Tod Bolsinger

Starfish and the Spider #2: Is the Head the Problem, or the Problem the Head?

If you asked most people in my church or who are familiar with church things what my title is they will tell you that I am the “Pastor” or sometimes the “Senior Pastor” of San Clemente Presbyterian Church. But, officially, in the Presbyterian Church (USA), my title is actually “Pastor and Head of Staff”.  And if Brafman and Beckstrom’s book, The Starfish and the Spider is correct, that title and all that it reveals could be the one of the most significant reasons that the PCUSA and other denominations are in decline.

But let me tell you a true story…

Last fall, a consultant that we hired to evaluate our church walked into my office.  The plan was that after he had sifted through a few hundred surveys and finished up with several focus groups (including a group of people who had left our church), and had conversations with my executive staff and some representatives of the rest of the staff, that he and I would talk one on one. 

He sat down, smiled and said, “You should be very happy about what is going on around here.  All the indicators are that this is one of the healthiest churches in the country.  People respect you, they love your preaching, they know and are committed to the vision of the church, they trust the leadership, they believe that it is heading in the right direction.  It’s a really strong church.  In fact, if I lived near by, I’d raise my children here.” 

I listened, not terribly surprised, but gratified all the same.  But, I knew that a “but” was coming…

“But, people are beginning to disengage emotionally.  They feel as if there is no place for them to personally contribute.  That the staff and inner leadership of the church runs everything so well that there is no need for them.  Many people feel as if this church can run just fine without them and that the church itself doesn’t need them to participate in any way.  They are satisfied but complacent.  Many of them are beginning to slip away.”

As I listened to him, I felt both saddened and relieved.  I had had a sense that there was something that was creating a kind of malaise in our church community.  That for all the indicators of strength, that we were beginning to plateau numerically and become complacent spiritually.

“Okay,” I said, “it’s good to get that feedback.  So what do we do?” 

He said, “First of all you have to see the problem for what it is.  For all the strengths you bring, Tod, the problem is you.  We have rarely seen a church that is as healthy as this one.  We have NEVER worked with a church that talks about its pastor as much as the people here talk about you.  The people are here because of your preaching and your leadership. Many believe that this church was turned around, even 'saved' because of you. The people who left did so because they thought that you can’t relate to them.  The people who are excited feel personally close to you, the people who are complacent say that they need you to support their visions and dreams.  And most people believe that the church will die if you leave. This whole church is built around you.”

I gulped.  I honestly didn’t know what to say.  I didn't like the idea that this church was so much about me.  I felt a bit embarrassed and defensive.  I really hadn't tried to make the church so centered around me.  But obviously, that is exactly what had happened.  So, I just asked, “What do we do?” 

He said, “You have a couple of options.  On one side, you can all continue on the way you are going.  You have great job security, the church trusts you, people will follow you.  You can keep doing what you are doing for another ten years and then what will very likely happen is what is happening at large churches all over the country.  They start a slow decline that continues until the pastor finally leaves.  Then they cave in.  And the church has to start all over from the ground up.”  (My mind raced to all the other ministries that I have been part of before coming to SCPC…none of them thriving today.)

“Or you can begin to make changes to move yourself out of the center of the church while still being the pastor of the church.  You can move from a ‘pastor-centric’ model to a ‘collaborative’ model.”  And that was the first time that I heard the word in this context that would lead to the biggest “adaptive shift” of my leadership style: “Collaborative”. 

Starfish and the Spider is study in the power of collaboration.  The Starfish and the Spider argues that while healthy, “centralized leadership” can build healthy, visionary, enduring organizations that are worthy of investing one’s energy, time and resources, that same centralized leadership also stymies the collaborative creativity that makes personal investment and participation so exciting, meaningful and well, fun.

In fact one of its central rules is “Everybody wants to contribute”.  They draw upon the story of Wikipedia to demonstrate that when given an opportunity to meaningfully and positively invest in something they believe in, most people would rather be participants than spectators.  However, strong centralized leadership, no matter how well-meaning and effective, inevitably erodes participation and personal contribution.

In Starfish, Brafman and Beckstrom demonstrate that whenever there is a “head” in the center of the “body”, the body overtime naturally becomes overly dependent on the head.  (Indeed, if the head is cut off, the body dies.)  But if the function, the values, the security and accountability of the head can be distributed throughout the body, then the body can survive, adapt and multiply.

What I learned from the consultant and from reading this book, is that the very style of leadership that has made my congregation appreciate and trust me was now keeping us from becoming the church that we needed to be and this book was giving me a vision for what that new creative, collaborative community could look like in our church.

Now, Brafman and Beckstrom are NOT arguing for complete decentralization (indeed, in most cases that would be catastrophic), but for what they call the “sweet spot” of the “hybrid-combo”:  A system that is centralized in the things that bring security, accountability and trust and decentralized in the areas that need creativity, participation and investment.

In a “Collaborative Model” the whole system is set up to engage and invite the personal participation of every member of the community in the partnership of ministry.  It’s not about carrying out the leader’s vision, it’s about each person working together in partnership to contribute to a much greater vision.  As our consultant told me, “Tod, if this church can stay as healthy as it is, and become more collaborative, it can make a great impact for the Kingdom.” 

To understand more about this, next post, I’ll say more about the history of our church,  “The Hybrid-Combo Sweet Spot” and why Ebay had to buy Paypal.

