How Not to Waste a Crisis : Tod Bolsinger

Full-Text Transcript

As pastors and ministry leaders, when we come up against a challenge or crisis, how can we reframe our perspective so that we do not waste the opportunity that challenge presents?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Tod Bolsinger. Tod is the founder and principal of AE Sloan Leadership. Tod also serves as the executive director of the DePree Center Church Leadership Institute and as an associate professor at Fuller Seminary. He’s the author of the best-selling book Canoeing The Mountains, as well as several other books, including How Not to Waste a Crisis. In this episode, Tod and I explore some of the common default modes that we move to as leaders when we face a crisis. Tod shares how we can reframe these situations so that we can better serve the kingdom and the people to whom we’re called to minister. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of Frontstage Backstage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week, I have the privilege and honor of sitting down with the trusted ministry leader, and we dive into a conversation all in an effort to help you, and pastors and ministry leaders just like you, embrace healthy sustainable rhythms and really help you flourish in both life and leadership. We are proud to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network. Not only do we prepare this episode, this conversation each week, but our team creates an entire toolkit that complements the discussion that we have. In this toolkit, you’ll find a lot of resources, including a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. Now, this growth guide helps you dig more deeply into the topic that we discuss, and we encourage you to use it not only for yourself but also with the ministry leaders at your local church. So be sure to check that out at PastorServe.org/network. Now at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders and if you would like to learn more about how you could receive a complimentary coaching session with one of our experienced coaches, you can find that information at PastorServe.org/freesession. So please check out that opportunity as well. Now if you’re joining us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below. We love getting to know our audience better, and our team will be praying for you and for your ministry. Whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe, follow, and to share this with colleagues in ministry that you think will benefit from this content. Now, as I said, I’m excited about today’s show, and at this time, I’d like to welcome Tod Bolsinger to Frontstage Backstage, Tod, welcome.

Tod Bolsinger
Hello, Jason, nice to be with you.

Jason Daye
Yes, it’s always fun to have you on the show, brother. You provide so much value and I’m so appreciative of the work that you do. We are going to talk today about how not to waste a crisis, which is great. It’s the title of one of your new books. These books you’ve put together, it’s a whole series that IVP has put out, the Practicing Change series. Really helpful. I encourage people to check it out. But we’re going to dive into this topic because, as you well know, Tod, all of us in ministry face a challenge, a big uh-oh, or a crisis, right? We’ve all been there. What’s interesting is that we often approach these in a similar way. But Tod, you’re challenging us to pull back a little bit, maybe reframe things, and approach these crises in a bit of a different way so that we can really learn, grow, and leverage them for our life and our leadership, which is absolutely fascinating. Before we jump into all of that, which I know you have a ton of great stuff for us, you write about this idea of kind of the superhero syndrome that we can fall into in ministry. So, let’s start there. Talk to us a little bit about this idea.

Tod Bolsinger
Well, one of the things I learned when we were doing, my company does a lot of coaching and consulting with leaders all over the world, and almost every time we’re working with really good people. Like I always said, one of the advantages of the kind of work we do, which is all in organizational change, is that we don’t work with anybody who’s not a really good leader. Really good leaders, we found, fall into the same mistakes, and one of their mistakes is relying on their superpower. None of them will call it that. They, actually, almost all these people are humble people. They would absolutely be cringing. But what I say is almost all of us learned something that really works for us. It serves us. We’re good at it. It’s our go-to. It’s the thing that if there’s a problem, we know how to enter into that problem. I mean, I tease people all the time. I go my superpower is pretty easy. I’m good at talking things to death. I had one of my friends say, you and I are the kind of people who are so good at talking about things, after a while we think we’ve actually done it. What it means is that when I have a problem, what I want to do is give a sermon, put a series together, teach on it, articulate something, write something, or do something. But what happens when you can’t preach your way out of something like a pandemic? Or what happens when you’re facing radical change in the culture, and you can’t even get people’s attention anymore in the way it used to be, or your neighborhood is changing pretty dramatically, and people are getting upset? You think, if I just preach the gospel enough, they’re going to be fine, and the truth is, they’re actually experiencing the loss of a changing neighborhood where they don’t feel as comfortable as they used to, and they’re tempted to flee when God might actually want them to really love their neighbors pretty deeply. The neighbors that are actually there. With these big, disruptive changes, you can’t just rely on your old superpower. One of the things we teach people that we learned from experts who’ve done a bunch of work on this is that in a moment of crisis, you don’t rise to the occasion, you default to your training. Most of us were trained to use what I call our superpowers over and over and over again, even when it stops working.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s good. So the important thing to kind of think through here is that when we face a crisis, when we face a big challenge, we slip into default mode, right? That’s what you’re saying, right? We default to those things that have worked in the past, and yet, Tod, what you’re challenging us to do is to recognize that many of those things that we’re accustomed to defaulting to don’t necessarily help us get through this big challenge, right?

