I found this short video on risk very helpful in thinking about the decisions we are called to make everyday both in our individual lives and as leaders. (Okay, first of all, I love that Cambridge has a “Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk” and even more that David Spielgelhalter, the professor in question, has been nicknamed “Professor Risk”!) I think it’s important because we are sometimes tempted to believe that if we are careful enough, or precise enough, or cautious enough, we can avoid risk. Indeed, often we are tempted to believe that our job as leaders is to avoid risk. But as Professor Risk points out, every...

3. The Risks and Rewards of Adaptive Change One of my definitions of good leadership is the ability to take advantage of crises. What do I mean by that? Simply that a good leader is always tending a vision of the future. A vision that is always a little larger than the present, always moving just a little beyond where we are now. The challenge however, is that as a species we tend to put a very high value on homeostasis. We greatly prefer, that is, stability to change. And for good reason: stability promotes growth. But that means we are often far more reactive than proactive, changing only when we have to. And that makes advancing a...

Part 1. Think Differently Moneyball, in case you haven’t seen it, is about baseball. But it’s also not about baseball. It’s about culture change. About how hard it is to change a culture, and about how it important it is to do just that, when the world around you has already changed. And it’s just that mixture of hardboiled pragmatism about a changed world – in this case the world of baseball – and creative ingenuity to defy tradition in order to change that makes me think that the secret to the church’s future may lie in this very good movie based on an even better book. In brief, here’s the setup: Oakland A’s general...