“Adaptive Leadership” with Tod Bolsinger

Show Notes:

This week, Chris and Eddie have an important conversation about leadership with Tod Bolsinger, senior congregational strategist and associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Canoeing the Mountains, a book about adaptive leadership. 

Tod wants to help leaders--church leaders, community leaders, business leaders--understand how to lead in a world that is constantly changing. For a long time, leadership has been seen as solving technical problems with technical solutions. And while that aspect of leadership is incredibly important, especially in building trust, today’s world is vastly different from the world of 20 years ago. Today, the answer to the question, “Now what do we do?” is often, “I don’t know.” Today, leadership looks more like learning and less like exerting authority because of technical expertise.

So how do we lead change in the changing world? There is no simple answer to this complex question, but Tod has a few ideas and a lot of hope for current and future leaders, where we embrace what we don’t know and learn to lead the learning.

Resources: 

Find books by Tod, including Canoeing the Mountains, on IVPress

Learn more about AE Sloan Leadership

Transcript:

Eddie Rester 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.

Eddie Rester 00:04

Today we have Tod Bolsinger. Tod Bolsinger wrote a book a few years ago called "Canoeing the Mountains." It was actually in 2015, when it came out, pre-pandemic. But what he talks about in the book is adaptive leadership. How do we move into a world that we can't see, don't understand, and is different than what we've known before? And he writes it for the context of the church. And a lot of our conversation today is around the context of the church. But what he has to say about leadership, I think applies across organizations.

Chris McAlilly 00:36

There are many changes that have happened over the course of the last two years, three years, even more so over the last two or three decades. And some of them create very difficult, complex, wicked problems and challenges for leaders and organizations to face, regardless of the sector. And, you know, I think one of the things that I found really helpful about the conversation, Eddie, is just kind of trying to get clear, not just about where you're going, but about who you are, not just as individuals, but as an organization. And really, it comes down to kind of values that are at the heart of it and allowing the values to create the direction or to help shape the discernment about what needs to happen next.

Eddie Rester 01:30

What steps are next? Yeah, I think for me, from him, the ability to say, "I don't know," that's something that I struggle with, because I've always been put in positions where I could figure out where to go, but this whole idea for me of saying, "I got no idea what's next." But if we can clarify who we are, then we can begin to have the conversation.

Chris McAlilly 01:56
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, for you to stand up publicly, in your context, with your people and say, "You know what? I got no idea."

Eddie Rester 02:06 "I got nothing here."

Chris McAlilly 02:07

I think the thing that that does, it does a couple of things. One is, you know, I think the fear in saying that publicly is that you don't come across as a person of competence, you know, or that you don't come across as a person who has their crap together, you know, or is capable. Right? And I think, you know, we talk about what what is it, how do you become a person of competency? Through technical, hard skill, and become a person that's trustworthy. But once you've achieved that, once you've kind of risen to a certain level of leadership or responsibility, then the questions become more difficult. They become more challenging, and really the direction of, you know, what should we do next becomes more challenging, and ultimately requires--and I think this is his point--different conversation partners, looking for expertise in different places.

Eddie Rester 03:03

You gotta agree that you're going to learn. You're not just going to say what you know, but you have to have the conversations to help you learn. It's a great podcast today. I think you're going to enjoy the conversation. He's got a lot of wisdom, I think, that he's gleaned over his 27 years in the ministry and his teaching time, so we know you're going to enjoy it today. Share it. Like it. Leave us a review. Help us find new people who will listen to The Weight.

Chris McAlilly 03:33

We're grateful as always that you're on the journey with us and hope you enjoy the podcast. [INTRO] Life can be heavy. So heavy, in fact, that the weight we carry can sometimes cause us to lose hope.

Eddie Rester 03:47
But we've all come across those people in life who seem to be experiencing the same world we live in, except they maintain a great depth of joy and hope.

Chris McAlilly 03:55
A former generation called this gravitas. It was their description of a soul that had gained enough weightiness to be attractive, like all things with a gravitational pull.

Eddie Rester 04:07
Those are the people we want to talk to. On this podcast, we talk to pastors, entrepreneurs, artists, mental health experts, and many others.

Chris McAlilly 04:16
We'll create space for heavy topics, but we'll be listening for a quality of soul that could be called gravitas.

Eddie Rester 04:23
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO] Well, today we're here with Tod Bolsinger. Tod wrote a book a few years ago called "Canoeing the Mountains." Todd, welcome to the podcast today.

Tod Bolsinger 04:33
It's nice to be with you guys. Thank you very much.

