"PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS"Alban Weekly from The Due Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States for Monday, 27 June "Encouraging Attitude Change in the Congregation" "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS"
"Encouraging Attitude Change in the Congregation"
As the common saying goes, "attitude is everything." It is what makes the difference in how hospitable a congregation is, how externally-focused it is, its priority for spiritual growth, its openness to change and so on. The determining factor in congregational flourishing often comes down to attitudes. Change initiatives can grind to a halt when prevailing attitudes impede movement, frequently leaving demoralized leaders with the belief that attitudes don't change. But attitudes can change, and leaders who have an understanding of the anatomy of an attitude can help congregants reconsider and revise them.
An attitude is made up of three components: a belief, an evaluation, and a strength. At the core of an attitude is a belief about something (what is called the attitude's object). Let's imagine a person's attitude towards contemporary worship music (the object). A person might believe this music is loud, simplistic and monotonous. Next, what really empowers an attitude is the evaluation one makes of the belief: that it is good or bad, true or false, right or wrong. In our example our worshiper might evaluate her belief about contemporary worship music as "I dislike it." Finally, every evaluation has a strength. Our congregant may simply not prefer contemporary music or she might really hate it. Leaders encourage attitude change by helping congregants review and revise any of an attitude's components: the belief, the evaluation or the strength. Read more from Peter Coutts »
Peter Coutts: Encouraging Attitude Change in the CongregationAs the common saying goes, “attitude is everything.” It is what makes the difference in how hospitable a congregation is, how externally-focused it is, its priority for spiritual growth, its openness to change and so on. The determining factor in congregational flourishing often comes down to attitudes. Change initiatives can grind to a halt when prevailing attitudes impede movement, frequently leaving demoralized leaders with the belief that attitudes don’t change. But attitudes can change, and leaders who have an understanding of the anatomy of an attitude can help congregants reconsider and revise them.
An attitude is made up of three components: a belief, an evaluation, and a strength. At the core of an attitude is a belief about something (what is called the attitude’s object). Let’s imagine a person’s attitude towards contemporary worship music (the object). A person might believe this music is loud, simplistic and monotonous. Next, what really empowers an attitude is the evaluation one makes of the belief: that it is good or bad, true or false, right or wrong. In our example our worshiper might evaluate her belief about contemporary worship music as “I dislike it.” Finally, every evaluation has a strength. Our congregant may simply not prefer contemporary music or she might really hate it. Leaders encourage attitude change by helping congregants review and revise any of an attitude’s components: the belief, the evaluation of the strength.
For our imaginary congregant, introduce her to contemporary worship songs that are not loud, simplistic or monotonous, such as “In Christ Alone” by Keith Getty and Stuart Townsend. A repeated experience of singing contemporary worship songs that are clearly different from one’s belief about this style of music provides the ground for reconsidering and revising beliefs. A change in belief, in turn, can encourage a change in the evaluation made of the belief (“I like this music!”) and even the strength of the evaluation (“I really like this music!”).
The most effective way to help people change their attitudes is by helping people reflect on and revise the beliefs at the center of an attitude. Consequently, discovering the core beliefs of a congregation’s attitudes is the vital first step for leaders to take. These core beliefs can be quite fixed but they can also be surprisingly easy to change. For example, I once worked with a church whose congregants were all too aware that their membership was aging and declining (the object of an attitude). They thought there was nothing they could do about it (the belief) and consequently they felt hopeless (the evaluation). Their attitude disempowered any possible motivation to deal with their situation. I worked with a group of them one evening to help them name the actual beliefs underlying their attitude. During the discussion one person said what many believed, “The problem is that there are no young families in our neighborhood. We all moved here and built this church when this neighborhood was brand new. But the children of the neighborhood have grown and moved out. The area is now filled with seniors and empty-nesters. There is no next-generation for our church.” As I thought about this belief I recalled something I had noticed. “Well, if this is true,” I said, “then why does the public school have six portable classrooms in the back playfield?” I was holding up some evidence that called their belief into question. After a moment of quiet reflection the people in the room agreed that—yes indeed!—the school had been expanded. “Maybe there are young families in our neighborhood” they said. This led the congregation to look at the local census data and talk to a realtor. The congregation learned that those retired empty-nesters were now selling their houses and downsizing, and the next generation of homeowners was moving into the neighborhood. In fact, the reputation of the school made the neighborhood highly appealing to young families. A very fixed belief (“there are no young families in our neighborhood, so there is nothing we can do to improve our future”) was challenged by very simple evidence. The new belief changed their evaluation, making them more hopeful. The new attitude, in turn, motivated them to engage young families in the neighborhood and meet their needs.
