Defining Reality

I grew up listening to leadership guru John Maxwell.  By the time I had finished high school I would estimate that I had listened to well over 100 hours of his leadership teaching - it's a long story, maybe I'll post about it sometime.  One of John's foundational ideas is that "it is the leaders job to define reality."

I think that's pretty spot on. (I'm sure John will be relived to hear that.)  Most leaders get so focused on creating the new reality that they fail to define the current one.  It's an important step and one that, if I'm being honest, I would rather skip.  Here's why:

It's subjective: There is no chapter and verse in scripture that will perfectly define your church's current reality for you.  There can be some empirical data - baptisms, attendance, and people serving are three of my favourites. But how to interpret why those numbers are why they are where they are and how that all fits together is an art not a science.

And yet you need clarity - definition - in order to make a plan to move forward.  That means you are going to have to convince people that your subjective view is accurate and their subjective view is less accurate. That's gonna feel like arrogance. (If it actually is arrogance for you then knock it off!) But what it really is is confidence.  If you aren't sure they certainly never will be.  So your task is to try to fully convince people of a clearly defined but ultimately subjective point of view.  That would be hard enough on its own, but it's even harder because they already have a point of view.

It's confrontational:  The reason you need to define reality is because reality is not immediately obvious to everyone, or more accurately, what you are putting forth as the actual reality is not immediately obvious to them.  However, that doesn't mean they don't have a perception of reality it just means it's different from yours.  They have a firmly held view of how things are and why and they have likely been living out of it for sometime.  You are going to try and mess with that. That's where the confrontation arises.

If you are going to help them see what you see you have to dismantle the blocks of data that formed their picture of the current reality, chuck the blocks that were faulty, add the blocks that were missing, and reassemble them into the more accurate picture. You can do it as gently as possible but at the end of the day it is a confrontation between your perception and theirs, and it all has to happen before you can really get started.

It's remedial:  Leaders want to go to new places together with their teams but defining reality for people is mostly just helping them to understand where they already are.  Leaders want to get the right people on the bus and get then get the right people in the right seats on the bus.  Defining reality feels more like you are giving a tour of a bus station.  It feels remedial.

But every bus trip starts with a moment when all the people who are in one location realize we can't stay here and we have to get to there. Creating that moment of realization of where we are and why we can't stay - that's defining reality.  It's a thing you do before you start but you have to do it if you ever hope to get anywhere.

So yeah - defining reality is hard and subjective and remedial and like it or not (for me it's mostly not) if you are the leader it's your job.

-What else have you found makes it hard?
-What approaches have you found helpful in defining reality?
-And for the bonus who are the two leadership gurus (other than Maxwell) I directly referenced in this post?