Eddie Rester 04:35

Yeah, it's great to be with you. I got to be with you in November of last year, just thinking about church and leadership and where we are. But before we get to all of that, kind of fill in the blanks for folks who aren't familiar with you or your work. Give us a little thumbnail sketch of kind of who you are, your history, your leadership, and what you're doing now.

Tod Bolsinger 04:56

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate very much. I spent 27 years as a pastor in Presbyterian churches. I served for 10 years when I was training at Hollywood Presbyterian. It's this iconic downtown church in Los Angeles, that at one time in 1963, was the largest Presbyterian Church in the country. By the time I was there in the 80s, it was about 4,000 members. Today, I think it's about 400. It's like many urban churches that have gone through some real challenges. I left there in 1997, to become the senior pastor at San Clemente Presbyterian Church, which is a little beach town, halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, and served there for 17 years. I raised my children there. It was wonderful. God gave us the desires of our hearts, to be in a place where we could pastor a parish and care for a people. And when I finished there, I ended up going to Fuller Seminary, where I'd gotten my PhD and my MDiv, as a senior vice president, and ended up now running their Church Leadership Institute. And what I really do is every day I work with leaders on leading change. I have a Church Leadership Institute, and I have a company called the AE Sloan Leadership, that basically helps faith leaders thrive as change leaders. Because as a pastor, I had to learn that seminary didn't prepare me for how to lead change in the changing world. And so that became my other vocation.

Chris McAlilly 06:26

What have you noticed over that period of time, I guess, over your career, about the world that needs to be changed? And kind of, I guess, give a snapshot of maybe when you started out as a pastor. What have you noticed? I mean, one of the things that, you know, we can pick up on, the decline in mainline Protestantism, that shows up in a place like Hollywood, where there would be 4,000 members at one point, and now they're, you know, more like 400. So there's clearly, you know, a decline across the board in American Protestantism. What are some? How do you attribute for that? And then maybe what are some other ways that you've seen the world or the church change during that time?

Tod Bolsinger 07:15

Well, the most significant change that happened over a course of a generation was what I would call the change from a Christendom to a post-Christendom world. And what all that means is that Christendom means Christianity had a home field advantage. That's what it means. It doesn't mean everybody was a Christian. So in 1963, when Hollywood Pres was the largest Presbyterian Church in the country, the Billy Graham Crusades were at their all time high also. People needed Jesus. There was no doubt about that. The challenge was that it used to be that you understood that if you wanted to find Jesus, you went to your local church. That's what Billy Graham would tell people. And the assumption was that everybody knew that was true. So I often say if you go into almost any small town in America, and I've been to Oxford, Mississippi, and it kind of looks like this, right? There's a downtown square with a statue in the middle right of the right most famous dead people, right? There is usually, those towns were founded with a courthouse and a library and the first church of whoever got there first, all there and on First Street, and all the other first churches are all on Second Street. Because the assumption for generations was, society is best when it's anchored around law, education, and religion. And that religion would be Christian religion, even if people weren't Christians. What changed in the last generation is now a town like that has more bars on those streets than libraries and courthouses and churches, that the churches themselves that are downtown are beginning to be more vacated, because less people feel the necessity of finding God in a church, and that we no longer have a home court advantage. We are still out there, trying to live out the mission of God. But the mission of God back then meant sending money over sea water. And today it means crossing your sidewalk. And so most of us weren't trained for that world. I came out of a generation where I was trained to assume "here's the church, here is the steeple, open the door, see all the people." And now we actually recognize that our work is missional wherever we are, and that we're going to have to change traditional churches to be churches that can live out their mission of God wherever they are, and that most of us just weren't trained for that. And then the pandemic happened. Like, if it wasn't enough, we had everything get disrupted in 2020. And now, people used to argue with me about post- Christendom. Nobody argues with me about the pandemic. And I'll often say we were not trained for the world that we're leading in today.

Eddie Rester 09:54

And think about the post Christian world. It's not just that we weren't trained to live in it, it's that we long for what was. We long for this world that... You know, when I was a youth director, I could call together a trip the night before--without email, without texting, word got out. 40 kids would show up, and we go do something fun on a summer afternoon. Now--because there was this idea that church comes first. And we'll invite our kids, our friends to it. But now, you put the word out like that--with better communication tools--you have 4 kids show up, because there's travel ball. And there are other priorities ahead of. And when I think about the post Christian world, that's kind of the, for me, the flip is that you talk about, it had this home field advantage. It was home field. And now it's four blocks away, around the corner, and most days forgotten by the world.

Tod Bolsinger 10:27 Right.

