I’m studying for a Masters in Contemporary Christian Leadership and in our class last night we spoke about ‘change management’. It’s one of the biggest reasons I wanted to do the course as it seems like the whole world is in a massive period of rapid change. The church is too and I want to try my bets to understand what’s happening and why.
We so often thing that change management is about doing one thing that will only affect that thing, a bit like Newton’s Laws. Apply force to something and it will change direction and move in a straight line until another force acts on it.
But that’s not what happens at all. I was struck by the image offered by our tutor, Richard Tiplady. “Change management is like playing kerplunk. Every time you pull out a straw the whole game changes… and often not in the way you intended.”
I heard Jason Leitch, Scotland’s Chief Clinical Officer, say almost exactly the same thing recently as he described trying to lead through the pandemic. There are never just two choices… and every choice you make sets off a whole load of other unintended consequences so the next decision becomes ever more complex.
That means applying the same solution to an ill-defined problem in 1,000 different communities will have 1,000 different outcomes… and almost all of those outcomes won’t be the ones you intended.