The Case for Taking It Slow

Change is inevitable. 

Michaela O’Donnell, the executive director of Fuller Seminary’s Max De Pree Center for Leadership, sees this fact at play in the lives of leaders every day. So, too, does Lisa Pratt Slayton, founding partner and CEO of Tamim Partners, which exists to grow leaders into lives of coherence, meaning, and contribution in the midst of complexity and uncertainty. 

If you ask them, change isn’t just inevitable; it’s accelerating. 

“In our respective roles, we’ve seen that people are hungry for ways to cope and manage,” Slayton told Common Good. “There’s an intensity to life right now … So how do we stay whole on the inside as we navigate all of the pressures and challenges on the outside?”

Merging their unique perspectives — in broad-brush terms, O’Donnell explains, she works with a high quantity of leaders while Slayton works in depth with a few leaders in the pinnacle of a crisis — the authors of Life in Flux: Navigational Skills to Guide and Ground You in an Ever-Changing World invite readers into the transformational work that integrates mind, heart, and body. 

O’Donnell and Slayton spoke with Common Good about the nature of change, common responses to it, and what it looks like for Christians to choose a better way.

While change is inevitable, you say, we don’t have to work through it with hyper-speed. What are some practical insights for engaging in the “slow, deep work that life in flux requires” of us? 

Lisa Pratt Slayton: The opening story in the book is about being lost in the fog. It’s counterintuitive — the temptation for many of us is to put the boat in gear, fly forward, and just make progress, regardless of whether that progress is thoughtful or intentional. We just kind of white-knuckle it and put our heads down. What I’ve seen and learned in my own journey, and what I’ve seen with the many folks I’ve worked with in 20-plus years of doing this, is that it requires space.

We wear productivity and our busy calendars like a badge of honor, right? But that [slow, deep] work cannot be something a person tries to address in their margins.

The question that often comes to me is this: “I can see a job transition coming. What do I need to do?” My response is, well, let’s start with who you are. That usually lets people back on their heels a bit. 

Michaela O’Donnell: We’ve built a world that’s taken on exponential, accelerated speed and has gotten beyond us. But we’re not really meant to go that fast. And then when that reality mixes with anxiety or fear about, for example as Lisa mentioned, professional transitions, people wonder: If I got fired tomorrow how am I going to pay for my kids to do the things that are important? 

When life is truly in flux, the things that matter to us most don’t feel solid. They feel up for grabs. In that moment, to say “slow down and don’t grab for them,” that’s just really different than what we usually hear. 

There’s a model, another way, a whole different fabric of values — one that celebrates our belovedness, humanness, and slowness, which doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s the work of a lifetime. This is where our Christian faith really matters.

Slayton: We get rewarded for going fast. Addiction to productivity and performance gets blessed and acclaimed in the world we live in.

I can’t shift away from that without help. I have someone who supports me and particularly supports my calendar. I’m very good at squeezing one more thing in. I can always find a space for something I enjoy doing or someone I really want to talk to, and she’ll say, “Nope! Not for another two weeks.” That feels like forever to me, but it’s not. So part of the balance is having the right support in place.

As someone who loves to solve problems, I found myself sitting for a while with the chapter on embracing the “unfiguroutable.” How can people grow in recognizing the times when they truly don’t know what to do, and how can they inhabit humble curiosity once they’ve recognized their uncertainty?

Slayton: My favorite moment with a team or a group of leaders is when they’re trying to work through an issue and someone finally pounds their fist on the desk and says, “I don’t know what to do.”

That’s when the real work begins.

Here’s the challenge: Most traditional leadership development is oriented towards equipping you to solve problems. We can’t lead without those abilities, so we’re not talking about this space being the permanent replacement for all problem solving. 

But problem solving is built on the premise or assumption that we can get to a root cause and identify pathways from that root cause that can solve the problem. When we don’t know what to do, we can’t identify the root cause. That’s when we have to switch to curiosity, questioning, and willingness to try some experiments that may fail. That’s when we step back, slow down a little bit, and say, “Okay, what are we seeing? What are we learning?”

We go back to those fundamental steps in the fog: Cut your engine. Listen. Take a simple step.

O’Donnell: Technical challenges, as hard as they are, have known answers. Adaptive problems do not have obvious answers. And we conflate the two a lot, right? We get ourselves in trouble when we treat adaptive challenges like technical ones. 

Lisa and I would say that the work of growth, transformation, and development in seasons of flux — I can’t think of an instance where it’s not an adaptive challenge, which means that you don’t have the answers. People don’t say that enough because answers, knowledge, pathways, clarity, and efficiency are rewarded and prized. So, when we get to a space that is not only potentially unclear but is bringing unclarity and the unfiguroutable in ourselves, that feels risky. It feels vulnerable and scary. 