Eddie Rester 10:58

And so it becomes this different kind of challenge. And you talk about it in your book. You talked about adaptive leadership. So I want you to talk about that, as opposed to kind of the technical leadership. I mean, what are those two things? How do they work together? How do they push against each other?

Tod Bolsinger 11:22

Yeah. So this work comes from Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, out of Harvard. They began to recognize that really complex, big challenges--the kinds of things that consume leaders--fall into one of two buckets. One bucket is a technical challenge. What a technical challenge means is that it's a difficult challenge, but an expert can solve it. There are best practices. There are things you can do. I always tell people, technical problems are not trivial, right? My dad had a heart bypass. That's a technical challenge. We got a doctor who's an expert, right, that's important. You know, doing a root canal, right? I always say preaching the Trinity without committing heresy is a technical challenge. We can teach you how to do it, I work at a seminary. If there's a best practice, and you apply those best practices, and they make an impact, that's a technical challenge. Technical problems require technical solutions. They require experts with authority to solve them. Adaptive challenges are challenges where there are no best practices, where we're not sure what to do, where we're gonna have to learn as we go, and where we're going to probably have to let go of some things that used to work. So an adaptive challenge requires learning, it results in loss, you're letting some stuff go. You're navigating competing values. You're asking questions like, "We can't just get a win-win. We have to choose between this one or that one as the first priority." And when we get into adaptive challenges, it requires a different kind of leadership, because it's not just have a plan and execute the plan, it's discover what we need to discover and be transformed for what we're discovering. Whole new skill sets, whole new ways of thinking, that is really different about that.

Chris McAlilly 13:15

I wonder, so one of the things that you mentioned is that, you know, one of the things that has shifted is the assumptions that lead to the built environment in, you know, every day America So, we make certain assumptions about what the good life looks like, and how to structure the institutions of a community so that the good life can flourish around education, law, religion, etc. You know, that has shifted. I guess, what are some of the other things that you think of as important shifts, that may be a part of a set of wicked or difficult problems that need to be addressed, that would require not technical but adaptive leadership? What are some of the other things that you would kind of earmark or highlight?

Tod Bolsinger 14:13

Yeah, so when the pandemic hit, I was at a time in my life for about five years, I traveled 100,000 miles a year, traveling around the country, speaking to groups and training people on adaptive leadership. Then all of a sudden on March 13 2020, it all shut down, right, just like everybody else. So now we were all online. I didn't know what I was going to do. All my stuff canceled. I ended up doing 170 webinars, where people just kept asking me, "Keep training us. Just use this thing called Zoom. We all know how to use." Right? And what I discovered was when I asked people the question, so what are you discovering about your church? What are the challenges that are being revealed during the pandemic? If you think of COVID not as causing problems but revealing it like a biblical book of Revelation, the apocalyptic, what are you finding? And they would say some really big things like, formation. We are not as Christian as we thought we were. In the past, crises lead people back to church, because Christians demonstrated the difference of their values in times of crisis, and the church grew. The church didn't grow. It accelerated decline during COVID. Community. People would say stuff like, "Hey, we've taken baptismal vows to raise our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And those vows got just decimated by asking people in some places to wear masks." Wear a piece of fabric to protect grandma, so we can all get together, or we're all disagreeing about whether we're going to meet in person or not. That was enough to make people shatter. Like, people started following their news... People were divided over which newscast they listened to. So we started realizing big issues, discipleship, community, leadership development, there's not nearly as many leaders as we thought there was. There used to be a day where if you asked people to step up into leadership, people would just volunteer because that's what they thought they should do. Today, we have a crisis of volunteers and leaders, because people feel so pulled, that they don't believe that they need to do anything. And so volunteers didn't come back. I mean, there's several of these things that we are facing over and over and over again. Generational divide that has become even bigger in the life of the church than it is in the culture, that we're accelerating and losing younger people out of the church at a faster rate than their other generations, because they find it to be irrelevant to their lives. Not because it's too harsh, too Christian. It's because it's irrelevant. So your giant disruption.

Chris McAlilly 16:57

Yeah, so I hear cultural fragmentation that's maybe driven by a kind of larger forces of media. The media environment has shifted. There's a political fragmentation or polarization that is impacting from kind of the outside and maybe the internal integrity of these communities are also maybe not as robust as or resilient as we might have thought, in the areas of formation, community, and leadership development. Am I tracking with you?