It is not always this easy. Some congregational attitudes can seem impervious to change. But while the beliefs and evaluation of an attitude may appear fixed, the strength of an attitude can often change. The easiest way to make this happen is to help people consider a few of their attitudes in relationship to each other. Each of us has more attitudes about more things that we could ever imagine, but at any one time we may only be aware of one or a few of them. Leaders can help congregants revise the strength of an attitude by helping them reconsider the relative importance of a few attitudes that are important to them.
For example, a congregation I worked with recently is typical of many mainline churches. An evaluative survey we conducted showed that the congregation was very inwardly focused, giving the highest priority to enjoying and sustaining their sense of community as a church. As for their future priorities, they desired a modest shift towards an external focus. As part of my presentation of the survey results I helped congregants see three things: how their internal focus was not serving them in a few significant ways, how the congregation was already leaning into the missional church model, and the potential benefits of embracing more wholeheartedly the missional perspective. The workshop did not change congregant’s positive and strong attitudes on the meaning and value of community life, nor was that the goal of the workshop. Instead, the day helped people reconsider the relative priorities of two of their existing attitudes: an attitude that values the benefits of an internal focus and an attitude that values the benefits of an external focus. Today this congregation is still enjoying a fulfilling community life, but now it is also proactively exploring how to become more missional.
A century ago the renowned psychologist William James wrote, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.” The same can be said of churches. The greatest gift a leader can give a congregation is to encourage attitude change that has the potential to bring greater life, fulfillment and faithfulness for congregants. The work of leadership, more often than not, begins with helping people reconsider and revise attitudes.
Dr. Peter Coutts is the author of Choosing Change: How to Motivate Churches to Face the Future (Alban, 2013).
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: CONGREGATIONAL MINDSET
"Bob Reinheimer: Changing mindsets, not skill sets"
Organizations must accept that the world is dynamic, chaotic and changing. Adjusting to that new reality requires institutions to embrace a new kind of learning environment.
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Faith & Leadership
MANAGEMENT
Bob Reinheimer: Changing mindsets, not skill sets
Organizations must accept that the world is dynamic, chaotic and changing. Adjusting to that new reality requires institutions to embrace a new kind of learning environment.
Melting boundaries and building networks within organizations are important ways to encourage the kind of flexibility that’s required as the business and cultural environment becomes increasingly global, said Bob Reinheimer, an executive director of Duke Corporate Education.(link is external)
Duke CE recently completed “Learning & Development in 2011: A Focus on the Future,” which is a study of global changes in business and in leadership education. Researchers interviewed 142 senior learning and development professionals in major companies around the world to better understand how the financial crisis had and would affect corporate education and learning.
Reinheimer is a former associate dean and professor of the practice of management at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Prior to coming to Duke, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and was on the faculty of the University of Virginia and the FBI Academy.
He spoke with Faith & Leadership about global changes in business and in leadership education -- and why the Third World may be the source of a new generation of leaders. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What is the business of Duke Corporate Education?
In effect, we help organizations align their human assets with their other assets to drive marketplace performance. We are not strategy consultants; we are strategy implementation consultants. Once a company understands what it wants to achieve in the marketplace, we add to the execution of the strategy. We help them think about the missing pieces. We also provide the education people need to deliver against their new responsibilities.
Q: What was the impetus behind your new study, “Learning and Development in 2011: A Focus on the Future”?
In 2008 to 2009, we were hearing from our clients that their world was changing dramatically. We wanted to better understand what was going on, how it happened, and what it would be like once the dust settled.
The economic downturn is one driver of the change. A significant number of our clients were finding that their ability to invest in people, invest in learning, invest in a lot of things, was dramatically diminished by diminished economic results. That one was sort of obvious. But what was less obvious is we also saw an awful lot of companies that were deciding not to allow people to travel. Part of it was economic and part was fear of pandemic and contamination.
Because our clients were forced to look for more efficient ways of distributing information and aligning people, they went back to technology as a solution.
The learning and development community had kind of walked away from technology because it just hadn’t met their needs. It wasn’t dependable; it wasn’t engaging enough. When these same people went back and took a fresh look in 2008, they found that technology had improved so dramatically that now all of a sudden it was a viable solution for some of the things that learning and development professionals do.