Tod Bolsinger
Right. Yeah. I tell people all the time that there’s something within us that says, Oh, I know this problem. What I’ll do is I will work harder. So the big mistake, the first big mistake, that good leaders make is they think they can outwork the problem. So if there’s a crisis, we’re just going to put our head down and work our way through it instead of actually letting the crisis be something that actually changes us in a good, positive way. The way you do not waste a crisis is you let it transform you for the future. The world in front of you is different than the world behind you. So, this crisis is an opportunity for you to learn and grow into becoming the kind of leader who can face the future. Most of us miss that opportunity because we just put our heads down, and we try to plow through and get back to normal and get back to doing what we’re doing, and we realize after a while, we’re just exhausted. It’s like paddling the canoe where there’s no water, after a while, you’re just exhausted. That’s where so many leaders find themselves.

Jason Daye
Yeah. Tod, now I love this train of thought. You and I think a lot about this adaptive change, kind of in the same realm. I love talking about this. But the question is, whenever the crisis and challenge hits, sometimes it’s hard to remember, Oh, wait, hey, sometimes we just automatically react, and we fall into this default position. So, Tod, help us think through how we can prepare ourselves in a way, what are some practices? What are some ways to reframe some things so that whenever we find ourselves in these moments, we can prevent ourselves from slipping into default mode?

Tod Bolsinger
Exactly. It’s a great question. So here’s one of the things I often say. Every leader I know, when I tell them this, and I just was with a whole group of senior leaders in a giant mission agency yesterday. I said, Look, every single one of you has a little voice in your head. It’s your parent, or it’s a coach, or it’s your first boss who, when there’s a crisis, they’re what you hear. Don’t just stand there, do something, and you snap to it, and you start doing something. What I want to do is become the small whisperer in your ear that says, don’t just do something. Stand there. Stand there for just a moment. Stand there until you see the shift before you solve the problem. See the shift before you solve the problem. What that means is that in adaptive leadership, deeper issues require a shift of values, attitudes, or behaviors. That’s hard because you also have to determine what you won’t shift. Like there’s a value I will not let go of, but because there’s a value I won’t let go of, I gotta be willing to shift a lot of other lesser values, and many of them I really love. Or here’s a behavior that I’m gonna have to shift. As for me, I gotta stop talking and start asking questions. Shift the behavior. Or here’s an attitude I need to shift. Like for me to understand this, I need an attitude that I don’t need to be the expert. I actually need to be the learner. I talked to the leader of this organization, the CEO of this whole group, who said the single biggest thing he had to learn to do was ask better questions. Shift. See the shift before you solve the problem. Because if you don’t see the shift, you’ll just solve it with the old default mentality, and then you’ll be exhausted because it won’t work.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s good. So when we talk about seeing the shift, is this something, Tod, that we’re doing, yes, in the moment, but also, is this something that we need to be doing some work on before the crisis comes? Like, do we need to start evaluating how we are operating in such a way that we’re kind of prepared before the crisis hits, that we can reevaluate or reframe things?