Tod Bolsinger 17:27

Oh, yeah, absolutely. You realize these are big questions. And what's important to recognize here specifically, is when we talk to leaders about this, they recognize, oh, these things were happening ahead of time. They were already happening. What became clear is there really writ large and a crisis. It's become... A crisis gives you the opportunity, if you want to, to address these larger issues. But it means you have to be willing to do long term work at a time when everybody wants a quick fix. We just want to get, I mean, how many times you sit in a church of people say something like, "When can we just get back to normal?" And I would say to people, "Which normal? The one that was losing a generation of Christians faster than we could keep them?" Which normal, right? Which normal do you want to go back to? 1963? When Hollywood Presbyterian was the biggest church in America, it was great for people who look like me, middle aged white guy. 1963 was also the height of the Civil Rights Movement. And it wasn't great for everyone. So where do we want to go back to? That nostalgia is built on anxiety that keeps people from actually the learning and growing that they need to go through.

Eddie Rester 18:36

So let's talk a little bit about that learning and growing. What's at the heart of adaptive leadership? How do you define that? And what are some of the pieces for us in beginning to move in? Because here's the thing, in 1997, I could use technical competence to solve a church problem.

Tod Bolsinger 19:00 Yep.

Eddie Rester 19:00

I had all the tools. I could do it. None of those tools, none of those levers work anymore. So as you as you talk about this transformational type leadership, where does it start? What does it begin to look like?

Tod Bolsinger 19:16
Well, so it starts with acknowledging it. So it's acknowledging that the world in front of us is nothing like the world behind us. That, you know, the things in 1997 that you and I would have nothing like the world behind us. That, you know, the things in 1997 that you and I would have used are, we were told that if you preach faithfully, you do good programs that are responsive to people's needs, and you demonstrate a lot of pastoral care, your church will be fine. And they really were. They grew. Those are the church that grew. Best programs, best preaching, good pastoral care. The problem today is you have people who literally aren't interested in those three things. So now how do you reach them? Well, what most of us do is we preach a sermon series. Or we start a program like invite your friends to this thing, or we say hey, we want to really be out there caring for people in the community. I mean, I can't even get to the hospital fast enough before most of my church members are discharged from the hospital like, right. So now what do we do? Well, the answer then is, you know you're in an adaptive moment when you need a different kind of leadership, when someone says, "Now, what do you do?" And your only honest answer is, "I don't know." What it means in that moment is you literally have to have enough trust with your people that you can say to them, "We don't have a solution. And we are going to learn as we go together." And so it's that learning that starts the process. It's leading as learning, which is hard when people assume that if you're in charge, you're the authority with the expertise. It's a different kinds of leadership.

Chris McAlilly 20:50

Yeah, I do think that, yeah, I definitely know what that feels like to be in a moment where you don't know what to do. And to have to say that. I mean, I think one of the places where, at the time, during the pandemic, Eddie and I were leading in the same context, and one of the realities was, nobody was coming back to Sunday School, you know. Sunday School was a thing for a long time, and nobody was coming back to it. And so we more or less had to have a conversation and just say that. Like, nobody's coming back to Sunday School. We have no idea what to do. You know. I do think... I don't know that I completely agree with the statement, "the world in front of us is nothing like the world behind us." I think, you know, I think that, yes, the world is different in a lot of ways. But, you know, I mean, one of the teaching... I don't know. I guess I'm curious about that statement. Because I do think that preaching, teaching...You know, I saw a MasterClass teaching online with Coach K, or like, George W. Bush. That's a different vehicle for teaching, but it's still the same basic thing. People still are looking for sources of wisdom. They are still looking for experts, voices of authority. You know, I do wonder, you know, sometimes I see people that say the world is different than it was before now. And so then the question is kind of what do we do next? And so I think, you know, one thing that I see people like the three of us sometimes say is, "Now we need to go start a coffee shop." Or "Now we need to go start the equivalent of CrossFit for Christians." I don't know, I kind of get weary of those solutions. I feel like they're cheap, I don't know, amateurish reproductions of cultural forms, rather than digging. And then on the other end, you have people that say, No, we've got a tried and true, go back to the source. Go back to the root." I guess, how do you think about that, Tod? And where do you kind of land in that? Both of those are kind of caricatures, but I wonder kind of how you navigate that space?

