“All life lives off-balance in a world that is open to change. And all of life is self-organizing.” (Leadership and the New Science, pg. 89, Margaret J Wheatley)
For 20 years I taught swimming. No child or adult ever forgets their mastering something every body can do: float in water on one’s back. “Lie back, relax, deep breathe, chest up, chin up, I’ve got you... hooray!
Now it’s true, some persons are more buoyant than others. Physiology: muscle density, bone structure, body fat and breadth capacity all play a part. Many feel “off-balance” filling their lungs with air and relaxing backward, face-up, into the water, until they trust themselves to trust air and water, to feel life self-organizing around their unique balance point. Then for a moment or two, open to change, they float!
Some new swimmers approach this basic life-saving skill with real fear and much trepidation. Water itself confounds them. Athletic and exceedingly competent on dry land, water offers mystery and danger. Once immersed, water can hold them and suffocate them. It can caress and pommel. It refreshes from the heat but can quickly tire muscles to exhaustion. In lake and ocean, other living things share the same space: a “sunfish,” plankton, jelly fish or turtle. Weeds grab hold. Stone and sand shift underfoot. All of this, of course, describes the natural order and no amount of study or accounting can quiet one’s distress. Only one action proves helpful: the decision to trust one who comfortably inhabits water’s space and to trust oneself to float.
Organizational and congregational transition-time can produce real fear and much trepidation. Leaders feel surrounded by much that confounds them. They wonder: how do we take our vision/mission into the marketplace? Does our vision/mission even make sense to the uninitiated? What do we do with expectations that no longer bring results? Who will care for me and the institution I love in a way that I value? If I can only understand, comprehend, analyze, design and stick to a plan, this transition-time will produce a good outcome, won’t it? And when the next settled pastor, ceo, or executive arrives, what then?
Hear some good news: dozens of books, workshops, conferences and consultants, educational organizations and industry specific administrative staff offer “how-to” resources and expertise. And if “you live life off-balance [because] you are open to change” then sign up, grab hold and get at it!
However, if you are like a new swimmer who fears “lying back (in the water), relaxing, taking a deep breathe with chest and chin up,” then seek first the experience of floating, for a moment or two, without fear. Trust holy Spirit: life will organize into it’s naturally vital best. Trust that “off-balance” feeling. Don’t devalue change. Don’t seek to manage and control. Don’t force your expertise on dry land into a water world. Live life with clarity of purpose attuned to the place you find yourself, true to itself, comfortably moving within needed bounds. Enter the water with someone who knows how to float. “I’ve got you... hooray!”
-Arlen G. Vernava
All blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.
“One of the things that I’m constantly obsessed with is trying to get just the feeling of the balance between the right hand and the left hand and make it feel good.”
(Aaron Diehl, stride pianist and the 2011 Cole Porter Fellow in Jazz) 
Stride Jazz Pianists keep a creative percussive beat with their left hand, while their right hand plays melody, a style that values rhythm more than playing every-just-as-written-note off a score. Stride Jazz Pianists, unlike their classical counterparts, are free to improvise within the bounds of constraint offered by the tune and the accepted rules of improvisation itself.
Sounds like transition work, doesn’t it? And if it does, what do you hear?
Balance takes practice, practice, practice. A Christian Century not too long ago featured “worship,” a perennial hot spot for congregations of faith. Are your conversations about protecting turf, holding onto power and maintaining historical legacy? Are they opportunities to assess both “old” and “new” against stated goals/objectives and values? Getting the “feeling of the balance between the right hand and the left hand” takes disciplined practice. It takes self-awareness, selflessness, patience, courage and grit. It takes practice. Often it takes a guide, tutor or teacher, one who already has the feeling and lives the benefit of practice.
The right practice brings balance. Describe your most recent strategy at changing or introducing an organization behavior you call [ fill in the blank]. Are you making progress, frustrated by resistance, or giving up? Why do you believe this is so? Every “cultural” shift, big or small, for the purpose of changing bad habits or embedding something completely new can succeed when leaders and stakeholders practice well. Right practice means one is “constantly obsessed.” Everyone with power and authority believe in this change. Key leaders practice with one another so that they will feel it in their bones. Contrarians and late adopters are encouraged and invited but Leadership convey a this-is-not-negotiable-this-will-bring-balance conviction to their practice.
