If you are leading in circumstances that have crystal clarity, you can stop reading now. If you’re part of a church where the congregation speaks with a single voice, the community has a well-defined set of consensus-felt spiritual needs, your leadership team all agrees on the number and priority of your goals, and your measurements have the precision of Swiss engineering, this article is not for you.
This is for people leading in ambiguous circumstances, where problems, opportunities, landmines, expectations, and the future are stubbornly fog-bound.
You are not alone.
If, as Max DePree says, a leader’s first task is to define reality, then perhaps a leader’s first enemy is ambiguity. A pastor I know on the East Coast has been trying to do a turn-around with conflicted church—when he tries to institute changes, he may get wrist-slapped for doing new stuff; when he doesn’t, he’ll get criticized for lack of vision. “I just want to know what the church wants,” he said. “When it comes to music style, or preaching content, or adult ministries infrastructure, or pastoral leadership, I feel like the church isn’t clear about what it wants.”
Here’s the deal: churches don’t want anything. Individuals want things. People want things. Churches are full of individuals who want different things than one another. Sometimes very different things. Sometimes the same individual wants something different on Tuesday than she did on Monday. Being able to read both the range and the center of gravity of opinions in a church is art and science and spiritual gift.
And if you disconnect and drift too far from that center of gravity, you lose the ability to lead that group of people.
George Washington’s muddle
I was thinking about this while reading Robert Middlekauf’s wonderful new book, Washington’s Revolution. In addition to great history, he’s written a primer for leadership in the midst of epic uncertainty. Washington faced a situation with:
Mandate Ambiguity: It wasn’t clear what “the country wanted.”
Personal Ambiguity: It took time for Washington himself to know what his goals were; he advanced from initially wanting self-government within the British Empire to fighting for full independence.
Team Ambiguity: Because of short enlistments, it wasn’t clear who was in his army. He had to keep re-creating it as he went along.
Resource ambiguity: There was no executive office; Congress at that time didn’t even have the power to tax.
Strategic ambiguity: It wasn’t clear whether the colonies needed to defeat British troops or just out-wait them.
Leadership ambiguity: “Volunteering” French officers—many of whom were ineffective—kept wanting promotions. This hurt morale of passed-over American officers. And yet, France was an indispensable ally without whom Washington knew he could not win the war.
So how did he win? And what is there to learn from him about leading in ambiguity?
4 clear laws for clouded circumstances
Middlekauf argues that Washington had two qualities above all that enabled him to transcend the uncertainties and challenges he faced and ultimately prevail. One quality was his will. He did not commit himself easily. But once he had wholly committed himself his tenacity was irrevocable. He simply did not waste energy thinking about throwing in the towel.
His other great character asset was his judgment. He had a finely-gauged capacity to assess others, himself, and his circumstances. This meant that, unlike many other strong-willed people, he also had a quality of restraint and of maximizing the likelihood of effectiveness.
So I’ll give you, by way of our first president, Four Spiritual Laws for Leading in Ambiguity.
1. God loves you and has a wonderfully ambiguous set of circumstances for you to lead in. So don’t be paralyzed by ambiguity.
If God’s primary will for you was to have clarity of social/external expectations, he’d have you leading lemmings. The reason we don’t like ambiguity is we’re afraid we will misread it and make mistakes. The only solution to this is to misread and make mistakes and learn from them. If God’s primary will for you was to avoid making mistakes, He’d have created you with Vocational Spell-Check and Auto-Correct.
2. You have fallen short of clarity and are full of internal ambiguity. Clarity begins at home.
Washington’s commitment to independence was inspiring—but he was not the first leader to embody full devotion to a waffling crowd. Joshua said it thousands of years earlier: “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.… But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” In an ambiguous setting, an unambiguous leader has great power to inspire.
3. Facts are always your friends, because facts de-fog ambiguity. So become a feedback junkie—not to get direction but to learn the realities of the situation.
A few decades ago I was part of a church that wasn’t growing the way I’d hoped. I gathered some folks to get feedback. One of them said to me: “John, I thought you’d challenge me much more as a leader and a preacher than you have.”
I didn’t want to hear that. I found ways to dismiss it. I told myself he wanted a style that wasn’t what I believed in. But the truth was, I needed to grow. The truth was, I didn’t want to hear his point of view because it was painful for me to face up to my failings in that regard, and then to work to get better.
4. When you cannot discover clarity, you may have to create clarity.
When Washington led, the estimates are that perhaps a third of the colonies wanted independence, a third of them wanted to remain British, and a third was watching Fast and Furious 1.
Washington, by his patience and his example and his belief and his efforts, made the possibility and desirability of a new nation more real year by year. Eventually, the population as a whole had clarity. But Washington didn’t wait for it. He was the biggest factor in creating it.
Great leaders are comfortable with ambiguity because they learn to manage it; they accept it where it creates productive tension; and they transcend it where clarity leads to mission.
Of course, I could be wrong …
John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership Journal and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California.
Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
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