Tod Bolsinger 23:09

Yeah. Well, let me separate those into two different things. So that I think in one sense, you're saying two different things. And I'll tell you the nuance of how I say it, because I would basically say to what you said is yes, and. The yes, and is this: I do believe that the wisdom of the past is still valuable. It just functions in a different way. So what I tell people is adaptive leadership is called adaptive because it requires transformation. What got you here won't get you there. So I use the example of Lewis and Clark in the book. It's why it's called "Canoeing the Mountains." They were trying to find a water route, a water route that everybody knew was there. They took off with canoes. They run into the Rocky Mountains. What you cannot do is keep paddling. Paddling doesn't do you any good when you run out of water. And what happened at that moment is they realized that the military structure that they used to get them this far was not going to work. They had to listen to different people, like a teenage Native American nursing mother, Sacagawea. We learned her name as Sack-a-ja-wee-a in our 11th Grade History classes. They wrote down her name as they heard it from her and they called it Sacagawea. They had to listen to her. It upset their authority, their practices, what they were doing. They still needed to keep going forward, and they still needed to take their learning from the past forward. So here's the difference for me: You cannot bring transformation without trust, good, solid wisdom. People of character, successful leaders--they are people we trust. But trust is not transformation. So technical solutions, wisdom, insight, success, builds trust. Trustworthy leaders then have to be able to acknowledge the world has changed, and I'm gonna have to invest that trust in transformation. In the past, it was just enough to be trustworthy. Get Coach K, get a basketball, get his game plan. But even Coach K had to change, when the three point line, the one-and-done, all the ways that college basketball has changed, he had to change.
The decision that you're always making is trying to figure out how trust leads to transformation. So that's the first part, which does lead to the second part, I'll say quickly, and then I'll stop. The way you make that transition from trust to transformation is getting really, really clear on your values, even more than your vision. When you can't see ahead of you, and it's changing so that you're disrupted, we lose vision. So it used to be leaders cast a vision, and you run to the vision. Today, it's leaders have to protect the values, what should never change. So a Coach K would say, I'm putting this in his head, "Hey, we have to play basketball differently than I did when I won my first national championship. But what certain values are going to be the same-- teamwork, you know, integrity, those things." Graduating, that changed. It used to be the Duke students were famous because they all graduated until Grant Hill. Now...

Eddie Rester 26:30
They wouldn't hang banners until everybody on the team graduated. They wouldn't hang the banner.

Tod Bolsinger 26:36 Right.

Chris McAlilly 26:36
Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, I think the MasterClass that Coach K is doing, you know what it's called? Literally, it's called Values Driven Leadership.

Tod Bolsinger 26:46
Whoa! I didn't even know that.

Chris McAlilly 26:49 [LAUGHTER]

Tod Bolsinger 26:49

What I often say is, more than--I'm less interested in whether it's CrossFit or beer church or dinner church, or First Presbyterian or great Saint Whatever. What I'm interested in is, what are the enduring values, the core DNA, that are so important to your church, that you are going to protect them and make sure they're healthy? And you're going to make sure you adapt them in a healthy way, so they'll be able to go into the future.

Chris McAlilly 27:15

Yeah, that's the word. That makes good sense. I know Eddie's eager to jump in. I'll just say one last thing on this. It's just instead of focusing the energy on vision, where are we going, what I hear you saying is we have to get a little bit more clear about who we are, what are the values that, without which, we wouldn't be who we are?

Tod Bolsinger 27:37 Exactly, yeah.

Eddie Rester 27:38

And you say this, and as you said that, Chris, it made me think of something that a speaker years ago said, and it's parallel to what you say, Tod, the speaker said that "We used to have maps. Now we have a compass."

Tod Bolsinger 27:51 Yeah.

Eddie Rester 27:51

And so we're orienteering, now. We're holding closely this thing that gives us direction, that's what our value. So I want to dig into the values piece, because you know, one of the things that you helped me see was that most churches have these. We have a mission statement. And we have values, but the values we put on the wall are often our aspirational values. They're not really our values. So say a little bit more about that, because you really helped open my eyes to think, oh, well, that's important, what we put on the wall, but there's something else when you talk about values. It's a little different.

Tod Bolsinger 28:27

Yeah, so aspirational values are different than your actual values. Your actual values are the things that are actually shaping what you do. And so your aspirational values are what you say you should do. And very often when I work with churches, and we always say we start with values, they go, "We've got a great set of values that are amazing," right? A whole group of us got together, we did some in depth Bible study, we prayed, we fasted, we spent a weekend at a retreat, we came up with five values. They all spell out the word "grace." We're generous. We're reconciling. We're accountable. Like it's great. And we created T shirts, and we've got a thing on the bulletin board. And you can't go around our church without seeing our values. And I said, the problem with all of that is you said the word "should." Those are aspirations. Those are really important. They serve a different purpose. What I want you to start with is who you are. Because you're right, your identity, who you are, how you... Think about this is adaptive leadership is about the way a living organism adapts to a changing environment. So in this changing environment, how do you thrive? And those values, your core ideology, that sense of who you are, how that thrives in a new world is what takes it forward. So the hardest thing for most leaders is to actually do the hard work of identifying what's true about us, then which of our core DNA are we going to discard because it's no longer helpful, or it could even be harmful. What are we going to preserve and what are we going to adapt? And that's the work that leaders are always doing. That's why the central spiritual practice of a leader in an uncharted territory is discernment. You're always doing works of discernment. And that's really different than saying, "Oh, I got a dream for having a church in an axe throwing place." It's more like, "Okay, what does our community need? And how do we use our values to embody those in some place that might end up with axes or not? I don't know.