Balance feels good (and offers grace.) I acknowledge that my optimistic, glass-half-full temperament expects that, with practice and the right practice, everyone in the organization feels the benefit of balance: unrealistic, I know. Late adopters really do watch and observe and comment (for a long time!) before they try. Contrarians simply refuse, some will leave (if the change, for instance, seems too much to bear), others will stay in place. That being said:
-balance feels good. You feel it before you “know it.” Everyone sways to a rhythm that speaks to the heart.
-balance makes space (or grace.) There are those who watch and wait. There are those who remain... contrarian. No need to fret; trust your practice, your right practice. “Balance...make(s) it feel good!” 
Transition’s balance: not stasis but creative, purposeful change. Have you noticed that balance takes constant movement (that also can look like perfect stillness), attention in the moment while attentive to “what’s ahead”? Seems like making music, doesn’t it? And if it does..
-Arlen G. Vernava
All blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.
“Sometimes a man [woman] stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his [her] children say blessings on him [her] as if he [she] were dead.
And another man [woman], who remains inside his [her] own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his [her] children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he [she] forgot.” (Rainer Maria Rilke,trans. Robert Bly 1981)
Twenty-two years later this poem still provokes me (in a good way). Transition work needsprovocation; do not fear provocation! The therapist provokes, so too the medical internist, the concert pianist, the art gallery curator, the movie director, poet and prophet. Jesus provoked. Provocation nourishes leaders and the organizations/congregations they serve. Are you, dear friend, provoking (in a good way) and are you working in a provocative-valuing environment? If you think not, does any of the following feel familiar?
Unprovoked, leaders “remain inside the dishes and in the glasses.”
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habits include timidity, caution, status-quo, risk aversive, plateaued
Unprovoked, institutions forget their founding story and their vision-directed purpose
Unprovoked, persons/ideas/material resources wander ill-equipped “far out into the world”
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best and brightest walk in the front door/out the back door, clients feel poorly cared for
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creativity and initiative languish pent up or quit, exhausted
Unprovoked, well loved organizations and her leaders slip into comfortable malaise...
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everyone values familiarity, safety, rest until malaise passes it’s “tipping point,” then...
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despair, chaos and every kind of nonsense demand their way
Vision-directed, an organization and her leaders vibrantly balance familiarity, safety and rest with curiosity, risk and creative doing. Rilke, like Jesus, understood that the question isn’t “will we (collectively) seek the ‘church somewhere in the East’” but “when and how will leaders lead?” And religion-based or not, of course, every vibrant organization symbolically orients itself to the “church in the East.” Metaphors abound: beginnings, wakefulness (after sleep), life (after death), brightness, light, creation and creativity.
Leaders and their organizations are drawn to this place. Here they flourish, undergirded, guided and defined by who and what they cherish. Provocation begins and sustains vision-directed leaders and organizations. Persons and ideas sharpen one another, clarify and push, test and affirm.
In the spirit of provocation, here are a few questions to consider:
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Who are the provocateurs in your organization/congregation? Are they valued or marginalized? Who nurtures an institutional spirit of provocation?
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Place “familiarity, safety and rest” alongside “curiosity, risk and creative doing.” Do they provoke one another in healthful, vibrant collaboration? Where do you notice and feel vibrant, passionate spirit?
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Can you and others easily, happily, offer blessings and thanksgiving for the place you work, the people who lead and serve with you and the product/service you offer to your world?
Feeling provoked (in a good way)? Hope so!
-Arlen G. Vernava
All blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.
