The eCrozier

The organizational theorist, Edgar Schein, has studied for decades how organizations function, particularly around their specific culture’s capacity to adapt to new learning in a changing context. His work with the Harvard Business School on these issues has gained him lots of attention among chief executives. He argues that there’s a built in contradiction in organizations: anxiety hinders the ability to learn, but anxiety is absolutely necessary if any kind of learning is going to occur. Anxiety about the way things are motivates one to learn something new. But anxiety has a negative cognitive affect on our ability to learn. In other words, we don’t learn well when we’re anxious.

Schein goes on to argue that there are two kinds of anxiety associated with anything new: learning anxiety and survival anxiety. Learning anxiety is associated with the fear that we’ll fail at the new thing we’re trying to do, or that it’ll be beyond our abilities, or we’ll appear foolish to others, or that we’ll have to jettison our old patterns that used to work for us. Survival anxiety is the fear that if we’re going to make it, to literally survive the context we’re in, then we’re going to have to change behaviors. In his studies of how businesses operate, Schein contends that most of the time learning anxiety is more powerful than survival anxiety. So, most people will opt to not learn new ways of business even though they know their professional survival depends upon it.

How might we see Schein’s insights applying to the leadership of our congregations? In a post-Christian context, we need to learn new ways of engaging God’s mission to bring others to Christ and to serve people in our communities. We know we must do this, but we experience the learning anxieties that come from fearing that we might fail, or that we might not be gifted enough to do it, or that we might appear foolish to others, or that we might have to give up some of our old ways of doing things. So, what happens? Many congregations are choosing to die rather than learn new missionary skills.

Congregational leaders face huge challenges here. Using Schein’s constructs, how do we help people lower their learning anxiety so it’s less determinative than their survival anxiety? One could argue that we could work from the other end by trying to increase survival anxiety, but that would be through the via negativa, i.e., increasing their fear that if they didn’t learn new ways of mission then the congregation would die or be closed. I find that approach repugnant because it’s based on threats and fear.

That means congregational leaders need to create supportive opportunities for their people to learn new missionary skills working with those in the congregation who have shown some motivation to learn. I think it’s a mistake for leaders to expect everyone to overcome their learning anxiety or even come to recognize that they need to do so. Leaders can work to develop a critical mass of willing learners, people who are ready, even if tentatively, to learn new ways of reaching out in mission. That seems to me be the primary missionary task for leaders: identifying those disciples who are capable of learning new skills and then focusing their energy on working with those disciples.

+Scott