Adaptive Decision Making, Change, and Leadership – Part 1

Watch this clip of a traffic intersection.

As you were watching it, what did you think was going to happen?

When I first saw this clip, it reminded me of the T-bone accident I was in as a child. I don’t really remember much around the way it happened, or what I was doing when it happened, but as a child, I flew right into the windshield of our car.

It happened when we were on our way home from the airport after picking up my mom. She had just returned after visiting family in Korea. Someone ran a stop sign and boom. Just like that, my hopes of ever becoming a doctor or rocket scientist flew right out the window…or should I stay straight into the window?

Alright, so back to the traffic intersection.

This is a video from a computer simulation that the Autonomous Intersection Management project at the University of Texas at Austin was conducting. When Peter Stone, the professor heading up this project, discovered that “25 percent of accidents and 33 percent of the thirty-three thousand auto deaths each year in America occur at intersections, and 95 percent are attributable to ‘human error,’” he and his team wanted to do something about it.

But how is this chaos better? Doesn’t this seem like a T-Bone accident just waiting to happen, rather than a way to prevent it from happening?

The interesting thing about this simulation is that every car you see here is being driven autonomously. In other words, they’re all self-driving cars.

This being the case, you can actually plot the trajectories of each car long before they arrive at the intersection, which means there’s no need for the typical breaking, stopping, and accelerating that normally characterizes four way intersections. This also means that you can get rid of traffic lights and stop signs, since every self-driving car would be communicating, sensing, and noticing the other.

To self-driving cars full of sensors and cameras, this simulation makes complete sense. To us, it doesn’t—it seems like utter chaos.

And here’s the reason.

It’s because of a thing called, “mental models.”

When it comes to traffic, and pretty much every other area of life, we have a strong sense of what’s “normal” and what’s not—these are our mental models.

The thing about mental models is that they’re a double edged sword.

They’re great since they can save us time and lead to efficiency

The downside is that they can get in the way of creativity.

But here’s the dangerous thing about them, if we’re not careful, we can actually depend on sets of mental models for so long that we completely miss all the changes that are happening around us.

And even though we ought to adapt and change, we refuse to do so, since we’re used to what has worked and what’s normal.

I mean…if it worked in the past, it should continue to work today, right? If it worked in the previous church you served in, you just need to run the same playbook, and you should be good, right?

When it comes to the way that you view leadership and make decisions, how do you know what worked in the past will continue to work in the future?

Change used to be measured by centuries.

Do you remember how slow and boring history class was? Especially pre-20th century? But as the years have progressed, so has the rate of change. It’s moved from centuries, to decades, to years, to months, to days, and now, even to minutes and seconds.

Just take for example, the impact of Elon Musk’s tweet back in August 2018 that cost him $40 million and his seat as the chairman of Tesla.

Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018

Just imagine that. One tweet where he was joking about having secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share gets him sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The speed and rate of change has increased exponentially…and here’s how all of this affects the local church.

Do you ever feel like you’re behind?

And in that moment, when you finally catch up and breathe a sigh of relief, you turn around only to notice that “more” has already come?

And if keeping up in a rapidly changing world wasn’t challenging enough, you’re expected to grow and do more, right?

And on top of all of that, you might’ve noticed that just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will work again.

Doing what you did yesterday will not get you the same results tomorrow. In other words, if you run the same playbook that you did last year to invite and put on your event, and got X number of people to show up and a Y kind of impact, you will have less people this year than you did last year.

This used to work…but it doesn’t anymore.

You can’t just put more energy and effort in and expect things to exponentially grow anymore.

We’ve moved from addition to calculus—seemingly overnight.

Next week, I’ll be sharing the reason why you can’t just set it and forget it anymore. And what we can do to adapt and change as leaders.