Great to Good – dreaming beyond the myth of progress /Marlin Watling (Heidelberg, Germany)

The top seller on American pastor’s reading list is the 2001 study "Good to Great".  I have read it and enjoyed it. It is fact-based (so it seems), takes a long-term view, and has some surprising insights. Maybe what pastors like about it is the Level 5 leadership aspect – "leaders who are humble are better than arrogant, self-promoting leaders."


Living in Europe I get a bit irritated after a while with this talk about greatness. I was in a workshop a while back where a bunch of church leaders worked out their strategies for the movements. The facilitator was American and clearly liked Good to Great. He encouraged us to find our "inflection point" – the spot where things turn and you move from good to, of course, great. And who wouldn’t want that?

When I talk to my friends about the dreams for our church they like the stuff like serving the poor, being known for God’s presence and helping people find their calling. But once I move to some specifics – like how many people we could be in a few years – they get turned off. It seems that most young Europeans don’t dream in terms of greatness. Maybe we dream more in terms of goodness. Talk about Mother Teresa, and everyone listens. Talk about Jim Collins, and you are a superficial salesman.

That got me wondering. Is the European dream more the Great-to-Good kind? And how does it relate to the stages? Well, just some unsorted thoughts: postmodernity is alive and well in Europe. And it has an issue with the modern’s dream of progress.

"The myth of progress states that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction. Progress is inevitable..... Philosophers, men of science and politicians have accepted the idea of the inevitability of progress." (wikipedia)

Seems to fit nice with the rules-thinking. Once you figured out the rules and how things work, you can manipulate it in a positive direction. Some Level-2 thinking here.

Postmodernity kicks in a Level-3 attitude: rejecting the optimism of rules and seeing the world beyond rules. Maybe progress doesn’t happen because there is more at play – like man’s destructiveness and irrationality, like emotions, desires and world-views. Maybe as humans we are severely limited in our cognitive abilities. Take the Wason Selection Task – one of psychology’s wonderful simple findings. It’s a logical puzzle that first appeared 1966.

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which card(s) should you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?

Which one are you picking? Well, less than 10% of participants pick the right card. And that is amongst college and university students!

So, we don’t have the cheery optimism of rule-to-progress thinking anymore. Are we stuck with a myth of being original, organic and otherwise non-directed (stage 3-ish)? Maybe the challenge is to be good. To live with integrity. To serve those less fortunate. To be kind and forgiving. To be open, awed and hopeful.

Maybe its just me. But if I had to pick – I’d rather have my inflection point towards goodness.