The perfect storm of the economic downturn, travel bans and improvements in technology caused a shift in how learning and development professionals think about reaching people.
Q: In the study, you talk about changing mindsets rather than skill sets. What does that mean?
Old models of learning and development fall short in preparing people to deal with a rapidly changing world. Senior leaders have to react to the realities of the world in new and agile ways. It is a fundamental mindset shift.
A study respondent from South Africa presented a hypothesis. She and her colleagues posit that the leaders of the future will be found among people who grew up in Third World countries. These individuals are used to ambiguous, rapidly changing, chaotic circumstances. That experience gives them a mindset advantage over Westerners who grew up in more fortunate circumstances.
They’ve developed the mindset by growing up in that environment. So it’s beyond competencies and it’s beyond skills. It’s shifting to a way of perceiving and a way of fundamentally reacting as a human being to an environment that is dramatically different, and that’s new.
Q: The expectations seem to have flipped. Rather than expecting stability, leaders need to anticipate disruption as a norm.
The new reality is a dynamic, chaotic world. It’s not something we can put our heads down and outlast. We’ve got to strategize businesses that can succeed against that environment. The ability to do that basic business strategizing and implementing against a chaotic environment is a whole new realm for those of us who try to help leaders succeed.
Q: How do you help leaders change their mindsets?
Changing the mindset is a years- to decades-long experience. We try to jump-start the process. We give our participants tools to more rapidly recognize what’s around them and integrate that new reality.
Rather than learning to do business in China from a classroom in Minnesota, for example, our participants go to China. The day they land, we put them out in the streets on bicycles. They immerse themselves in a different market reality. With facilitation and coaching, we improve their ability to rapidly scan, make sense of and integrate new experiences into their thinking.
We took a company to China that wanted to sell medical equipment in a Chinese market. I took teams of seven, put them in vans, and gave each one a symptom: You’ve got a cold. You’ve got an upset stomach. You’ve got a headache. We sent them into the streets to find Eastern medicine remedies for their symptoms. They began to understand a different psychology about healing present in that environment. There’s no substitute for experience.
Q: How are the study respondents thinking about globalization?
They’re thinking about it more urgently. The financial crisis alerted us to how globally interconnected financial systems have become. New voices, new constituencies are joining the search for what it means to have effective global institutions. Everybody has seen the downside of globalization. There’s a real interest in accelerating the upside.
Q: How do you train people to appreciate the global nature of the business world or the interconnectedness of the world in general?
It’s a very complicated problem. First, we help people understand megatrends, what is likely to happen in the next 50 years demographically, technologically and economically. If people get a sense of the big forces at work, they may be able to respond more effectively.
Next, we help people recognize and respond to weak signals. In an environment as complicated as the global environment, how do you figure out what’s important? The signals are weaker than they used to be. They are not as easily discerned.
Q: In the study you mention focusing on capabilities rather than competencies. What’s the difference?
Capability resides within an organization or a team. Competency resides within an individual. Both describe something the entity can do, the individual or the group, but a lot of human resource professionals become preoccupied with competency models. In the worst cases, those competency models have little to do with what drives the business. The models don’t speak to how the employees need to perform.
Capabilities bridge the gap between individual competencies or skill sets and what an organization is trying to do. If you understand your strategy, the next step is to figure out what capabilities your organization has to develop to deliver that strategy.
I’m amazed at how rare it is to run into an executive who is thoughtful about what his or her organization needs to be able to do to deliver results. Executives love to tell you about the new results: “We’re going to become No. 1 in this, we’re going to grow in these ways, and we’re going to enter these markets.” But the how are you going to do it never seems to get as much attention. Forcing them to think about capabilities forces them to think about the how that drives their abilities.
Q: There is one finding that focuses on individuals -- the growing importance of targeting educational investment on high performers and the next generation of leaders.
Organizations have decided that they need to really target their learning and development resources toward those individuals who are going to have the likely greatest effect on the business. So the choice is made to use some mechanism to identify a subset of employees who are high potentials, or key talent -- there’s a variety phrases.
And there’s a focus now on investing in those high-potential, key-talent individuals, because we can clearly see them building bench strength for senior leadership roles.