Tod Bolsinger
Yeah, Jason. It’s a very good question. I think one of the things that many really good leaders do is they just say, I know it’s going to be hard, so when it gets hard, we’ll just keep working harder, right? What I want to encourage you to do is to say, pay attention to what’s changed. What’s changed and what’s different, right? Pay attention to it, not as an excuse, but just paying attention to the terrain. You’re in a different terrain. So, the Lewis and Clark story of canoeing the mountains was all about the fact of, look at what changed is 300 years of a mental model of how the geography of North America was destroyed in one minute. Everybody of European descent. Now, all the indigenous folks, and all the Native American folks would have told them, if they would have their they listened to them, right? But everybody of European descent all of a sudden went, Wait a second, this big, vast continent that is mostly a flat plane and a treed plane gave way to mountain ranges that are bigger than any of us have ever seen in our lives. We are not prepared for that. Instead of acknowledging that the world in front of us is different than the world behind us, what we do is we either just want to go back into comfortable terrain, let’s just keep going back, or we want to just plow ahead, paddling with the old canoes, even though there isn’t any water. So part of what we had to grapple with is early on, prepare for the fact that when you hit something that’s not working, that opportunity is actually for you to be retrained. Adaptive leadership, that is what this is called, starts when someone asks you, hey, we trust you. You’re a good leader. We trust you. What should we do? You have to look them in the eye and say, I don’t know. I really don’t know. But this is ours to do and we’re gonna have to figure it out. That’s actually a really hard moment. I mean, many leaders like to say, I’m really comfortable. None of us. Psychologists tell us they’re the three hardest words to say. I don’t know. Just listen, there’s a presidential campaign coming up. Will you hear any of them say, oh my gosh, we got massive, global, international problems that are there, what do we do? Do any of them say, you know, I don’t know? We don’t know yet, but we’re going to figure it out. Not at all. They go, here’s my five-point plan. I got it perfectly worked out. I alone can solve it. I mean, it’s really hard to be that humble, that much of a learner, and that open to telling the truth.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s fantastic, Tod. As we look at that, how do we, as the leader, say, I don’t know, to our team in a responsible way that can encourage them and build trust, as opposed to making them think, Oh, well, why in the world do we have this guy or this woman leading us then, right?

Tod Bolsinger
Right. So one of the first things we have to do is teach people that really good leaders in a changing world lead the learning. So, what you’d say is that we are going to take this on, we are going to figure it out, and we’re going to figure it out by being humble, and we’re going to work hard, but we’re not just going to keep doing what wasn’t working. We’re actually going to try to experiment our way forward. I was invited to speak at a conference where they asked, in the middle of when COVID was coming to a close. They asked the question, could you tell us where you think the church is going to be in 2030 and I said, that’s actually not what I do, right? The old famous, skate to where the puck is going. That’s the Wayne Gretzky thing. Wayne Gretzky wisdom, the best hockey player. How do you get ahead? You skate to where the puck is going, not where it is. We now live in a world with 14 pucks. So that’s not going to work. A big part is to say, that you can trust me, that I’ve been a person who has integrity, that I care about you, and that I’m committed to our mission. But I’m also willing to be humble enough to say that we’re going to have to actually experiment our way forward, we’re going to have to learn as we go, and we’re going to go with the speed of learning. That’s the new way of getting everybody together in that process.

Jason Daye
Yeah. No, that’s good. So Tod, how can we develop this adaptive capacity within ourselves as leaders? Are there some key things that we can lean into or practices and things that we need to kind of reflect upon? How do we increase that adaptive capacity?