I drive a car with 225,000 miles under the hood and Mazda’s bones are feeling achy. Here’s my conundrum. Mazda: faithful, dependable, (hasn’t missed a day since we met in 1997 except for regular maintenance), economical, safe and in it’s younger days, energetically fun. Sadly, Mazda has less and less “get up and go,” blah curb appeal, noisy, and likes to drive in it’s own ruts (so to speak). New tires, windshield wipers and a tune up? Necessary, but they do not make for a 21st century Mazda. My biggest fear? One morning Mazda will start, then stop for the last time and I’ll have no sensible transportation plan. What to do? What to do?!
If you are a leader in a congregation or organization with 225,000 miles on her, you have exclaimed: What to do? What to do?! Memories, experiences, relationships. Success, defeat, ecstatic joy, knee buckling sorrow. You have been around the block with people and a “product” that matters to you. New copy machine, steam-cleaned carpets and a revamped training program? Necessary, but regular maintenance may not make for a vitally relevant “now.” And though “decline” often measures in decades, not years (for long established congregations and organizations), that day will arrive. What to do?! Consider...
An early 20th century leather goods company made one product: buggy whips. When automobiles arrived they (mostly) set aside buggy whips to make seat and steering wheel covers.
John Wyclif made the first English translation of the entire Bible between 1380 and 1397. He translated it from the Latin. William Tyndale made the first English translation (of the entire Bible) from Hebrew and Greek between 1526 and 1535. The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (from Hebrew and Greek), translated by Eugene Peterson in 2002 represents an early 21st century offering, and certainly not the last.
The take-a-way?
Don’t confuse how you offer your product with the good news you announce. A few folk, like the Amish, use buggy whips, the rest of us drive holding onto steering wheels. I keep the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and Peterson’s The Message both close by, but have The Jewish Annotated New Testament on order. Congregations and organizations, at their best, straddle the space between the way it’s been and the way it is becoming.
If all this seems simple and obvious, it is. All the same, I invite you take a survey of your congregation or organization. Who do you wish to reach, serve, nurture, teach and equip with your good news? What are your preferences and bias? Are your means congruent or in conflict with your aim? Keep attentive to cultural and technical seismic shifts, then choose your vehicle wisely!
-Arlen G. Vernava
All blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.
Just My Type, a wonderfully inventive jaunt through the history and current use of fonts, really understands the vision thing, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. Fonts are everywhere. Write a vision statement: font. Express a vision statement in such a way that passer-byes look twice, stop and say, "I want some of that": a font that works really well. A vision statement that goes viral? A font by only one name: the vision statement!
Vision statements, sadly, are often forgettable and uninspiring. They are no ones type and everyones type, like fortune cookie sayings they prompt a chuckle or a groan, and fit neatly into any organization or church community. Why is this so? Every congregational leader knows that the community of faith they attend has a uniqueness. Something about the spirit of the place, hard to define yet crystal clear, differentiaties it from every other faith community. Yes, everyone uses letters, so to speak, but no two places combine or create the same exact fonts. Indeed no one letter or two ampersands, Simon Garfield informs us, look exactly alike. Janet Maslin in The New York Times writes:
"A T-shirt that is depicted in...“Just My Type: A Book About Fonts” is adorned with nothing but the ornate ampersand of the font Caslon. This graphic, Mr. Garfield remarks, is capable of “occasionally eliciting a nod from another aficionado, like smug fans of a cool pop band before it becomes famous.”
The knowing nod has everything to do, in the first place, with a Caslon ampersand, and secondly, with fonts. Vision statements are meant to say the true and extraordinary story about one type of place: not in too many words but by expressing the sense of spirit. Caslon, not Verdana. Comic Sans, not Baskerville Old Face.
What's your type, friend? Claim or create your font and others will say: Wow, you are just my type!
-Arlen G. Vernava
All blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.
