O to be a strategist, o to be a leader.
Strategy and leadership rank highly as status goods. Old fashioned words and phrases like management and business administration are so last year. The M.B.A. (I have one – with distinction too -and I have taught on one) has been repurposed. Strategy and leadership are what they have become all about. The good (and they were good) courses that focused on ‘boring’ subjects such as operations, governance, law, and management have been marginalised. Leadership, strategy, and to an extent finance is where it is at. The message is clear: if you want to be a saviour, a corporate messiah, then you need, above all else, to be a leader and strategist. As a brief aside let me pose a question: do you think most corporate and institutional crisis are the result of poor management or poor leadership?
My hunch is that we have become so focussed on ‘leadership’ that we have lost the harder art of management.
Let’s pause and reflect (because that is what we do in the church!) for a second or two and ask ourselves a simple question: how many companies, or charities, or causes, can we name that have been utterly transformed as the result of a top down strategy, delivered without glitch or modification by a cadre of culturally aligned operatives, where the strategy is the fruit of a leader’s intellect and influence? I will start…….
And yet the myth pervades that strategy and leadership, or strategic leadership, is the very thing that is needed to save not only institutions, but the world itself! The myth just keeps on growing (as all good myths do) and is well and truly present in the church, or at least The Church of England.
The trouble with the myth is that is it is credible. It is credible for two reasons; the first is that is desirable. It plays, as all good myths do, with our hearts and minds. The myth invites us to believe certain things about ourselves and others. It invites us to believe that there are saviours (strategic leaders) and the saved (those who place their faith in the strategic leader).
The myth therefore creates a culture of dependency. In some ways it infantilizes both the narrator and the listener. When strategy and leadership, strategic leadership, is elevated to the highest of all status goods the very character of the organisation becomes irreparably changed (and in my view for the worse). The second reason that the myth pervades is that it speaks loudly and clearly to our anxieties; our anxiety that unless we do something everything is going to collapse around us.
Anxiety, collective neurosis, is the fertile fallacy, the very, ground in which the myth of the strategic leader is best sown. Like all good and sustaining myths its roots run very deep and are hard to remove.
Another question: is it fair to our senior leaders to impose on them the mantle of strategy? Why, for instance, would anyone expect a bishop or an archdeacon to be a strategist, or strategic leader? I know we have – through the myth – been conditioned to expect strategic brilliance from our leaders, but is it fair? Fair to them, and fair to us? Do we want our bishops and other senior leaders to be the Jack Welch’s of the ‘church sector’, with all that this would entail? (And post Jack Welch GE got into all sorts of strategic bother. A lesson to all ‘strategic leaders’ is this: choose the timing of your exit well).
Tragically, and it really is a tragedy, turning up for an interview (almost any interview these days), and failing to persuade the panel that what you have to offer is ‘strategic leadership’ is very probably the quickest way back to the car park or railway station and yet another feedback session. The myth can very quickly descend into both farce and tragedy.
Now I have a sneaky perspective to offer: I don’t think many bishops and archdeacons do, in fact, regard themselves as strategists. They are wise enough to know that there really aren’t that many strategic leaders out there and humble enough to know that they probably don’t count amongst them. And yet, and yet, they also know they need to play the game; to pretend in other words, to fake it, so they can make it. So, they come up with ‘strategies,’ strategies that aren’t in reality strategic in any meaningful sense of the term, but are nonetheless moderately persuasive; persuasive enough to get the job and then the money.
And, so, the myth is reinforced and perpetuates. O, and it is financed too! Strategy, leadership, and finance, become beautifully aligned, in support of the myth! I am sure that some ‘senior clergy’ have bought the myth lock, stock, and barrel, after all the myth has a truly psycho-seductive quality to it, but I hope and believe that they are in the minority. The tragedy is that when ‘their’ strategies fail it will always be someone else’s fault.