Eddie Rester 30:30 Now.

Chris McAlilly 30:31 Let me just say...

Eddie Rester 30:32
A lot of Christians with an axe, it's going to end up with bloodshed.

Chris McAlilly 30:35

No, I'm okay with Christians with axes, but, like, axe church, come on. I'm not going to that church. I mean, Eddie, if you're preaching at that church, I'll come because you're preaching, but I'm not going to the axe church. I'll go throw axes, and then I'll go to church, but like, that's so dumb. If there's somebody out there that has an axe church or that goes to an axe church, I apologize, but it's dumb.

Eddie Rester 31:01

So how do we get to those actual values? I think that's the thing that most of us, if it's not go to a workshop, read some scripture, do a Bible study, put that together. I mean, that's what we've--again, that's technical competence--that's what we've been trained to do. Do your values, then do a vision, do a 10 year strategy session, and you know, somewhere in your book you talk about Max Dupree, somebody said, "culture eats strategy for breakfast every day." And so how do we get into what thevalues of our culture are? Yeah. So the way you get to your values is you, I always say this all the time, that you get to your values by letting people tell stories. Tell me the stories of your heroes in your church. Tell me the stories. What's the story you tell over and over again, about the moment we are most proud of us? What's the story that you want every new members class to hear about us? What's the story that makes you choke up? Ask the person who said, "Look, this church has been through a lot. We've been through some pastors and some of our pastors were terrible. But the reason why this is my home church is this." Right? That thing is where your actual values are. And those values, to become living, have to be able to adapt.

Tod Bolsinger 31:35

So the example I often use is my grandfather was an Italian immigrant. And my grandfather, one of his values was that he believed that family comes together around food, and he had an Italian restaurant. So the food was great. And when I was growing up, going to my grandmother's house, man, you could smell the ravioli from the car when you pulled in, right? My grandfather died when he was 60, before I was born, and I never knew him. Those values are so permeated that even my children, his great-grandchildren, will talk about having family suppers with their friends, which is the way they're saying we're building community around food. Now, the thing I want you to know is because I'm 58, and that my kids aren't in any hurry to give me grandkids, I know I can't eat the same family suppers that my grandfather ate. What he called Tuesday, we call Christmas. I get that meal once a year, because that heavy bolognese sauce thing that he did is not healthy. I don't want to die of heart disease. So we have family suppers, and I love being Italian. But our family suppers have more salmon than he ever had. The value of family suppers is still there. The adaptation is the meal, even the meal we love, because we have a higher value, a higher goal, which is I want to see grandkids.

Eddie Rester 33:36 Right.

Chris McAlilly 33:38

Yeah, that's a great example. I wonder if you could... Who are people that you have seen in leadership that do this well?I'm asking for specific names of specific leaders that you admire that have led transformationally that you would lift up either in you know, the for-profit, the nonprofit sector, the church world. And then the other question I would have is just are there institutions that you admire, whether within the church or outside of the church, for-profit or nonprofit that you would lift up as good examples of what you're talking about?

Tod Bolsinger 34:13

Well, so this is what's interesting about adaptive leadership is they're usually not platform leaders. Right? So it's hard to know their names. So any, like, I can give you some very specific examples of leaders doing amazing things, but you wouldn't know any of their names. The closest one that I would name, I think, is one of the most remarkable leaders I've met is Linda Livingstone, who is the president of Baylor. Watching her walk into a crisis, not only turned that church around, that school around and have it thrive, but have it thrive because they doubled down on their values, their Christian values, and they doubled down on their mission, which was that they wanted this school to become a premier Christian institution, and it's been amazing to watch it. She's, I've gotten to know her a little bit. I've done a little bit of work at Baylor. And I think she's one of the most remarkable leaders I've ever seen. And so there's others like that, but there are very few that I could name that you would know. I mean, so I can tell you some examples. But it's hard for me to give you names.

Chris McAlilly 35:16

No, I mean, I think the Christian university space is really interesting, because it's a place where you, you know, I mean... So the example that we lift up a fair amount is Greg Jones, who's now at Belmont University. It's very similar example, in that you've got a historically Christian institution, that for whom those values aren't just like a thing that you... It's not just heritage, for them. It's like, it's a part of the DNA of the place. But they also have aspirations to be, you know, research one university, that's actually a player in the game of serious university world. And that puts, those are two interesting sets of values that they don't clash. But it just, it's interesting to see a leader, who's really good, navigate that space well, without compromising on both the intellectual rigor or excellence, or the Christian value, the value of being a Christian institution. That's fascinating.

