Two Loops model to the rescue
A Saturday’s blog title was ‘Can you draw it on a graph?’. Seth Godin wrote, “If you truly understand something, you can use different modalities to help someone else understand it.” While acknowledging the visual power of the graph as modality, he goes on, “That’s why most graphs aren’t any good. They are made by folks who don’t actually understand the concept they are trying to explain.” Seth has a unique way of undermining shortcuts to worthwhile work while encouraging us to persevere in doing the right work.
The power of his assertions struck home last week when I was exposed to the ‘Two Loops’ model of how systems change or paradigms shift.
“That’s it!” I said out loud but fortunately on mute in the Community of Practice weekly Monday ZOOM. That’s precisely the ‘Reimagining Leadership’ way forward, the ricketybridge network asserts. This graph, this visual, has all the ingredients that I otherwise needed 169 pages to introduce to Church Leaders.
The power of this discovery (an interesting term to use here, but perhaps appropriate in this context, which I will get to later..) was not in its intellectual or theoretical accuracy; but in the experience of the discovery itself. I lived, and am living, the story it is telling.
And I’m apparently not alone. I introduced it to two Church leader audiences this week, and the response was, can I say, ebullient? An odd word perhaps to attach to ‘long-term strategy’ conversations but apropos. The discussion in each meeting centered mainly on this visual — we never got to the full agenda. Both meetings went overtime at their behest. Because they wanted to stay here, understand more fully, find themselves on this map of reality, tell stories of where they saw it lived out, share metaphors to attach it to what they know, discuss the implications, and learn of its providence. When it clicked, the map led to compassion for one another, generally in the sea change of Church leadership and themselves, more specifically. There is hope! “That’s it!” they did not say aloud, but I heard clearly.
In both cases, the result was quickly scheduled follow-up with others to share this and its implications. This has forced me to learn more about this, as I am just a week ahead of them. Which brings us back to this ‘discovery’ noted earlier.
So, what is discovery? I learned growing up that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in 1492. We know Nicolaus Copernicus discovered the earth is in motion, around the sun and itself in 1543. James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA in the 1950s, or was Friedrich Miescher in 1869? Anyway, Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize. But these discoveries already existed, did they not? It’s just when someone else discovers them that we call it a discovery. Reading the history of these and other discoveries, we discover they were built on the work of many people before. Perhaps discovery is more of a communal process, with timing and publicity more likely to give way to single-person attribution at various points along the timeline.
The providence of the two loops map follows this pattern. Attributed to the Berkana Institute as it hosted a ‘swirl of community conversations’ in the early 2000s, it was first published by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze as “The Life Cycle of Emergence.” It was discovered as a group of people tried to make sense of the times we live in, the liminal space we all find ourselves in as we bridge the industrial revolution to the information revolution. The model helps us shift our mindset from how change happens. We have become addicted to our linear, predictable, mechanistic mindset from our experience of the last 150 years and have lost sight of a deeper reality. When people are involved, we are a living system, unpredictable and uncontrollable. This map helps us reground ourselves in that reality.
For we as Church leaders, we quickly discover that a more remarkable reality is one we may, too, have lost sight of. We call it the Gospel — good news — that new life emerges from death. And we are invited to continually repeat this process at the personal, family, team, organization, community, and societal levels, as the earth does without resistance. We have discovered a map, a tool to help us navigate back to the reality that we cannot change. And enjoy the fruit of the new creation. May we choose to employ it.