Another question: how many of our central and diocesan strategies do we expect to materialise (or in the strategic jargon to become ‘realised strategy’?) Let’s be honest on this one, all of us. My answer would be simply this: not many!
Now to be clear, I believe in strategy (after all I am a MBA!), but I don’t believe in top down, generic, strategies. I also don’t believe in the toxic myth of the ‘strategic leader,’ aka the institutional messiah. There are too many case studies out which testify (narrative strategy) to the ability of the ‘strategic leader to reap havoc and accelerate decline even and especially after an initial period of ‘apparent’ growth. I am sure you can name many of them! There are also strategic tools that, when badly used, facilitate the myth.
One such tool is the BCG – Boston Consulting Group – Matrix which asks strategic leaders to categorise products, or even subsidiary companies, as either Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks, of Dogs. Now I am not suggesting that somewhere in Church House Westminster, or in diocesan offices, a BCG Matrix actually exists (I am not that cynical), but I am gently suggesting that a BCG mindset has penetrated much of our ecclesial and missional thinking. I am suggesting that bishops and ‘their’ priests are endlessly encouraged, through the myth, to look for myriad new and shiny star projects, projects that will just keep growing (until they don’t) whilst regarding the inherited, essentially parish, church as the proverbial cash cow.
The thing about the BCG Matrix is this: the categorisation needs to be bang on the money, the result of hours and hours of detailed and painstaking analysis. It should never be used as a quick rough and ready tool completed on the basis of intuition. It has absolutely no place on a flip chart and should never be used in break out groups. If it is not used well and with ‘strategic skill’ the results will be disastrous: the stars end up not being stars at all, but dogs or question marks, and the cash cows end up as being fit for nothing but the slaughter house. A BCG mindset can lead to very costly mistakes. Its visual simplicity invites sloppy use. It should never be used to support a myth. User beware.
Those ‘stars’ that do rise end up as lone stars, disconnected from any meaningful and wider system, or forced to create their own eco system. The ‘stars’ that fail to rise, that for some reason don’t conform to the model, end up being forgotten about, not counted, because they fail to give credence to the myth. Success is therefore seen ‘through a glass darkly.’ Not counting the failures makes it very easy to turn a question mark into a star.
I think that this is a very real risk for the Church of England. I can see a situation where we end up with a portfolio of apparently successful projects, but not a lot else. And of course if this happens, the blame game starts up with a vengeance (‘if only you had been more like the stars…’), and what is lost can never be replaced. When the cash cow has been milked, but not fed, the slaughter house really is the only place for it to go.
I believe in strategies that emerge over time (Mintzberg) and are the fruit of local initiatives and experimentation (J.B. Quinn); ‘logical incrementalism’ in the jargon. I believe that the institution can play an important part in encouraging and funding local initiatives, backing parish churches, because strategy is normatively best developed from the ground upwards. Harsh as it sounds I cannot think of a single reason for believing in the bishop or archdeacon as a strategic leader. I can think of them as a strategic enabler or encourager but that’s a very different thing.
In simple terms I believe in the parish, not as the subsidiary company there to deliver on a top down strategy, but as the place where (mission) strategy is best developed, and where experimentation and incrementalism, are owned. I believe in the parish first, and the diocese (and national church) second. The diocese and the national church exist to animate and serve. These two, service and animation, should be the marks of national and diocesan leadership, that is if the national church and the dioceses wish to be (arch) diaconal in their approach. Thankfully some dioceses, my own for instance, have in places structures and budgets which encourage experiential and incremental strategies; the sort of strategies that can help revitalise the parish.
Finally, I also believe in the aspiration to be a ‘humbler’ church:
A church which refuses to acknowledge the myth of the strategic leader or institutional messiah as a mark of, and requirement for, office.
A church which steadfastly refuses to place the mantle of failure around the necks of its bishops, by constantly asking them to come up with some shiny new star product, approach, or game changing strategy, in order to be SDF funded.