Tod Bolsinger
Well, that’s why we wrote these little books. So this book, How Not to Waste a Crisis, actually teaches you a technique that is not my own. It comes from Marty Linsky and Ronald Heifetz. I’m out of Harvard. It’s called getting up on the balcony and what you do is you teach people how to get up on the balcony. Which, I always say, take your team to the balcony. So if you need an illustration in your head, just think if you were asked to chaperone a junior high dance, right? Keep everybody safe and make sure that it goes off okay. You could be down on the dance floor, the music swirling, the bodies are going, and the Axe body spray is overwhelming you. It can be really hard. But if you have an opportunity to not only be on the dance floor, but to spend some time up on the balcony where you can see the whole dance floor, you’ll notice stuff like, I don’t know, I can’t hear what’s going on, but that group in the corner, whatever they’re doing is not good. There’s somebody over here that’s crying. I don’t know why, I’m gonna have to go listen to it. Or this person just walked in and everybody’s excited, oh my gosh, they’re celebrating something. What you need is, good leaders learn how to listen on the dance floor and look from the balcony. So one exercise we just teach people how to do is, whenever you’re trying something new in the life of your organization, or you’re trying something new in the church, or God puts on your heart that you want to reach some people try a small experiment, and then listen on the dance floor, get as close as possible, get feedback, listen to what people say, and then don’t make a decision yet. Look from the balcony. What is the system? What do you notice? What do you observe? How would you interpret that and get multiple interpretations? So I was talking to a pastor today where we are teaching them this, and they said one of the things we learned is, if we as leaders do stuff to people, we know it’s bad. When we do new ministries for people, it actually turns out bad. What we have to learn is to practice doing stuff with people. I said, Okay, tell me how you learned that. He goes because we stopped doing stuff to people, and we thought we were doing a lot of stuff for people, they kept walking away on us, and we kept resenting them, like, we did this for you. We offer this for you. We gave money to this for you, and they’re like, We want to be part of it. Okay, so now let’s try. What would it mean for us to do something with these people? It means they’re probably going to come up with an idea that is different than what we would have and it’s going to require us to change. That observation and that interpretation led to some questions to learn. How might we engage this group of people in something deeper that they can own and participate in, that could be part of what God wants to do in our community? Then what would we learn from it? Explore those questions. Try another experiment. Keep learning as you go.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s super helpful, Tod. Let’s lean into this a little bit more. Looking at it from a local church perspective, you just referenced working with a pastor there. As a pastor or ministry leader in my local church, whether I have a large paid staff, a lot of key volunteer ministry leaders, or whatever it might be. How can I begin to maybe model this or practically help lead the team into experiencing what it means for us to work through this adaptive mindset or reframe things? What are some practical ways to kind of develop this within our teams?

Tod Bolsinger
So, we ask people to start with the problem that’s keeping you up at night. What’s the thing that you most want to solve? What can’t you get traction on? Then just name it and then pay attention because the next thing that’s going to come out of somebody’s mouth is, you know what we should do? I just want to tell you, as a professional consultant, that dude is wrong. Dead wrong because if he was wrong, and I said dude, and it usually is some guy, usually some guy with some gray hair like me and some experience who just wants to tell people what it is. This is what we should do. They’re wrong because if they were right, we would have done it. We’re not dumb. So now we can ask the question, okay, if instead of solving the problem, we want to see the shift, right? You see the shift? What’s the shift of values, attitudes, and behaviors? We’re gonna have to get up on the balcony to see that shift. To see that shift, we’re just gonna take a few moments, we’re gonna actually talk that thing through together, and we’re going to try something. Something small. We call it, we learned it from the tech people, a prototype, a cheap, modest experiment. Don’t launch a brand-new program. Don’t tear down a building. Don’t hire a bunch of staff. Try something small and make the focus on learning. Learning. So I tell the story in the book about, basically, when our church that I was pastoring was trying to reach young adults in our neighborhood and our community. We had a worship leader who was a young adult. She was 29, she was turning 30. She invited me to her birthday party, which was kind of awkward. I was 50 at the time. But when we got there, we realized, oh my gosh, all these people at my worship director’s birthday party are the kinds of people we’re trying to reach. Like, there they are. Not only that, they used to go to our church. So on Monday, I said to her, Look, this is so interesting. We’re trying to reach these people and I realized they’re all your friends. She said, I know. I felt awkward about that because, like, maybe you now think I can’t do the job. I said, No, this I know. You’re really good at what you do and they kind of like me too. So now I have no idea why we’re not able to reach these people. She said, What do you want to do? I said, Could you get six of them together and we could just have a conversation and talk with them about it? Tell them that I’ll buy a pizza. It cost me three evenings and three pizzas, and we figured out what we were doing wrong because we got them involved in it. I’m never going to tell you what we figured out because the point isn’t what we figured out, it was the process we did.