On the first day of Christmas my Intentional Interim minister gave to me a “calendar” of our Christian liturgical year:
Advent: Christian Church Year Begins: November 27, 2011
Christmas begins: Christmas Eve - December 24
Christmas Day: December 25
Epiphany: January 6th, 2012
Lent begins: Ash Wednesday - February 22, 2012
Palm Sunday: April 1
Maundy Thursday: April 5
Good Friday: April 6
Holy Saturday: April 7
Easter begins: Easter Day: April 8
Pentecost: May 27, 2012
Christ the King Sunday: November 25
On the second day of Christmas my Intentional Interim minister gave to me a “calendar” of the Jewish year:
Rosh Hashanah - New Year, 5772: September 28 (evening) 29-30 2011
Yom Kippur evening and day: October 7-8
Sukkot: October 12-14
Chanukah begins: December 20
Purim: March 8, 2012
Passover: evening April 6, 7-14
Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day): April 19
Shavuot: evening May 26, 27-28
On the third day of Christmas my Interim Pastor gave to me a “calendar” of the Islamic year:
Ras as-Sanah al Hijri -New Year, 1433 (AH) - November 26, 2011
Mawlid na-Nabi (birthday of Muhammad): February 4, 2012
Laylat al-Miraj (remembering Muhammad’s ascension): June 17
Ramadan begins: July 20
Laylat al Qadr (Muhammad receives Quran): August 15
Eid al-Fitr (Ramadan ends): August 19
Eid al Adha (remembering Abraham’s sacrifice): October 26
“Religious” or liturgical calendar’s offer both guide and insight. Each event names a sacred invitation, hints at the depth and breadth of a sacred encounter, offers opportunity to renew friendships and creates learning/growing space. Each liturgical year describe a drama and takes a journey. Faithful persons order their lives by spiritual encounter: “demonstrating to the world what social relations directed by God are.”
On the fourth through twelfth day of Christmas, I commend to you insight and guidance. Your work and attention to transition follows a "sacred" path, makes a journey and encounters the holy. Leaders change. Power shifts. Vision/Mission become clear. Relationships clarify and focus. The community/congregational spirit anticipates then claims "something new." Anxiety and resistance turn to confident hope and celebration.
Like the three Abrahamic faiths, take nourishment from your common ground. Good news awaits, so the Christian story goes: the magi arrive with gifts for the new-born: holy one of God! May your transition season culminate in new holy, sacred life too.
All blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.
Give and You Shall Receive? Generosity, Sacrifice, and Marital Quality
(Jeffrey Dew, Utah State University - College of Education and Human Services - Family Studies and W. Bradford Wilcox, University of Virginia. National Marriage Project Working Paper, No. 11-1. 12/8/11)
Dew and Wilcox’s research title caught my attention. Haven’t I heard something like it before? “‘It is more blessed to give than to receive,’” writes the author of Luke/Acts, quoting the Apostle Paul quoting Jesus. Giving and receiving are DNA deep. That marital quality directly correlates to practicing generosity and sacrifice makes sense. Clergy and not-for-profit Directors, with Executive Boards and others rise and fall within this ancient matrix too.
Generosity, write the authors, produces the “virtue of giving good things [to one’s spouse] freely and abundantly.” (Science of Generosity Initiative, 2009)
Good things, they say, include:
Major sacrificial acts express what “the doer finds personally difficult, undesirable or unappealing.”
Wilcox and Dew conclude that too much sacrifice negatively impacts one’s [marital] satisfaction, while generosity, both giving and receiving, offers positive outcomes.
Consider your place of work and service or ministry:
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How does the current practice of generosity compare to theirs?
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Does the ethos or practice of sacrifice play a large or small role?
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Does this ethos of generosity help or hinder boundary awareness and inter/intra-personal best practices?
A not-for-profit of recent memory has “too few workers and too much work.” The “president” served to the point of emotional and spiritual exhaustion. At the end of their term they dropped out and never returned.
Key leaders in a local congregation have a custom of eating together before and while they do their “executive” business. They credit their cheese and crackers care for one another essential to their positive outlook and effective service.
The moderator of a congregation laments, “concerning the minister, I don’t know if I can forgive. Our working relationship is such a mess.”
