Over the years, the elders of Trinity Wellsprings Church have adopted several “Leadership Culture” principles to help our church flourish as an emotionally-healthy spiritually-vibrant church that seeks to honor Christ as the Head of the Church while serving together in unity as we pursue Christ’s mission together.
Leadership Culture Principle #4 is Ideas are Born Ugly which can also be accessed in a PDF.
Ideas are Born Ugly
“We’ve always done it this way.” In the church, those six words have torpedoed more fresh ideas, more unique innovations, and more new ways of doing things than perhaps any other six words in the English language. Imagine shutting down Johannes Gutenberg with those words in 1448. Or using those words with the headstrong Augustinian monk Martin Luther in 1517 while insisting that he delay posting his Ninety-Five Theses on the doors of Wittenberg Castle Church. Or telling the Jesus Movement in the 1970s that they must not deviate from traditional hymnals because the organ, rather than the guitar and drums, was still going to be the musical instrument of the future, because, after all, “we’ve always done it this way”.
Most church leaders want to think they are open to innovation. Most church leaders want to think that they are open to trying new strategies and brand-new ideas. As long as the simple biblical gospel remains unchanged, are we not receptive to pioneering new ways of reaching the lost and new avenues of organizing the church to deliver the timeless saving message of Jesus Christ to a fallen world? Yet, as Craig Hamilton in Wisdom in Leadership puts it, many leaders have experienced the difficulty of putting forth a new idea only to see it get ripped to shreds in a hot minute:
Immediately the rest of the group jumps on the idea and rips it apart. It won’t work. We’ve tried it before. It sounds risky. They bombard it with questions about specifics – how and when and for whom and how much – and then move on to more solid discussions that are less experimental. And everyone in the room has learned a valuable lesson: we don’t do the new here. So keep it to yourself….in the meeting, when the new is put before us, the immediate instinct is to bombard it into oblivion with questions.[1]
Is a new idea really that fragile that you can bombard it into oblivion with a few hard-hitting questions? In the context of the church, the simple answer seems to be a resounding “yes”. Why is that the case?
Hamilton marshals forth two ideas – the mere exposure principle and loss aversion – which, taken together, are responsible for killing an idea before it gets a chance to be properly born.
The Mere Exposure Principle
The mere exposure principle rests on the idea that “the more familiar a thing is to a person, the more they will prefer it. Merely being exposed to something makes us more positive towards it.”[2] Hamilton offers the following scenario:
Researchers once gathered a group of subjects and developed two different photos of those people’s faces; one photo showed what their faced looked like to everyone else in the world, and the other was the mirror image, the face that person saw in the mirror.
When asked which photo they preferred, as predicted by the mere exposure effect, the subjects preferred the photos that resembled their mirror images and their friends and loved ones preferred the photos that hadn’t been reversed. We like our mirror image face more than we like our real face because it’s the one we’ve seen most often.
What this means for new ideas is this: we will prefer the status quo not because it’s better or more helpful but merely because it’s familiar.[3]
Loss Aversion
The second principle that drastically affects our capacity to on-board new ideas is loss aversion: “Loss aversion means that people’s tendency to want to avoid loss is stronger than their desire to make gains.”[4]
By way of illustrating the loss aversion principle, imagine that “you are offered a gamble on the toss of a coin. If the coin shows tails, you lose $100. If the coin shows heads, you win $150. Is this gamble attractive? Would you accept it?”[5] Hamilton explains the dynamic:
Most people don’t like this bet and wouldn’t take it. To make the choice you need to weigh how you would feel about winning $150 against how you would feel if you lost $100. Overall the deal is positive, by which I mean there’s a good chance that you’ll win more money than you’ll lose. And yet still the gamble probably isn’t that attractive. For most people the fear of losing $100 is greater and more intense than the hope and possibility that you’ll win $150. Kahneman concludes that “losses loom larger than gains.” We want to not lose more than we want to win. This is loss aversion.
And so when we hear new ideas, no matter how good the idea is we’ll be thinking much more about what we’ll be losing if we implement it than about what we’ll be gaining. Even if we’ll gain more than we lose.[6]
Status Quo = Mere Exposure + Loss Aversion
Hamilton brilliantly explains how the mere exposure principle plus loss aversion typically results in a strong predisposition towards the status quo, also known by one of our favorite church axioms, “we’ve always done it this way”:
When you combine the mere exposure effect with loss aversion, the result is an incredibly strong bias towards the status quote. The status quo emits a powerful conserving force. The status quo is so familiar that we know exactly how it works – we know what isn’t good about it, what questions it raises, and what we’ll lose if we move away from it. If we think about moving away from the status quo and embracing a new idea we can almost touch and taste what we’ll lose. Gains from a new idea, on the other hand, are imaginary because they exist only in the future. We distrust the unfamiliar. New ideas aren’t as clear as old ideas. Lots of factors and outcomes are unknown.