Jason Daye
Right. That’s awesome.

Tod Bolsinger
That process is what changes things. It’s not solving the problem. It’s learning the process of how to learn your way through it and then you can solve every problem.

Jason Daye
Yeah. So, I mean, you write on this in the book, this idea of prototyping versus predicting is what you’re talking about here. We tend to, Tod, it seems like we tend to feel like we earn our wage as a leader by predicting how to solve the issue, right? Is that fair?

Tod Bolsinger
Oh, I was with a senior leader. So, I’ll tell you how pervasive this was. I was working with a group of my doctoral students, and I had just had a conversation like this, where I said, Look, don’t predict prototype. Stop believing that you can travel fast enough to outstrip the world. The world is changing way too fast. Stop predicting prototypes. Learn your way forward. I asked a senior leader to come in and speak to the group, and he literally got up in front and said, Well, the key to the future is for you to figure out where the future is and go there. I thought to myself, Oh my gosh, you are stuck 30 years ago. You’re stuck in 1990. I get it. What I was realizing he was modeling for me was exactly the thing. Again, these are good leaders. This is a senior leader. He’s a good man of integrity. The problem is that what used to work doesn’t work today. The problem isn’t that it was wrong. The problem is that it used to be right and we keep trying to use it today. What we stop doing is we want to be the expert rather than the chief learner. The way, if you learn to teach your leadership team to be learners, then actually we go back to the birthright of what it means to be Christians because learners and disciples are the exact same word in Greek.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. That’s good. So let me ask you this. As you’re talking, I began to think a lot of the people that we work with, a lot of our audience, they may not be the leader, they might be second chair, right? What recommendations or suggestions do you have for someone who’s in that second seat and yet the first seat tends to be kind of caught, as you said, in the 1990s on how to lead? Are there some thoughts or ideas that you can do kind of from that second seat?

Tod Bolsinger
Well, it’s interesting. All of these little four books came out of questions like that. We were talking about one thing and someone asked a question. We thought we got to write on that. I guarantee you the next set of books we write, we’re going to write about leading from the second chair. Everyone asks us about this one. The reason why is that because very often the senior leader is the person who’s been the expert and they’re geniuses. I mean, if you think about some of the high-profile leaders, even in our culture today, they are once-in-a-generation talents. They’re just amazing people. We know we’re not them. I’m not one of them. So what we learn from the second chair, if we’re not one of those amazing people, is how can we take on the problem that nobody else wants to take on? How do we say, can we just have permission to learn our way forward? That’s all we need. Just permission to learn and we’re going to do our best to learn our way forward. So can I gather a small group of people to do a small, cheap, modest experiment? We tell people stuff like, do an experiment that’s going to cost you less than $100, it’s going to take less than a month, and it’s going to use less than 10 people. Try something really small, then figure out what you learn, do something else, and do something else. It cost me three pizzas. Three pizzas to figure out that our entire strategy for young adult ministry was going in the exact wrong direction. Three pizzas. If you just do small things, you can then begin to learn your way forward. That builds credibility and then you can start moving in a whole new direction. I’m like, don’t predict prototypes. Don’t program prototype. Do a small, modest experiment. Learn your way forward.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I absolutely love that. So super helpful. Hey, Tod, I want to give you a chance just to speak some words of encouragement to pastors and ministry leaders who are leading right now. You have the opportunity to work with many ministry leaders in a lot of different capacities. What words of encouragement would you like to offer to them today?