A church where you no longer have to fake it to make it.
A church which places diaconal rather than ‘strategic’ leadership at the heart of things.
A church that believes that strategy and mission is best worked out at the parochial level and that the job of the ‘centre’ is to remain resolutely at the periphery animating and serving; in a very real and paradoxical sense leading by not leading and strategizing by not strategizing.
Theore0 
Thank you. The problem with many of the projects that have been developed since the commencement of R&R is that, whatever their merits, they will not come close to off-setting the progressive collapse of the Church on a far wider scale elsewhere. They are also, arguably, divisive, insofar as they tend to favour certain settings and milieus, at the expense of the rest. The favoured few are therefore perceived by the rest as being the ‘pets’ of the authorities, and resentment results. This resentment is amplified if the success of the pet projects results in the further weakening of the rest, as existing churchgoers (especially young churchgoers) are simply redistributed from existing, relatively weak, churches to the pet projects. That injury thereby engendered is aggravated by a perceived insult if the pet projects are funded, implicitly, by parish share subventions from the rest.
If all diocesan assets were consolidated in the centre (the Commissioners), with resulting economies of scale, the Commissioners could do the strategizing. The bishops could then concentrate on their core function, which is not to function as CEOs, but to act as preachers and pastors. An immense and often fruitless distraction would be removed from them.
Thank you Andrew for your insightful analysis. My (admittedly somewhat distant) view of the parishes I know is that most are as yet unaware of the latest Myriad scheme; and their clergy – still battling as we all are against a pandemic which is far from over – are not at present keen on enlightening them while everyone tries to assess the safety and feasibility of resuming former patterns of worship and ministry (as well as integrating the positive new ones). There is a broader understanding however that money – significant money – is going to be invested in new church plants; and archdeacons and others seem singularly bad about indicating ‘what’s in it for the parishes’; hence an awkward chasm in communication is opening up. I feel that the general uncertainty and trepidation for both clergy and laity must by now have reached anxiety-busting proportions. Coming out of lockdown is a complex and challenging process. To be asked to jump on the ‘all change’ bus by those with big ideas and ambitions feels like heavy-handed management bearing down inexorably. The tectonic plates grinding between the powerful and the powerless is exactly where the message of Jesus should cut through. But the ‘little people’ are being increasingly left behind. It could be a recipe for disaster.
I haven’t got an MBA, but from the Community Organising world I find the distinction Ernesto Cortes Jr makes helpful. He distinguishes Planning (with a capital P – the kind of Planning that community organising doesn’t like, which is done from above, championed by one single leader and ‘comprehensive’) from planning (with a little p, the kind of planning that community organising does like). planning is simply the middle stage between listening to the community and action. Stories are turned into bite-sized, ‘winnable’ issues (‘problems lead to conferences, issues lead to action’); when the gifts local people bring, and a power analysis are brought to bear, a plan for action comes together. Cortes uses the Greek word metis to mean ‘local knowledge … gained through incremental learning and constant feedback and evaluation,’ and claims that it is metis that makes the difference between Plans and plans. Bretherton uses the adjectives ‘prudential’ and ‘non-ideological.’ To which we want to add ‘local’ or even ‘parochial’.
I’m not a senior leader, but even for junior leaders like me the temptation to be the heroic, central, top-of-the-triangle or top-of-the-tower-of Babel leader is a familiar one. It is the original temptation of Genesis 3, the heart of the temptations in the wilderness of Jesus. But we are following Jesus, and that means we are not heroes but servants, not Planners but planners, not seeking power-over but power-with. Zinzendorf: ‘The Saviour rules, he gives life and breath, he heals us, he keeps us, he conquers sin & carries out decrees -yes, he does all this – but my sisters and brothers, he does all this after the pattern of the cross, and we must never present him as a despot with a way of power, but as a Lamb: patient, lamblike, gentle if things do not go his way’.