Tod Bolsinger 36:24

I can give you like two examples from two of my clients today that I worked with today. My first client of the day was a pastor in Texas, who's in a community that the community has become more and more multi-ethnic. He said, our value is that we will be missional. We said all the time that we're going to love our neighbor. We're going to reach our neighborhood. Our focus is on our neighborhood. Our neighborhood's become multi-ethnic. We're going to become a multi- ethnic church, a multi-ethnic movement of missional disciples. That's their statement. They are about 2,000 members. And it's the most diverse staff I've seen of any church in the country. The Seventh Day Adventists tend to be even more diverse, but it's one of the most diverse, and it's a Bible Church. It's a conservative place. Here's what's interesting. It's going great in almost every measure that you can have, except he preaches to 500 empty seats every week. Because they used to be 5,000 members. And he has people who say to him, "Ya know, this whole multi-ethnic thing is keeping us from being a mega church." Now, most of us would probably take a church of 2,000 members that are multi-ethnic, but in that place, it's disappointing. And he has to hold them through leadership. Our mission is that we are going to be love our neighbors. Our neighbors are multi-ethnic. We're going to be a more multi ethnic church. That's our value. We're going to live into that value. And it's costing us because we have people who remember that the mega church of the past, when it was really homogeneous, grew. So he has to live with a loss of looking at 500 empty seats, and living into his vision of being multi-ethnic. And today, he and his associate pastor, he's a white guy, she's an African American woman, we spent the entire time talking about how to keep moving that work along. That's just one example. I could give you more.

Eddie Rester 38:19

I think one of the things that I'm learning, you brushed upon it a little while ago, is that the idea of win-win, which is woven deep into my soul, is that adaptive leadership, you have to let that go because a lot of times change does represent loss. And I think you said it this way, people don't resist change, they resist loss. Help me under... How do we begin to tell people we're not all going to win?

Tod Bolsinger 38:57

Yeah, yeah. So, "People don't resist change. They resist loss." That comes from Ronald Heifetz. That's one of his statements. What I want people to get is, in a technical solution world, you can get to win-wins. So the reason why win-win is so embedded in all of our souls is probably the first leadership book we all read was "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." And the reason why is because it was given to young leaders who were pretty good at speaking or teaching or doing something, but you needed to figure out how to lead your way out of a paper bag. So you'll start by developing some different habits, and one of them is think win-win. Win-win works in a technical solution. If all we got to do is figure out how to manage the resources, we'll think win-win. In an adaptive environment, you have to, you can't get forward with a win-win because you now have competing values. So if you have to decide, is it a water route, so we're going to be canoeing? So we're taking canoes, and everybody who came on this trip came on a water route, and now we discovered the mountains. We have to decide, are we going back, or are we going forward? Is it going back to where there's rivers? Or is it going forward and dropping canoes? There's no win-win here. We're gonna have to decide. It's going to be an A B decision. Now sometimes that A B decision is 1A, like, we're going to go forward, and we're going to carry some canoes, hopefully we'll find a river on the other side. But for a while the canoes are going to be heavy on our back. Some it might be 1-2: we're going to burn these canoes, but we're going to build some other in the future. It might be 0-1. That's the discernment. I don't know. But what it is, is whatever it is, if you're not 1,nyou experienced loss. If you're 1A, you're the backup player, you're the second responsibility. I mean, I've been in an organization where I was the primary, my work was the primary work of the leader, that became the secondary work. We have a different goal that's more important. And literally trying to name that, that this is no longer the primary work, it's that this other one is more important, was necessary. And now we have to figure out what to do. If I came on this thing, because I was willing to do this job because it was the number one priority of the leader, that's really different than if I came on this because I want to do this, even if I'm not the first priority. So it's navigating that loss. And the only way that you can help people navigate that loss is by naming it, attuning with them, and accompanying them through their process of letting go. It's thinking about empathy and attunement, and what we would call sometimes pastoral care as a leadership skill, and not just a pastoral care skill.

Eddie Rester 41:51 Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 41:53 That sounds great.

Eddie Rester 41:56
Yeah, you know what I'm thinking, I'm just sitting here thinking about how, again, in the church moment that we're in often when somebody is 1A or 2, there's your conflict.

Tod Bolsinger 42:10 Boom.

Eddie Rester 42:12

And that becomes, again, and you talk a lot about trust and relationships, trust and relationships. There's a section I think of the book where you talk about, you have to be technically good.