I was talking to a senior executive just a few days ago about this. I asked what she does in these situations during in-person, organizational interactions and she told me she uses scripts. She said, “When that I don’t know and I can’t know and I don’t need to know feeling stirs up in me, I look down at my notes and then say, “Tell me what I might be missing. Tell me what y’all are seeing.” 

She gets curious then rewards curiosity. So now we’re talking about humility, right? Embracing the unfiguroutable really comes down to humility. As Christians, it’s something we have to flesh out on a daily basis. It’s easy to feel shame when we don’t get it right, but shame is the enemy of curiosity. I think a lot of inviting people to get it wrong is part of the process.

Do either of you have a favorite chapter?

O’Donnell: It’s “Stay In Your Headlights.” You can only go in the direction that your lights are pointing. The moment you get outside of that, you’re in the darkness, and you can’t really do anything.

Those constraints are ultimately very freeing. People change in the headlights. The book is about acknowledging the fact that people are in flux, that it’s okay, and that it’s the path of discipleship. So I think that staying in your headlights is critical.

Slayton: That’s one of my favorites, too. One of the questions we pose is, “What is mine to do?” It almost only works well if you do it in the context of a high trust community. I need someone to say to me, “Lisa, you’re overreaching. That’s really not yours to do. It’s Jim’s to do.”

I don’t lead a team in the same way I used to, but when I did, this was common language in our team meetings: “Whose is this to do?” It was based on who they were and the gifts and talents they brought to the table. As leaders, this is where we overreach all the time. We tend to get outside of our headlights. I have never addressed someone who is in the midst of a leadership or personal crisis where it hasn’t stemmed from them being outside of their headlights.

O’Donnell: In the book, we draw parallels between common postures — what most of us are doing all the time — and uncommon postures — the fruit of this change work. One of them, which is related to what Lisa just said, is that we move from asking What do others and myself want from me? to What do God, myself — and even others — want for me?

Slayton: It’s a powerful shift. We’re very good at asking what we want from ourselves, which feels very performance oriented. But for ourselves is much more about asking how we want to live in this world and be who we are intended to be.

Coming home to yourself is not navel gazing, but it is deeply introspective. It requires us to go way down into who we really are, who God has made us to be. There are all of the passages of Scripture that we know so well around this — we’re made in God’s image. He’s gifted us as Jesus and Paul repeatedly state. We’re fearfully and wonderfully made. We each have uniqueness that we bring to the table. 

We have to go down to this deeper place that asks, In light of who God is, who am I?

Many of Common Good’s readers are pastors or ministry leaders. What would you like them to know about the nature of change in their own lives and the lives of those they serve?

Slayton: One of the consulting clients I have right now is a pastoral team. My work with them started with the senior pastor coming very close to burn out. He was getting ready to take a sabbatical and his leadership told him they wanted him to do some deeper work, and he wanted to do it too. I spent about a year with him and then we came back to his leadership and said, “Okay, this is who you have, and he cannot possibly meet all the expectations that are being put on him.” 

This is true in a lot of situations, but I think particularly true for pastors. Over the last two and a half years, we’ve developed a shared leadership model for that church. They no longer have a senior pastor. They have three pastors who have zones of gifting and responsibility that are very aligned with who they are. My work has been to help those three form a community where one can say to another, “Stop. That’s mine to do.” 

Those are the kinds of environments we want to see people create in their organizations — individuals who are working together with that level of mutuality and interdependence.

No human can do everything from vision to administration to formation to care. It just isn’t how people are made. My fundamental belief is that unless we are learning how to better disciple pastors, we cannot expect them to disciple their people holistically. At its core, this is a book about formation and discipleship. It’s more than that, I hope. But it’s a book about doing this deeper fundamental formation work. And I don’t think there’s any group of people — certainly in the Western culture — that needs this more than pastors. 

O’Donnell: The adaptive change concept is massive for ministry contexts. The fabric of what church means is changing, and so there’s not just identity issues for individual pastors or questions about skills and gift sets, but ministry leaders are wondering things like What are we doing here? How is this going to look?

That is a seismic shift. The thing I regularly say to pastors is, “Take care. What does care look like in your context? God has put you in a place in a time and culture in which seismic shifts are happening. And that’s not small stuff.”

This book offers deeper reflective work that we need to make some space for in the lives of church leaders.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Life in Flux: Navigational Skills to Guide and Ground You in an Ever-Changing World by Michaela O’Donnell PhD and Lisa Pratt Slayton is available from Baker Books on August 20, 2024.