After previously exploring the nature of operational v. adaptive leadership, I am going to track some of the principles of living systems theory.  I love the format of the guys in Surfing the Edge of Chaos and will adapt their framework here.  There are four,  equilibrium is death,  surfing the edge of chaos, self-organization and emergence, disurbing complexity.

Principle #1. Equilibrium is Death
Most churches start out of dynamic and exciting adventures in evangelism and church planting and at the end of their organizational life cycle they are usually miserable, static, institutions.  And it appears that an essential part of the process is the movement from the early, more unstable, disequilibrium to that of a stable environment of equilibrium. The early days of most churches or parachurches experienced as unpredictable and wild but at the same time seem to be filled with a kind of spiritual energy. Why is this the case? What is it about disequilibrium that seems to stimulate life and energy? And what is it about stability that seems to stifle it?  (Remember the story of SMRC.) Is it because life itself is unpredictable and chaotic and that when we establish organizations that seek to control and minimize the dangers of life, these organizations in the end stifle it? The history of missions is quite clear about this: that Christianity is at its very best when it is on the more chaotic fringes.  It is when church settles down, and moves away from the edge of chaos, that things go awry.

The assertion that "equilibrium is death" is a derivative of an obscure but important law of cybernetics called the Law of Requisite Variety.  This law states “…that the survival of any organism depends on its capacity to cultivate (not just tolerate) variety in its internal structure. Failure to do so results in an inability to cope successfully with "variety" when it is introduced from an external source.”  The authors give us a great example as to how this law works in reality. They note that…
[F]ish in a bowl can swim, breed, get food with minimal effort, and remain safe from predators. But, as aquarium owners know, such fish are excruciatingly sensitive to even the slightest disturbances in the fishbowl. On the other hand, fish in the sea have to work much harder to sustain themselves and they are subjected to many threats. But because they cope with more variation, they are more robust when faced with a challenge. 
But we know from nature that “survival favors heightened adrenaline levels, wariness, and experimentation”.   Or we can recognize the same sentiment in the more popular phrase, ‘history favors the brave.’

So what is the role of leadership in all this? “Leaders are to a social system what a properly shaped lens is to light.”  They serve to focus the capacities of the organization and do this for better or worse. If adaptive intention and capacity is required, the organization must be disturbed in an intense and extended fashion if leaders are to break the stifling equilibrium that has overwhelmed it. But this is not achieved quickly, nor without significant wisdom as to human motivations and as to how human communities are activated in a new search for answers. Adaptive leaders must resist the urge to move too quickly or reach for quick fixes or packaged solutions. Rather they must activate a corporate search from deep within the ranks of the organization in order to help plot a way forward. This adaptive activation is achieved by

1. “communicating the urgency of the adaptive challenge (i.e., the threat of death or the promise of opportunity),
2.  stablishing a broad understanding of the circumstances creating the problem, to clarify why traditional solutions won't work, and
3. holding the stress in play until ‘guerrilla’ leaders come forward with innovative solutions.” 

This sequence of activities will obviously generate significant anxiety and tension in the organization but we had better get used to it because if we are going to adapt to the rapidly changing environment of the 21st century.  One of the skills of adaptive church leadership will be to learn to manage the stress and make it a stimulus for innovation in church and mission.  The Christian church ought to be highly responsive to its missional contexts.  I call this missional fitness . And it is in the constant pursuit of this fitness, or innate adaptability, that mission must become be the organizing principle of church.  When we are truly missional, the whole church becomes highly sensitive to its environment and also has a natural, inbuilt, and theologically funded, mechanism for triggering adaptive responses.  A genuine missional church is therefore a genuine learning organization. It was by being missionally fit that the church in the apostolic and post apostolic periods (and in China) not only survived but thrived.  They were forced by sheer external conditions to live by their message and adapt to threats as they came along.  This made them a far more vigorous Christians than their more stable brothers and sisters in more static periods.  They did not live in an artificial environment of a churchy fish bowl, but were the ecclesia in all the dangerous spheres of life. And, just like our own immune system, what didn’t kill them served to make them stronger.

Brian McLaren, a key voice for what is called the Emerging Church in the US, recommends that the churches actually adopt a core value of valuing adaptability itself.  He says “Change your church’s attitude towards change and everything else will change as it should.”  Tom Peters in his book, Thriving on Chaos, insists that this is an indispensable element of successful enterprise in a chaos situation. He has a useful model for developing the ‘love of change’ at every level of business practice.  In this book however, this is called missional fitness—the ability to embed in the church’s working philosophy a willingness to be highly agile and missionally responsive.