Heading North to Florida: How Direction Trumps Intentions

So when the same issue, topic, or question comes up within a few days of each other, I try to pay attention to what the Lord might be saying to me. Here's what's been rolling around in my head from this past week.

Friday night we had some great old friends over for dinner. One of them has been working in the corporate world for the past fifteen years and he's decided to go back to school on the fly and get his MBA.

He talked about where the breakdown happened in organizations, both in his experiences in the corporate world and as a multi-term elder and leader in his church.

"There's plenty of strategy out there," he said, "the problem is that there's this huge gap between the ideas being presented and the actual implementation of them. Executives think that if they stand up and say 'we're doing this next quarter' it actually happens. In reality, there's often a huge breakdown between the strategy and the tactics."

Hmmm, guilty as charged here. How many times have I had a vision or strategy that broke down at the level of implementation? More times than I care to remember.

Then just the other day I was listening to Andy Stanley's leadership podcast--something I commend to all you leader-types out there to download (it's free on Itunes).

He was talking about organizational break-down as well. And his pithy mantra for the week: intention is always trumped by direction.

Say you want to go to Florida. You tell all your neighbors, pack the car, and book the hotel room, but then you get on the highway from Chapel Hill and go due North. You're never going to get there. No matter how good your intentions, your processes aren't going to move you along to the desired destination.

In our marriages or finances or careers, we often have desired outcomes, intentions that we hope for. But we often have systems or ways of operating or machinations that push us in completely different directions.

So with our organizations, departments, classrooms or offices--wherever we have influence. It's important to know where you want to go, but then you have to be willing to do an honest assessment: is what I'm doing now going to help or hinder my progress towards my desired outcomes?

What path am I actually on? Does what we say we want to be about match up and align with how we conduct our business/ministry/marriage/parenting on a day-to-day basis, or are they totally separate things, completely out of alignment?

Good stuff for me to think about as we head into a new school year.