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.