I just finished a pretty good book called Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor. Pretty good book, but more about the need for transparency than about how to create it in your culture. The best thing I took away from the book was from an experiment on collaberation mentioned in the last of the 3 essays.

In the experiment, the subjects were each given a set of 6 marbles. 5 were unique to each subect and 1 was common to all subjects. The goal was for the subjects to all determine which marble they shared in common. The subjects were then organized in one of three different ways, simulating communication in either a top-down heircachy or a more collegial arrangement. (There was a third arrangement as well that I confess I couldn't really understand.) Here's what the experiment found: when the problem was simple (like all the marbles were a solid color and one could simply say "here's my colors") then the top-down structure worked best. When the problem was complex (like marbles that had multiple colors or patterns) the collegial system worked best.

For me, here's the takeaway: no one system of decision making works best, but we live in a time when working collaberatively generally makes more sense than working top-down because of the complexity of virtually every system on the planet. It's not that top-down is wrong, it's just a way of doing things that worked better at a different time than we're now living in. Three other possible lessons for the church:

1. At the local church level, this understanding may be a little counter intuitive. Following the model of the experiment, top-down leadership may make sense in a smaller church with simpler systems. The larger and more complex the church becomes, the more decentralized church leadership needs to become. I've pastored or been on staff of churches with average attendance in the 30's, 50's, 150's, 180's 300's and 500's. My experience has been that the larger the church the more decisions the pastor and staff want to make. This may be exactly wrong.

2. I'd theorize that the more institutional and less movement-like an organization/organism becomes the more complicated it gets and the more necessary it is for decision-making to become collaberative. Take the United Methodist Church's ever expanding Book of Discipline, for example. At the same time, the more institutionalized we become, the more top-down we tend to become. Maybe we need some radical rethinking of how we're organized and even the contents of the Book of Discipline to make the UMC more agile and flexible.

3. Bennis suggests that we may have reached a point of complexity where "leadership may come to be seen as a role that moves from one able individual in an organization to another as projects come and go." This apparently is already the case at Google. In this context do Bishops for life make sense? At the local church level, what does this say about the need for strong lay leadership? Perhaps more important that the question of whether we have pastors who are strong leaders is whether we have pastors who can equip the laity to be strong leaders.

Kansas East Annual Conference

I'm wrapping up a long week and ready for two weeks of vacation. First, some thoughts about the Kansas East Annual Conference that ended yesterday:

Positives
- Adam Hamilton's plenary sessions were fantastic. What was even better was the Conference embracing Adam as a leader within the Conference and the UMC. After years of jealousy and irrational concerns (it was just 5 years ago that Adam was slighted in General Conference delegation elections even though Resurrection was the sole reason we had the number of delegates we had that year) Adam was warmly welcomed and deeply appreciated. I believe 50 years from now when people speak of the revival of Methodism in the first half of this century Adam will figure very prominently.

- Young lay and clergy were among the most active voices. I am concerned that we need more collaberation between younger and older members, especially clergy, but I am excited by the participation of younger people who have energy and good ideas.

- Adoption of a tithe model of apportionments. This isn't THE Biblical model of giving as advertised by the CFA chair. I think he oversold it some, actually. But I think it is a very postive step forward, both as a way of controlling spending and budgeting and as a way of helping us to explain to our churches why we pay apportionments. I spent a few minutes at the beginning of worship today talking about a few things that happened at Conference and when I mentioned this one there were lots of nodding heads like "that makes sense. Now I understand."

Negative signs -

- I felt like there was still too much top-down leadership. CFA seemed to recomend that we not read the budget, just the summary of it. (every time I preach on me I try to remind people that we are very open with our finances and everyone is welcome to see how we spend money). Even though I like the new apporionment system there should have been more conversation about it before Conference. We were given a copy of a staffing plan for unfunded positions but I'm not sure it's a good plan and there was no chance for debate of it (thanks to Neal Gately though the plan may be changed next year)

- There was more discussion about the location of AC next year than the Constitutional Amendments. What's our real priority?


Reasons for Hope for the future
- Bishop Jones gave us clear priorities for our future as churches in the Conference. We really need these objectives to shoot for. Thanks Bishop!
- There was a hopeful, energetic, and cooperative spirit.
- There was a strong willingness to change (apportionments, location, and amendment conversations all showed this spirit.)

I left Conference feeling very positive about the future of Methodism in Kansas. I hope those of you reading this who were there felt the same. Let me know what you thought.