If a culture of emotional and spiritual generosity seems more the exception than the rule in the place you work and serve, feel encouraged. Regularly giving good things and refraining from major sacrificial efforts does reap positive benefits. Clergy or executive officers take note: your intentional attention to the simple needs of others - your generosity - provides self-care and initiates in others reciprocity. All concerned grow reinvigorated. On the other side, I can think of few times where major sacrifice benefited long-term outcomes; uncoupled from consistent generosity, sacrifice seems to serve only the “self.”
Genuine feedback, affirmation, thanks, reverencing and humble amends do more than nourish marriages. Practice the “virtue of giving good (emotional and spiritual) things... freely and abundantly” and an ethos of generosity will take hold. Joining you in this great and wonderful enterprise...blessings and peace!
-Arlen G. Vernava
All blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.
At their beginning just after the Civil War, founders of Sigma Chi fraternity noted how existing college brotherhoods sought “like minded men.” They believed, instead that: “true brotherhood could prosper only when men of unlike minds, talents and personalities banded themselves together under a common set of ideals.”
Sigma Chi’s history highlights a wonderful truth: diversity framed within common ground prospers organizations, congregations and their leaders. Unity with diversity? Absolutely!
Charles Shultz’s Peanuts characters know this too. Pig-pen, Sally and Franklin, Lucy and Schroeder, Marcie and Peppermint Patty, Linus, Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Woodstock raise their voice in song around a Christmas tree. They are of “unlike minds, talents and personalities.” They possess “varieties of gifts...varieties of services...varieties of activities, but the same Spirit... for the common good.” (I Corinthians 12: 4ff, NRSV)
Organizations and congregations at their best are particularly themselves and generously inclusive: I call this reverent communality. Within gladly embraced bounds (such as the Peanut’s neighborhood or Sigma Chi chapter) all are welcome, all reverenced, all honored. This remarkable grace makes equal space for the “insider” and the “outsider.” A stranger enters and those inside call the stranger “friend.”
Does a spirit of reverent communality order and undergird your life and community? Does your organization or congregation make room for a Pig-pen, a blanket toting genius(Linus), a smart-aleck tomboy(Peppermint Patty), a bossy know-it-all (Lucy), a hero-worshipping little sister (Sally) and a dog who thinks he is a person (Snoopy)? Does your group see into the heart of the matter, affirming the bearer of a spindly evergreen (Charlie Brown) and transforming it into a handsome Christmas tree? Can you express, and do outsiders see your unity within creative diversity? Are all who wish, as one congregation puts it, “welcome at the table?”
Reverent communality necessitates a generous hospitality and fosters glad collaboration. In seasons of harmful stress and high anxiety, with an organization and her leaders emotional and spiritual immune system weakened, unity without diversity and rigidity in place of common ground seek pride of place. Here one needs a leader, like a Linus, or like a child of the Civil War to remind the community of their underlying strength and purpose: diversity bounded by a common ideal. Who else can speak “welcome” but one who reverences both sweet and tart, calling them “friend?”
How will you know you are practicing reverent communality? Persons, institutions, and ideas that feel strange will receive a gracious welcome, a place at the table, an invitation to lift their voice with you and yours and sing!
-Arlen G. Vernava
All blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.
“Old Jack is difficult. When the mood strikes him he can be magnificently difficult.” (Wendell Berry A Place On Earth, 19)
You have met “Jack” (and Jill), and like others in Berry’s fictitious Port William, Jack and Jill matter, and this matters tremendously. Why? Leading during interim time and “difficult - magnificently difficult” are always well met. What, I wonder, do you do with magnificently difficult persons or issues? How do you process your first-hand encounters with Jack and Jill? I am not querying your tool-box resources, nor your analytical assessment acumen. Early in my ministry I leaned heavily on both, to my detriment. Encountering difficulty is, well, difficult! Consider these associative words:
hard - arduous - onerous - grueling - complicated - baffling - thorny - impenetrable - troublesome - recalcitrant - obstreperous - fussy - finicky - awkward - inconvenient, unsuitable - bad - grim - distressing - tough
Difficult, says my dictionary, are those who are “not easy to please or satisfy” - and are issues “characterized by or causing hardships or problems.”