There are an awful lot of companies who see real problems with succession planning. And so what this whole finding emphasizes is that companies are now very conscious of succession planning. That means you’ve got to identify who your key talent is. That means you’ve got to invest in accelerating their development.
Now, there’s always been something like this going on, but it has become more urgent because, for demographic reasons primarily, an awful lot of companies are seeing future vacancies in their senior management ranks. And so the talent pipeline has become a more urgent issue.
Q: Do you mean baby boomers retiring?
Yes. A pervasive finding from this study is that the requirement that learning and development professionals explain the value that they create is stronger than ever. But executives don’t want voodoo calculations of return on investment. They want answers to two questions: Are we developing the capabilities we need to execute our future strategies? And do we see that the talent we need to fill future management positions is being developed in an accelerated and strategic manner?
Q: Your study shows that people need education that is closer to their work environment. Why is that?
People talk about the power of creating an environment where learning happens coincidentally with doing the work. That kind of learning environment is immediately relevant; pragmatic applications are obvious.
Learning at work is powerful, impactful and efficient. Learning outside of work is costly and inefficient and less impactful. You have to take people off the job and often send them somewhere. Now, virtual means will allow you to avoid the travel, but they’re still probably concentrating on some learning experience that’s external in some way to doing the work.
So, whether you send them away or send them to a virtual experience, you’ve taken them away from the work and you’ve got to worry about whether or not that training experience is going to be relevant, impactful, insightful, useful and so forth.
For a long time people gave lip service to making a real learning environment. But the travel bans and budget cuts forced us to take it seriously and figure out how to do it.
Q: How does that really happen?
We studied how medical professionals learn at the bedside. That was analogous to financial services and other professions that are analytic. In medical shows, you’ve seen the intern and resident conferring at the bedside. You’ve seen groups of interns huddled around the resident talking through a problem. We found a number of habits and routines that could be built into the way an organization works.
There’s no bedside in accounting, but there is a client. There’s no grand round, but there is a mobilization meeting. These routines make learning and working almost synonymous. You’ve got to be intentional about building them into the workplace. Once you do, the power of the workplace as a learning environment is greatly increased.
Q: Is there a specific example, say in accounting, of a learning practice that could be embedded in a workweek?
When an assurance team reviews a client accounting matter, we encourage the more experienced team members to use a behavioral pattern called “teach, don’t tell.”
Say that a junior member says, “I don’t understand this regulation and how to apply it.” Rather than saying what it means, the senior member uses the Socratic method and asks a series of questions that lead the less-experienced learner to think out loud about what [the regulation] could mean and how it could apply. The experience is two or three minutes long, but it solves the problem and it makes learning and work synonymous.
It builds incredible rapport within the team; people don’t have to worry about getting caught not knowing something. They can bring it out on the table and everybody gets an opportunity to learn.
The notion that we’re going to learn from and with each other is a mindset shift. If you can get a group of people to make that shift, it transforms their effectiveness and brings joy to a job. So -- teach, don’t tell.
Q: What were other important findings of the study?
Something like 80 percent of the leadership and development professionals in our study identified melting boundaries as an important topic for global leaders. People’s sentiment was that the only way to deal with the complex problems businesses face is to draw on the totality of available resources.
You’ve got to get rid of the boundaries that prevent you from drawing on the brains, the hearts and the hands of all of the people working in the organization. What can you add to a leader’s mindset and toolkit that will help him or her melt boundaries? Designing education for melting boundaries is a fascinating leadership challenge and opportunity.
Q: How do you train people to melt boundaries while operating within organizational hierarchies?
You can build networks that penetrate boundaries. It is about building your network of connections to people in other parts of the organization.
“Collaboration” is a buzzword, but very few people know what it means behaviorally. It has to do with how you think about solving problems. Who you invite to meetings. How you frame issues. There are a number of mindset and behavioral issues around collaboration that are very teachable and have a big impact.
Another thing we’re trying to do is help people look at the less obvious but more impermeable boundaries, such as generational and intellectual. The scientific mindset vs. the economic mindset vs. the accounting mindset and so forth.
I actually think that the disciplinary approach that universities have in organizing their curriculum creates an extraordinary set of wired-in boundaries about ways of perceiving and interacting with the world. So we have to kind of dismantle the tyranny created by the major.
Again, it comes to perception, scanning and reading weak signals to see boundaries that people have never discerned are there.
