Linear Leadership, Promiscuous Practice

Okay, first, let me say that I use promiscuous in the "pro-mix" sense in the title of this post and do not intend to imply anything that has to do with sexual behavior. Please consult a dictionary if you are confused. It is just hard to come up with a word that starts with "P" that fits.

Leadership is becoming less and less linear. Instead it is much more interactive, chaotic, disjointed, etc. This creates problems because it isn't as easy to clarify or visualize as linear leadership has been. People like the simplicity and focus that comes with linear leadership.

Interestingly, though people like linear thinking, they are often non-linear in practice. That's because life in general is much more chaotic and as long as we don't have to think about it too much we can get more done, be more effective and more efficient if we are non-linear.

I was thinking about this after talking with my wife about how we run errands. The gas prices have turned us into the energy conscious beings we should have been all a long. We discovered that we were quite linear in our thinking as we ran household errands. We would take care of each item as they came up during the week. Now we plan differently. We multi-task as much as possible and I think it is safe to say that a typical run to the city is much more chaotic. I know that this isn't exactly what I mean be being non-linear but it is close.

So how do we get people in our denomination to accept non-linear leadership? I think that most of those who have trouble with this are those who are older or those who have grown up in households with strong lnear leadership. This group has a hard time seeing what non-linear leadership looks like and how it will ever be able to function. They prefer linear leadership even if it is not as comprehensive as non-linear leadership would be.

I have a hard time answering this question. I want to appeal to their practice since I believe that they do often function in non-linear ways but I'm not sure if they would see it that way.

P.S. I'm not going to use the words linear and non-linear for a long time now.