You know how it goes. Everyone wants to tell about that time when something awful, or someone awful happened, or keeps on happening; Jack and Jill announce themselves. They are the office curmudgeon, the we-have-never-done -it-that-way-before chorus leader. They are supportive in one setting, but undermining and sabotaging in another. They are quick to “make friends” and equally quick to hold a grudge.
Keeping one’s distance seems prudent; naming - diagnosing seems helpful. Both are useful, but neither are enough. All magnificently difficult persons or issues play, work, and serve in community. They are someone's friend. They are something of value to a few, if not many. Their behavior has a context. More often than not they act to protect: themselves, another person, something they adore. Issues - those elephants in the room - demand attention too. They announce “this thing? it’s a holy thing. It’s sacred. It matters. It exists for the good of the institution.”
Berry trusts the community to do right by Jack (and Jill). Leading in time of transition means trusting the place, it’s history and the persons you newly lead and serve. Reverencing walks in alongside seeking-to-understand; diagnosis walks in behind wanting-to-fix-it. Every organization and congregation nourishes the stuff that makes for “difficult.” They also have in them the nurturing ointment that heals difficulty. Jesus of the New Testament Gospels often offered this affirmation in response to “difficult - magnificently difficult”: your faith (my sister, brother, community) has made you whole.
Short of pathological (a topic for another time), invite difficult, even magnificently difficult persons and issues to speak and act within community. Avoid and discourage labels and distancing. Lift up the sacred and the holy, incarnate loving-kindness, for it both affirms and constrains the Jack and Jill we sometimes are, and those we surely meet.
-Arlen G. Vernava
Learning in Relationship : Foundation for Personal and Professional Success, Ronald Short
A Place on Earth: A Novel, Wendell Berry
All blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.
“[ Ministering to the need of another] is a simple sacrament, involving all of a person...one’s spirit moves through the swinging door of need into the very citadel of another’s spirit.” (Howard Thurman The Inward Journey, 43,44)
Self-differentiation - fancy phrase, simple concept - always needful. Differentiated living, leadership, partnership and organizations are all about flourishing in relationship. The Board room and the bedroom benefit equally in this regard. Peter Steinke defines this soul-full work that begins with one-self and then other(s):
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Self-definition (limits, values, clarity)
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Self-regulation (cognitive and emotional resiliency, transparency, mature expressiveness)
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Self-other (meaningfully, empathetically connected, appropriately intimate)
Kerr and Bowen (1988) add: “...a [differentiated] leader [is one] who has the courage to define self, who is as invested in the welfare of [the other] as in self,... who can know and respect the multiple opinions of others, who can modify self in response to the strengths of the group, and who is not influenced by the irresponsible opinions of others.”
Simple, as in easy to understand? Yes. But hard to master. This leadership “work” demands soul-full vigilance. Emotional triggers are everywhere. Grow up around demanding perfectionists, few rules, or too little autonomy? Experience repeated trauma? Always need to “lead” and find it hard to “follow?” (Or just it’s opposite?) Make no mistake, home life “personal” life and “work” life always impinge upon one another. When either enters a season of flux and significant change, give close attention to self-differentiation: being fully oneself - staying connected to others. And because you are a leader, and if your work, like mine, takes place in the prism of organizational transition, your soul-full work will sustain and nourish you.
This soul-full work of self-differentiation, thankfully, always takes place in relationship. There are those who attend well to this work, both individuals and organizations: let them serve as mentor and guide. You will recognize them. They are generous, respectful and glad. They are hospitable, communal, and collaborative. They are clear, transparent and appropriately intimate. All of this to say: they are spiritually and emotionally mature.
Know that if you are one who does this soul-full work faithfully, are are a mentor. Others are taking their cues from you. If you have not already done so, make yourself available to those in need; emerging leaders and their organizations will thank you. I already do.
The Inward Journey (Introduction to the Deeper Christian Life) Howard Thurman
Family Evaluation Kerr/Bowen Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach Peter Steinke
-Arlen G. VernavaAll blogs posted on the Design Group International site reflect the opinions of the author and not necessarily that of Design Group International.