We all make the grand, egocentric assumption that other people are like us. When you run into somebody who doesn’t get it and you get frustrated and angry, those are the kinds of things that really can be destructive to productivity and relationships. They come from the fact that you’re wired very differently, intellectually, emotionally, whatever it may be. And those kinds of boundaries, if you don’t acknowledge them and begin to work with them, really become set in stone.
Q: It sounds like your first order of business might not be changing the organizational chart, but rather making human-to-human, team-to-team connections that can break down boundaries in reality. If they still exist on paper, it doesn’t really matter.
Exactly. There are a lot of companies making a lot of money and a lot of businesses that are preoccupied with changing what’s on paper; restructuring happens all the time. Most of the time, it never solves anything. For me, it’s a much more human equation than it is an organizational-structure equation.
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"Habits are Key to Transformative Leadership"Activities practiced over time become habits -- and activities shape and are shaped by mindsets in the organization and character traits of the people.
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Faith & Leadership
MANAGEMENT, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Dave Odom: Habits are key to transformative leadership
Activities practiced over time become habits -- and activities shape and are shaped by mindsets in the organization and character traits of the people.
The people of Israel, delivered from bondage in Egypt, were encamped with Moses in the wilderness. Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro decided to pay a visit. Jethro celebrated God’s blessing on Israel and observed Moses at work.
In Exodus 18, it is clear that Moses was a very busy leader, working alone and making decision after decision about everything that came to his attention. Seeing Moses exercise the mindset of a solitary leader, Jethro witnessed the withering effect on Moses and the unintended consequence that the larger community didn’t understand his decisions or the reasons behind them, because Moses wasn’t sharing the work.
So Jethro suggested an entirely different set of activities: Moses should learn the law from God and teach it to the people; and he should set up a network of judges, selected on the basis of good character traits, to help hear the people’s cases.
These new activities of teaching and preparing others to judge would open up growth opportunities for everyone. The burdens would be shared, and everyone’s eyes would be opened to God. Rather than thinking of his work as deciding, Moses needed to think of his work as cultivating.
Of course this was -- and is -- easier said than done.
Moses had to discern, identify and train the new judges and then trust them to do their work without getting in their way. The new judges had to buy into what Moses taught them and maintain the integrity of the new system of justice for the whole community. And the people had to learn to trust the judges as much as they trusted Moses.
Throughout the process, Moses had to exhibit the trait of humility -- to step away from the center and trust and empower the judges. (That he was successful in doing so is noted by the narrator’s affirmation of Moses’ humility in Numbers 12:3). Thus, everybody had to practice new activities that, with enough repetition, became habits. Those habits, then, enabled a new mindset to permeate the community and instill in its people new traits of character.
Today’s Christian institutions can learn a lot from Moses about what it means to be a transformative leader. He was willing to examine his mindset and work in new ways as the context changed. Mindsets are the default patterns of thinking we use to interpret the world, frame situations, contextualize relationships and respond to leadership challenges. These mindsets emerge from our experiences, but they also are shaped by the activities in which we engage, which establish our habits. A mindset that works well for us at one point in our lives may serve us poorly in another.
This principle is what made Jethro’s advice in Exodus 18 so timely. Moses was willing to listen and risk engaging in new activities because he recognized that fundamentally his leadership was focused on God, not on himself. Moses -- and other leaders facing new circumstances or changed contexts -- can change their mindsets only if they engage in new activities that help them develop new habits.
Consider, for example, a budding social entrepreneur who was her high school and college valedictorian and has a mindset shaped by continuous success. One of the lessons of starting a new organization is having a mindset of experimentation and “survivable failure.” This social entrepreneur will need to engage in activities that enable her to cultivate habits so she learns a new mindset that is otherwise unfamiliar and, initially at least, likely to be destabilizing.
Another example: In late 2008, many Christian organizations faced daunting economic challenges because of the stock market implosion. The mindset of many leaders became dominated by fear and crisis. In April 2009, James Surowiecki wrote in The New Yorker(link is external) that in such times business leaders tend to be far more worried about “sinking the boat” -- destroying the company by making a bad bet -- than about “missing the boat” -- letting a great opportunity pass.
While a leader with a “crisis” mindset would be inclined to cut the budget and wait for better times, a leader willing to learn a new pattern of thinking might engage in new activities -- remembering the organization’s past, inquiring about current needs, strategizing about the organization’s contribution, experimenting with new services -- leading to new habits and a new mindset of “seeing opportunity.”