Tod Bolsinger 42:26 Yeah.

Eddie Rester 42:27
Because technically good builds trust.

Tod Bolsinger 42:31 Brings trust, right.

Eddie Rester 42:32

Brings trust. And so when there's trust, there's a different way that in my experience, that conflict happens. Usually it's direct. It's not as many. There are always parking lot conversations. Again, that's why we'd never have a church in an axe throwing place because somebody's getting an axe between the shoulder blades. But you know, I think I don't want to lose that technical piece, and you do a good job of, I think, helping us think about you got to have the technical piece. You got to have the relational piece. And then you got to have this adaptively. They all play together. It's not one or the other.

Chris McAlilly 43:09

I think that's... I mean, one of the things is Heifetz. Heifetz is not denigrating. I mean, I guess my reading of Heifetz is he's not denigrating technical work. And I think, as you're saying, you know, you have to have, like, if you're going into heart surgery, you need a good technician to do that. If you have you get on an airplane, you want somebody that's really, really good. But, I mean, there are great examples of pilots who get into a situation and are having to navigate. I was listening to a podcast at some point about these guys that got into a situation where they lost an engine. And so all of a sudden, you know, now they're trying to figure out how to fly the plane, the two guys are in front, and there happened to be this flight instructor that was sitting out there, back in the cockpit, or not in the cockpit, but in the... What do you call it, the fuselage? You know, what do you call it, where people sit? Where people sit. And he came up and help them kind of navigate, you know, what became a really dangerous adaptive problem. And so, yeah, I mean, I think the better you are, as a technician, the more capable you are of creating, you know, of presenting yourself and the institution as a competent institution that builds trust, that allows you some of that flexibility to actually engage the kinds of questions you're gonna have to engage if you're going to do adaptive leadership.

Tod Bolsinger 44:40

Yeah, and that's 100% true. And what makes it hard is that most of us thought as long as I'm good at landing the plane, I'll be able to fly this thing no matter what. Like the struggle for most of us is most of the leaders I work with are people who have been really competent. Now it's not working. Now, what do I do with that?

Eddie Rester 45:06

And church members get frustrated because they want a leader who can do the things that the leader did and were successful. And they get frustrated, because, well, we're putting out the same effort, and we're not getting the same return. So, if you would say, here's the one skill, the one perspective that I would say, would be the one that can help you the most on this journey of adaptive leadership, transformational leadership. Here's what I would tell you. This is where you would start. This is where you should start.

Tod Bolsinger 45:43

Yeah, it's not one thing. It's the starting thing, right? Because it's not that simple. It's complex. And so the answer to this, it would be, you know that you need a new type of leadership, when you can embrace what you don't know. It is to learn to lead the learning. And that's, I mean, moving from overcoming the expert expectation, to lead the learning. And for us Christians, what's great about this, is this is a moment for us to recover our birthright. To be a Christian is to be a disciple and disciple is just the word learner. Today, I was just asked on another podcast today, you know, what are the two things you would say to people? And my answer was, you need to keep building trust. Trust is needed for transformation. You build trust through competent, handle the scriptures, well care for people love them, take care of them, building trust. Know that trust is not transformation. Use all the trust you can. Build the relationships, build the trust, and then lead the learning. And that's where the transformation comes. It's trust to transformation. It's trust and learning.

Chris McAlilly 46:56

All right, that's a good place to set it down, I think. In another, at some point, I would love to have a follow up conversation with you about if you're going to build a seminary from scratch, what would that look like? You know, I mean, a lot of our seminaries are institutions that are built with certain assumptions that really served a previous, you know, moment in time. What I'm thinking about is, you know, maybe it's a time to build new structures of leadership development. I know you've thought a lot about that. If you were starting a seminary from scratch, what would that look like? We can't talk about it now. But maybe we could talk about it. I just want to... That's something that I'm gonna leave the conversation thinking a lot about.

Tod Bolsinger 47:39

Yeah, yeah. I'll just, so I guess I would just leave it with this piece, which is, you start by recognizing that the starting point is what we're trying to accomplish, the pain point we're trying to serve, the challenge that we're taking on. You form people for mission. So what's our mission?

Eddie Rester 47:59

Tod, thanks for your time today. The book is "Canoeing the Mountains." I have like 70 more questions to ask you. But I think I'm gonna see you again in February. So yeah, so thank you. Thanks for your time today. Enjoy Southern California and we'll talk again soon.

Tod Bolsinger 48:20
Thanks very much. My pleasure.

Eddie Rester 48:21
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Chris McAlilly 48:30

If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]