Tod Bolsinger
Actually, the most encouraging thing to me, Jason, is we work with people across the spectrum. I mean, literally, like we work with four different types of Baptists, three different types of Presbyterians, now two different types of Methodists, and three different types of international Pentecostal agencies. I mean, we talk to people who do not talk to each other, right? What is so encouraging is that they’re all asking these questions. Nobody has a silver bullet. The people who are most excited are people who are just curious. They want to love their neighbors and they’re learning. I want to learn. I want to talk to anybody else who wants to learn, to learn to do it with me. That part, the most encouraging thing is, that if you put yourself in the pool of being a learner with others, you will find other people who are there. You don’t have to be competitive. You don’t have to have the perfect answer. You don’t have to have the big, growing, booming thing. You can actually be encouraged because you’re not alone. You’re all working on the same. We’re all working on the same thing together and that part is really encouraging to me.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. Tod, when we talk about what you just shared there, and then this idea or experimenting, prototyping, and all these types of things, you know? It gives us kind of permission to be creative. It’s fun, you know what I mean? It’s like it’s getting to the fun of what ministry is all about, right? What the mission of God is all about. We serve a creative God. It kind of takes a little bit of pressure for us to have all the answers off of us, and for us to say, You know what? Let’s, together, figure this out. Let’s experiment a little bit. Let’s try some things. That kind of, I think, for pastors and ministry leaders who might be feeling on the brink of burnout because of everything, this could be life-giving.

Tod Bolsinger
Right. Life-giving because the first thing is, you can’t do it by yourself. Literally, you’ve got to drop the superhero cape, and you’ve got to go get a bunch of normal people together and say, Okay, we’re going to figure this out and we’re going to work on this thing together. All of a sudden, that part of feeling like you’re not alone, you’re working out with other people, you’re listening to different folks, and you’re trying new stuff. That part is very energizing. I mean, we are working with lots of folks across the spectrum and the most energized people are the people who are learning as they go. Like learning is… we are fueled by it. We’re fueled by the discovery of it all.

Jason Daye
That’s awesome. Absolutely love that. Awesome, Tod, it’s been a great conversation, as it always is with you, brother. Share with us, if people want to connect with you, your ministry, and those types of things. What’s the best way to do that?

Tod Bolsinger
Yeah, the easiest way is our consulting Group’s website, which is AESloanLeadership.com. AESloanLeadership.com. There we’ve got links to books, we’ve got our consulting stuff, and you can get links to our stuff. That’s our group and our team, and that’s where everything kind of resides. I mean, I do a bunch of stuff for Fuller Seminary, and I do a bunch of stuff teaching doctoral students, but the easiest way to connect with me is through my company.

Jason Daye
Perfect. Love it. Awesome. For those of you who are watching and listening along, we will have links to Tod’s ministry, AE Sloan. We will have links to the books. Not only How Not to Waste a Crisis, which we talked about today, but the other books in the series, and give you details on how you can connect with that. You can find all that in the toolkit for this episode, which you’ll find at PastorServe.org/network, so be sure to check that out. Brother, it was a great conversation. Thanks for making the time to hang out with us today on Frontstage Backstage.

Tod Bolsinger
My pleasure. Thank you, Jason. Anytime.

Jason Daye
All right. God bless you.

Jason Daye
Now, before you go, I want to remind you of an incredible free resource that our team puts together every single week to help you and your team dig more deeply and maximize the conversation that we just had. This is the weekly toolkit that we provide. And we understand that it’s one thing to listen or watch an episode, but it’s something entirely different to actually take what you’ve heard, what you’ve watched, what you’ve seen, and apply it to your life and to your ministry. You see, FrontStage BackStage is more than just a podcast or YouTube show about ministry leadership, we are a complete resource to help train you and your entire ministry team as you seek to grow and develop in life in ministry. Every single week, we provide a weekly toolkit which has all types of tools in it to help you do just that. Now you can find this at PastorServe.org/network. That’s PastorServe.org/network. And there you will find all of our shows, all of our episodes and all of our weekly toolkits. Now inside the toolkit are several tools including video links and audio links for you to share with your team. There are resource links to different resources and tools that were mentioned in the conversation, and several other tools, but the greatest thing is the ministry leaders growth guide. Our team pulls key insights and concepts from every conversation with our amazing guests. And then we also create engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process, providing space for you to reflect on how that episode’s topic relates to your unique context, at your local church, in your ministry and in your life. Now you can use these questions in your regular staff meetings to guide your conversation as you invest in the growth of your ministry leaders. You can find the weekly toolkit at PastorServe.org/network We encourage you to check out that free resource. Until next time, I’m Jason Daye encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. God bless.