Mindsets and activities require and reinforce each other, as do activities and traits. Mindsets are much easier to shape than are traits, which are signs of a person’s character. The Christian life is a journey of learning the ways of God in Christ. Scriptures and the Christian tradition have developed many and varied lists of virtues and characters traits, including the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, as well as the classic cardinal and theological virtues.
Twenty-first-century Christian leaders would do well to consider the character traits that are essential to the habits they are seeking to develop in their organizations. The change in Moses’ practice, for example, both required and reinforced the trait of humility, which enabled him to be receptive to Jethro’s recommendation.
Many leaders think about change as an announcement. Having a clear, compelling picture of the future that can be framed succinctly is important. As James Dubik, the U.S. Army general who directed the transformation of the Army in the 2000s, once told me, “Change is very practical: ‘What do you want me to do differently?’” A vision has to be translated into a set of activities that become habits.
Paul points to this same truth in his letter to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God” (Romans 12:2 NRSV).
Our minds are renewed by focusing on the things of God. The habits of worship, prayer, Bible study and service are what Christians do. Our activities are part of the renewal of our minds, and these activities form us.
Ultimately, we are all about joining with God’s transformative work in the world. God has given a clear vision of his reign. It is for us to translate that vision into the activities, mindsets and traits needed where we live.
How would you name the key activities of your organization?
The critical mindsets? The essential character traits? Leadership Education at Duke Divinity suggests these lists as a starting place.
ACTIVITIES: IRONIES
Integrate
Remember
Observe
Network
Inquire
Experiment
Strategize
Mindsets: CITIES
Cultivation
Imagination
Trust
Improvisation
Excellence
Sustainability
Traits: PITCH
Perseverance
Interpretive charity
Truthfulness
Courage
Humility
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"Breck England: Finding the 'Third Alternative'"
The co-author of Stephen Covey's new book, "The 3rd Alternative," says leaders who are able to cultivate a mindset that can entertain wildly divergent ideas not only encounter less conflict but also come up with more inspired answers.
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Faith & Leadership
MANAGEMENT
Breck England: Finding the "third alternative"
The co-author of Stephen Covey’s new book, “The 3rd Alternative,” says leaders who are able to cultivate a mindset that can entertain wildly divergent ideas not only encounter less conflict but also come up with more inspired answers.
When people with opposing opinions collide, one side typically wins out, while the other leaves frustrated and angry.
But there’s a way to resolve differences that results in less conflict and leaves both parties enthusiastic about the outcome, said Breck England, co-author of Stephen Covey’s new book, “The 3rd Alternative.”(link is external)
In the book, the authors encourage individuals in leadership positions to listen to both sides of a problem and look for answers that transcend polarizing positions.“It’s a question of mindset,” said England, who holds a doctoral degree in English and works as a consultant for the Franklin Covey Co., focused on Covey’s principle-centered theories of organization and leadership.
“If you approach a problem with the point of view that ‘I’m interested in an exciting third alternative; I don’t care where it comes from,’ then the burden comes off of you. It’s so liberating for a leader to be able to say, ‘I don’t have to be the source of this,’” he said.
Covey, a worldwide expert in business and personal time management, teaches at Brigham Young University but is best known for his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” along with other books about organizational leadership.
England spoke to Faith & Leadership about the latest book and the steps to finding better solutions to organizational dilemmas. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Could you describe the concept behind “The 3rd Alternative”?
In just about any field of human endeavor, you’ll have two conventional alternatives -- left versus right, management versus labor. The idea behind “The 3rd Alternative” is to arrive at a position that is better -- that is higher -- than either of those two conventional alternatives.
Dr. Covey was taken with this idea years ago when he studied some of the literature on leadership and learned that many of the great leaders get beyond the conventional two sides of a story to a third side, which is new, innovative and better than anyone thought of before.
So the idea behind the book was that many of our conflicts, and also dilemmas that we face in life, are often the products of poor thinking. A better way to think is to look for a third alternative.
Q: How is it different from compromise?
It’s the opposite of compromise. In a compromise, everyone loses something. When you get into a compromise situation, people tend to go away generally unsatisfied. They didn’t get what they wanted. They had to cede ground to the other party.
The idea behind “The 3rd Alternative” is actually the opposite of that. It’s that no one gives anything up, because we arrive at something that everybody agrees is a win for everyone. It’s something better than any of us thought of before. It’s something that delights everyone.
