christendom in the book that seem to be in the present tense)
  
• How really enthusiastic are Australian Anglicans about mission post-Christendom?
• What might the implications be for Anglican ecclesiology and theology more generally of active engagement in the post-christendom context in Australia? In posing this question I am asking in my own way about the historical contingencies that have shaped Anglicanism and what forms of church life might survive as something recognisably Anglican in this new context.
  

These questions are not so much directed at Tom (on the issue of Establishment there is no question as to where he stands - very much against it) but a first attempt to frame some of my own questions.

Claiming an historical heritage as central to their identity as Anglicans do is fair enough. The issue that is rarely explicitly dealt with by those claiming the heritage is the question of the use of state power to enforce matters of worship and theology, whether directly by capital punishment and torture, or less directly by educational, social and economic discrimination against Catholics and dissenters. This it seems to me to be a scandal that needs to be more directly addressed.

I was delighted to note that Tom suggests a revisiting of the Thirty-nine articles. A reconsideration of those articles might provide a useful opportunity for dialogue with descendants of the 'detested anabaptists" over a number of matters canvassed therein.

Christmas as the time of no room

A collection of readings for Advent and Christmas, Watch for the Light, brought me this morning an extract from Thomas Merton's meditation "The Time of No Room" from his collection of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable.

Merton opens up another dimension of the politics of Christmas with a reminder of the critical approach of the Old Testament tradition to the practice of the census.

Why then was the inn crowded? Because of the census, the eschatological massing of the "whole world" in centers of registration, to be numbered, to be identified with the structure of imperial power. The purpose of the census: to discover those who were to be taxed. To find out those who were eligible for service in the armies of the empire.

The Bible had not been friendly to a census in the days when God was ruler of Israel (2 Samuel 24). the numbering of the people of god by an alien emperor and their full consent to it was itself an eschatological sign, preparing those who could understand it to meet judgment with repentance.

Merton provides a powerful reflection on the detail that there was no room for the baby in the inn.

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it - because he is out of place in it and yet must be in it - his place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.