And so we stick with what we know.
We like to think that we carefully weigh the merits of new ideas and judge them objectively and without bias. But the truth is that when it comes to assessing new ideas we’re deeply irrational.[7]
Protect the Ugly Baby
If a strong disposition towards the status quo exists within churches, based upon the mere exposure principle and loss aversion, how do new ideas begin to thrive that helps the church take its next flourishing step? First, leaders need to recognize that ideas are born ugly:
The fact that ideas are born ugly is hard to accept. We often have the notion that great ideas are birth fully formed, glittering in all their glory. But that kind of idea is extremely rare. Most ideas are born disproportionate and lanky. They aren’t fully formed and often they’re either missing key components or have too much of one thing over another. They need to grow and be refined….
When you drive a baby home from the hospital you don’t just throw him or her on the back seat of the car. You don’t even just put a seatbelt on them. No, you strap them into a giant reinforced capsule that is itself strapped and bolted into the car.
Why? Because they’re fragile and they need protection. New ideas are the same. They’re fragile and easily destroyed. They barely exist and can be eroded into nothing with only a few pointed questions or scathing comments….
You and your team, therefore, need to be patient with new ideas. Don’t overwhelm them with questions. Delay judgment. Allow the idea time to percolate in your mind and in the minds of your team members. Don’t criticize it too early….
When people begin criticizing the idea or asking too many detail-oriented questions, you need to be the one to jump in to protect the idea – even if you’re not yet convinced that the idea is a good one. It’s your responsibility to protect new ideas and allow them the space they need to grow and develop. This doesn’t mean you need to approve and implement every idea….It means you lead the way in asking questions that foster rather than hinder the idea’s development.[8]
Hamilton insists that the initial questions of a new idea need to steer clear of the details of its implementation. Instead, be curious about novel and unique ideas with questions like:
1. Can you tell me some more about where this idea came from?
2. What problem is currently being overlooked that you think this new idea will solve for us?
3. How is this idea different from [this other thing that is similar that we already do]?
4. What do you think are the next steps for exploring and developing this idea?[9]
New Ideas Need Protective Friends
Knowing that “the system is geared to favour the incumbent” means that leaders recognize that ideas are born ugly.[10] The second practice that leaders need to implement towards overcoming the irrational bias towards the status quo is to recognize that new ideas need protective friends. Good leaders protect new ideas from withering attacks:
Like any newborn, new ideas are fragile and new protection. Holding a newborn baby is risky business. You need to get yourself ready, sit down in the chair, make sure you’re stable. Carefully place your arms in the baby-holding position in anticipation of the transfer. Be careful to support the neck.[11]
You must protect the ugly baby from the inevitable all-out assault simply because it’s a new idea.
In the animated movie Ratatouille, the nemesis of the hero is the food critic Anton Ego. Towards the end of the movie, the nemesis of the story has an awakening. His awakening has to do with how easy it is to be a professional critic. (Church: are you paying attention?!) It is safer to be a critic. It is safer to promote the status quo. It is safer to repeat the church mantras: this is the way it’s always been done. This is the way things are around here. Anton Ego recognizes that while it is safer, easier, and more customary to be a critic, his transformation and awakening occurs when he finally comprehends – in a published review of the hero’s new recipe – how beautiful and arresting and transformative new ideas can be:
In many ways, the work of the critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.[12]
There you have it via the insights of Pixar! Ideas are born ugly. Will you be a leader who is, at least initially, a protective friend of new ideas? You might just end up helping your church take its next flourishing step.
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Leadership Culture Principle #1 is called The “No They” Policy and can be found here as a blogpost or downloaded as a PDF.
Leadership Culture Principle #2: The Ministry of Asking the Person to Go Directly to the Source.
Leadership Culture Principle #3: All the Leaders Own the Decision: Public Fans, Private Criticism.
Leadership Culture Principle #5 is entitled Email Matters: 15 Questions | How Shall we Utilize Email in our Leadership Culture to the Glory of God? and can be found here as a blogpost or downloaded as a PDF.
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[1] Craig Hamilton, Wisdom in Leadership: The How and the Why of Leading the People You Serve, pp. 197, italics added.
[2] Ibid., 198.
[3] Ibid., 198.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Daniel Dakhneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp. 283, as cited by Hamilton, pp. 198-99.
[6] Craig Hamilton, Wisdom in Leadership, pp. 199.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid, 200-1.
[9] Ibid, 201.
[10] Ibid, 202.
[11] Ibid, 200.
[12] As cited by Hamilton, 202.