Q: How does this book build on Stephen Covey’s classic book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”?
The “7 Habits” book is based on the idea that if you start by realizing that you are responsible for your own choices, you begin to rise in maturity through a series of seven habits. The final and culminating of what he calls “interpersonal” habits is Habit 6, which is “Synergize.”
Synergy, he believes, is the highest human activity. In any interactive situation, it’s possible to arrive at a synergistic solution that is better than anyone has thought of before. So he would say that the “7 Habits” book leads up to this book.
Q: Could you talk about the mindsets that make it difficult to find that third alternative?
I can take a concrete example and walk you through it. Malaria is endemic in equatorial Africa. For years there has been a knock-down, drag-out argument between the left and the right about what to do about it.
Years ago, there was a solution in the form of DDT, which was very effective at wiping out the mosquito that causes malaria, but it was very damaging to wildlife. So for many years the use of DDT was banned, because it was damaging to wildlife. But then malaria came roaring back, of course.
So the right wing would like to see DDT brought back, for a number of reasons. They feel that the threat is overblown. And the left wing comes back and says, “This is far more damaging than you think it is.”
There’s this tremendous tug of war between them.
Our contention is that they’re both equally caught in conventional thinking and they’re unable to get past it.
While the left and the right wings are fighting over DDT, along comes Nathan Myhrvold and his fabulous Intellectual Ventures company in Seattle. And they come up with a thousand “third alternatives” for curing malaria.
Some of them are really off-the-wall, like a machine that will shoot down mosquitoes.
With less than $200 worth of equipment -- a little blue laser, the kind that they use in the grocery store checkout, a computer and a radar system -- they put this system in place in the perimeter fence around a village and program the computer so that it can distinguish the female Anopheles mosquito.
As the female mosquito enters the perimeter, a laser beam shoots it down. And the laser that shoots the little mosquito out of the sky will not hurt any other form of life.
Q: Is it the emotional investment that makes these disputes difficult to resolve?
Yes, there’s a deep emotional investment in one’s own side and one’s own position and one’s own philosophy.
Why do people find it so difficult to get past these conventional ways of thinking? We believe the reason is because they emotionally identify with their positions to the point where they can’t get beyond them.
Q: So what are the personal skills and habits that people can learn in order to practice this kind of thinking?
What you need to do is recognize that there is an abundance of solutions.
In logic, there’s never only one alternative to anything. There may be infinite alternatives.
For example, the struggle over energy philosophies in this country is a deeply political, and therefore deeply psychological and emotional, conflict. The fact is, the universe is absolutely roaring with energy. There is no energy shortage. There is simply a shortage of solutions.
In India there are millions of houses without electricity. The leftist politicians want a national electricity grid paid for by the government. And there are private interests who say a national electricity grid should be privately owned. The result is you get a 40-year battle between these two sides and no solution.
Then what happened was that a little company owned by a man named Harish Hande slips in between the two and says, “We don’t need a national electricity grid.” So he’s producing kits that will enable these homes to be electrified by solar power for less than $200, and millions of homes in India are rapidly being electrified by these little kits. Soon the argument over whether there should be a national electricity grid becomes irrelevant.
Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen saw all these television sets running off of solar energy kits and said, “People don’t want a national electricity grid. What they want is a TV they can watch.” The national electricity grid is just one way to get there.
A second key to this kind of thinking is to have enough personal confidence to go up to people you disagree with and say -- and in sincerity -- “You disagree with me; I need to listen to you,” instead of saying, “You disagree with me; I need not to listen to you.”
If you really do sit and listen to the other side with the intent to understand them and understand their point of view and see if there’s anything of value there, that immediately diffuses the conflict.
A third thing you can do is say, “Would you be willing to look for an alternative that neither one of us has thought of before?”
Generally, they will say they are willing to do that. And as you push towards a better alternative and keep that goal in mind, you soon find yourselves transcending your positions. There’s no guarantee that you’ll arrive at it, but when you do, you’ll know you’ve got it. Everybody gets excited. They say things like, “I never thought of that before,” or, “Why didn’t we think of that before?” They recognize it when they get there.
Q: How can institutional leaders cultivate those skills and habits in their organizations?
My research and experience have shown me that to a very great extent, an institution is the reflection of the leader. Whether you’re the university president or the CEO, the leader sets the tone for the entire institution.