The Starfish and the Spider #1: What’s in a Head?

But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.                                   (Ephesians 4:15-16)

 

When the Spanish Army invaded the new world in the 16^th century, it took them less than two years to erase the dominant empire of the day, the Aztecs.  Ten years later they did it again to the Incas, again in about two years.  Their strategy: cut off the head of the empire and it will die.  They killed the chiefs and the tribes folded.  For the next 150 years the Spanish Army dominated the continent.  Until they finally met a foe that was their undoing.  Compared to the Aztecs and the Incas, the Apaches of what would become northern Mexico and southwestern United States, were primitive.  No great culture, no dominant technological advances, no pyramids, no gold.  But by the late 17^th century the Spanish had given up trying to defeat the Apaches.  And indeed, the Americans didn’t fare much better a century later. 

What made the Apaches so strong if it wasn’t a great leader, a great culture, and great wealth?  Decentralization.  Bluntly, neither the Spanish nor the Americans could find a “head” to cut off.

In Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, the authors offer a grand tour of an ongoing “battle” between highly centralized organizations and the de-centralized groups that are changing the organizational landscape. 

Using illustrations from history, social sectors, business and current events, the authors demonstrate that over and over again decentralized organizations wreak havoc on centralized ones.  (The most obvious and painful example is how the United States can topple a centralized dictator in a few short weeks, but has spent years in a struggle with a decentralized terrorist organization.  Will we ever know if we truly have won the war on terror?)

For many of us today, this is just confusing stuff.  We are used to hierarchy, we think in terms of order and structure and organizational charts.  We are in the middle of another all-consuming campaign for the presidency of our country, and we assume that the health and strength of an organization all flows from the “top”.  Some of us can’t even understand the idea of a “leaderless organization”.  It seems an oxymoron.  In the book, the author’s tell the story of a high-powered leader who wanted to find out who is the “President of the Internet”.  And many of us want to know the same: Who is in charge?

This book raises a different question: What does it matter?

To quote the central metaphor of the book: What’s the difference between a starfish and a spider?  A spider has a head.  If you cut off the head, the spider dies.  If you cut off a spider leg, the spider survives as a seven legged spider.  But a starfish has no head.  If you cut a starfish in half, it makes two starfish.  Indeed, if you cut off a leg of some starfish, they’ll grow—from that leg—a whole new starfish. 

The key is that the cells that “run” the starfish are present throughout the entire starfish and not just in the head.

When I read this book, I had this recurring sense that if Brafman and Beckstrom had been more familiar with the early church that we find in the book of Acts, that they would have used it as a prime example.  How did a rag-tag, small sect of people grow from 120 people to over 6 million in 300 years?  How did they keep from being co-opted by the large religions of the day or extinguished by the Roman Empire?

The church, at it’s organic best, is a prime example of the “hybrid-combo” organization that the author’s advocate as the organizational structure for a changing world. (More on that in future post). Over the next few several blog posts, I am going to offer some recurring reflections on what this kind of Starfish and Spider thinking has to say to the church and how we can recapture some of our vitality and missional effectiveness by thinking more like starfish than spiders.

But let me offer a warning right off the bat: I am not going to argue that the church shouldn’t be (or originally wasn’t) hierarchical.  (If you want a good debate on that one, see Ben Witherington’s response to Frank Viola’s book on "Pagan Christianity.")  The biblical witness is clear that there was some kind of functional hierarchy at work in the early church.  My interest is in the “combo-hybrid sweet spot” of centralization and decentralization:

•  What SHOULD be centralized and why? 
• What SHOULD be decentralized and why?
• What is the best structure for missional effectiveness today?

And perhaps the underlying question is this:  If, as Ephesians 4 says, that Christ is the head of the church (and cannot die!), then what organizational structure best functions under Christ as head? What kind of “body of Christ” best enables us to fulfill the mission of Christ?

Feel free to read along with me.  Get the book, join the conversation, and post a comment.  Let’s see what comes of this.

An Interview with Ori Brafman, one of the "Starfish" guys

Podcast interview (HT: to Nick and Josh Podcasts)

Another chance to catch up on the concepts before I start my blogs on how this book helps us think through organizational leadership in a changing world. For the first time, I heard Brafman talk directly about leaderless churches.  He also discusses the power of circles, that people really want to contribute, open systems, the possibilities opened up by technology and how "starfish" organizations are more chaotic and messy.

What does a "circles and shared values" approach to organizational structure look like?

Here are some links to other pastors who are thinking and writing about starfish principles in mainline denominations.

• The first of which is my one my graduate school classmates, a Methodist pastor and Professor Richard Heyduck (one of the truly SMART guys), with posts here, here and here. 
• The second is another Methodist with a four part series and lots of good thoughts.

What Wikipedia, AA, Al Qaeda and the Early Church have in Common...

I am going to start a new recurring series on the book, The Starfish and the Spider by Brafman and Beckstrom.  The model in this book, and especially what it calls the "hybrid combo", offers a most fascinating set of possibilities for creating healthier, more missional and re-producing churches.  We used this book for a day-long retreat for our SCPC Leadership Core and found it a most stimulating way for reconceptualizing what the church could be--again.

Watch the video, read along with me and help me with comments (especially if you have read the book).

And here is a "starfish-like" "cheat sheet" to get you going (but read the book, it's a fun, easy read.)