Stop & Start 2012: Ben Stroup

Ben Stroup

As part of the current series addressing the shifts leaders should consider making in the new year, I connected with Ben Stroup. Ben is a writer, blogger and consultant and he helped me produce the eBooks that I’ve released in the last twelve months. Here’s our interview:

TONY: What’s one thing that leaders and/or organizations (businesses, churches, non-profits, etc.) should consider stopping in 2012?

BEN: Stop being efficient. The larger the organization or church, the more likely they are to move toward efficiencies. Manufacturing is built around the goal of creating consistencies that can be scaled based on needs or demand. The goal is to adjust the quantity rather than the substance of each unit. The more units, the more profitable the product line becomes because you can spread the cost over more units.

This is fine when you are working with widgets, but people are not widgets. People are emotional, inconsistent, and unique. Organizations and churches should be engaging with people (inherently inefficient) rather than simple reproducing previously agreed upon standards. One path feeds the organizational process while the other path becomes a catalyst for change and impact.

We still have to focus on growth. If an organization or church is not multiplying, it is not fully alive and growing. There is always an element of efficiency that is part of growth, but it shouldn’t limit our strategy and tactics as it relates to connecting to and engaging with our core audience. Organizations and churches that will thrive in 2012 will exchange efficiency for effectiveness and reintroduce a level of humanity in the midst of their process development planning.

TONY: What’s one thing that leaders and/or organizations should consider starting in 2012?

BEN: Get comfortable with chaos. The idea of a “new normal” emerged to describe what happened as a result of the economic meltdown that began in 2008. That “new normal” is really chaos. We see change everywhere: politics, organizations, communication habits, technology, career paths, etc. Very little in our world today can be described as stable. This can either eat you alive or compel you to adapt.

When we get comfortable with chaos, we free ourselves from being bound by precedent and historical success. Instead, we use those things as the foundation of growing forward. Chaos is not comfortable, predictable, nor controllable. Chaos forces us out of our linear thinking and opens us to the interconnectedness of many things. The more important question is not “how?” but “why?”

Stop waiting and planning for a new predictable pattern to suddenly appear. Make the assumption that the speed of change is consistent with the burden we have to constantly learn to adapt. That means we must evaluate the lens through which we view the world before we can confidently adapt and begin to describe chaos as comfortable.