The key is to begin to model third-alternative thinking. Have third-alternative sessions if you’re facing a dilemma: “Do I need to raise money or not?” or, “Should we take money from this source or not?”
Whatever dilemma you’re facing, you start holding sessions where the goal is not to fight or argue points but to generate third alternatives. You can always argue later if you want.
A good place to start is by saying -- just say, “You differ from me; I need to listen to you.” And then just do it, without debating the point with them. The idea is to truly understand their position rather than to debate it.
Q: You wouldn’t allow people to start arguing over those points -- just present them to the group?
Yes. The idea behind letting people vent is that it gets it off their chest, and it kind of empties their conflict bank. It empties out their psychologically pent-up, repressed feelings. And then they’re often ready to sit back and think with you.
Here’s another story: One little pizza store in a chain was producing so much more revenue than the others that the company was interested in how the manager was doing it.
The only thing he does differently is bring together his crew once a week and hold what he calls a huddle. He lets them come up with the ideas, and it’s amazing how creative these teenagers can be.
They’ve come up with some outstanding ideas, like load a pickup truck with hot pizzas and drive them to the football game and sell them out of the truck.
They come up with these unconventional ways of selling. As a result, this man has a huge revenue stream compared to his competing stores, because he values the ideas of his people.
Think about that mindset in relation to running a huge organization like a university. You can see how energizing it could be if a university president were to get his vice presidents or his reports together and say to them, “What can we do this week we’ve never done before?”
Q: How do you apply this in situations where maybe there isn’t conflict, but you just think it’s a good way of thinking?
It applies to any dilemma that you face. So the idea is, if I’m a leader, I really value diverse points of view.
We all have slices of truth, I like to say. So it’s valuable to get as many slices of truth out on the table as you can, and take that terrible burden off the leader of trying to be the fount of all wisdom.
The idea behind “The 3rd Alternative” is the principle of synergy -- that you and I together can come up with things that one of us alone could never do. And those things will be far more fruitful than just the two of us together. One plus one equals three, or 10, or 1,000, instead of just two.
Q: You use words such as “excitement,” “promise” and “delight” to describe this concept -- not your typical business leadership language. What’s the significance of this?
Human beings are delighted by the exciting, new idea. It’s just part of our makeup. I think it’s the highest human endeavor, to discover new truths, to discover new ideas, to arrive at new realizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. (I grew up with “Star Trek,” OK?)
I believe that’s rooted in us. And it’s our highest delight in life to discover something new that really works well and works better than we ever thought anything could work. Of course, we live in a world where we’re saturated with that.
The highest form of human work is coming up with the exciting new alternative that nobody thought of before.
We wrote the book because we were fascinated with all of the evidence of human ingenuity that can come once we get past our conventional, two-sided ways of thinking. The “me-against-you” thinking is the enemy of the future.
It’s a very hard thing to do, to get past your traditional mindsets.
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DENOMINATIONAL LEADERSHIP
It seems like only yesterday that you were the pastor of a congregation, and now you are offering leadership to your denomination at the regional or national level. Not only are the scope and scale of your responsibilities different, so too are your available resources and the ways you can lead effectively. This four-day educational event is designed so you can consider your practice of leadership and be equipped with the tools and strategies you need to navigate the complexities and changing landscape of denominational and institutional life today.
People of all denominations who are transitioning into executive-level positions within denominational governing bodies or who have been in their role fewer than three years are welcome to apply for this selective program.
This event will offer participants:
a variety of learning experiences designed to develop their individual leadership capacity;
the opportunity to learn about their leadership by receiving 360-degree feedback;
ways of understanding change processes and transition times;
strategies for practicing innovation at the regional or national level;
tools for responding to challenges that are particular to the work of a denominational executive, including managing personnel processes, having "critical conversations" and offering difficult feedback; and
times to network with colleagues in similar positions.
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FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
In Choosing Change, author Peter Coutts acknowledges that clergy today recognize the impact our individualistic culture of choice is having on congregations. But Coutts also points out that many leaders do not think about motivation. For them, encouraging change is about selling their congregation on a new idea, governed by the assumption that a better idea should win the day. Wide experience in the church demonstrates that this approach often doesn't work and leaves many congregational leaders demoralized. A new approach must be tried.
In the first half of the book, Coutts explores theories, ideas, and terms that are most pertinent for leaders who desire to encourage congregational change. The second half of the book offers detailed guidance for congregational leaders who want to be motivational leaders.
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