Strategies for Winter: Redemptive Leadership in Survival Times

By Dave Blanchard, Andy Crouch, Jon Hart, Scott Kauffmann, and Jena Lee Nardella

The authors are the partners at Praxis.

Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash

If you haven’t read Leading Beyond the Blizzard: Why Every Organization is Now a Startup, we suggest you start there. Here’s a summary:

1. We need to treat COVID-19 as an economic and cultural blizzard, winter, and the beginning of a “little ice age” — a once-in-a-lifetime change that is likely to affect our lives and organizations for years.
2. The majority of businesses and nonprofits are already “effectively out of business,” in that the underlying assumptions that sustained their organization are no longer true.
3. Leaders must set aside confidence in their current playbook as quickly as possible, write a new one that honors their mission and the communities they serve, and make the most of their organization’s assets — their people, financial capital, and social capital, leaning on relationship and trust.
4. The creative potential for hope and vision is unparalleled right now — but paradoxically this creativity will only be fully available to us if we also make space for grief and lament.

A shorthand of the key terms:

Blizzard: You can’t go out — zero visibility and hostile conditions. Need to shelter.

Winter: You can go out, but not for long. Wear protective clothing and check the forecast for storms. Need to survive.

Ice Age: Things don’t grow the way they used to — but we’re finding new ways to live and even to thrive. Need to adapt and rebuild.

As of this writing in late April 2020, many organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, churches) are struggling mightily to survive the blizzard of viral spread and rolling shutdowns. Many will not survive the arduous winter as social and economic life re-emerges in fits and starts, lacking the assets or the positioning to advance their mission under new constraints.

In Leading Beyond the Blizzard we estimated that 10% of organizations are relatively unaffected by COVID-19, 10% are responding to unprecedented opportunity, and the remaining 80% “find themselves with a strategic and operating playbook — primarily in terms of product offering, business model, and team structure — that simply does not translate in the likely conditions of the blizzard, the winter, and the little ice age.”

For leaders of organizations in any of these categories, your focus now should be to survive the winter by building for the ice age. This means to do all that is necessary to sustain your core mission in times of scarcity; to prototype everything toward a different future; and in all things to compound the trust and reputation of the organization.

Leadership under these conditions requires acting fast (in fact, ventures that have not yet made considerable changes are already in grave danger); it requires the fortitude to make hard choices; and it requires agility and vision to design a new business and redeploy toward it. In this season you will produce an unusual share of mistakes, pain, losses, and failures, with no guarantees of survival — yet in all of this, you can still act in ways that demonstrate love, bear burdens, and keep trust.

At Praxis we work with leaders who aspire to redemptive leadership, which we define as following the pattern of creative restoration through sacrifice in and through their organization. In this season of winter, our chief redemptive questions are: Where do we have newly-unlocked freedom to be creative? Where are there newly-possible opportunities to restore broken norms, flawed assumptions, hurting people, and inefficient channels? And where can we as leaders and organizations take risks, even sacrificial ones, for the sake of others?

In the following six essentials we offer a roadmap for redemptive leaders seeking to survive the winter by building for the ice age. These summarize the counsel we’re giving to (and learning from) the hundreds of business and nonprofit entrepreneurs in our community and beyond:

1. Embrace your role.
2. Maximize your runway.
3. Prototype in sprints.
4. Organize for resilience.
5. Lead by naming.
6. Design for a different future.

1. Embrace your role.

As a bearer of God’s image in a position of leadership, this season of crisis is part of your story. It’s what you’ve been called to and have been training for — for years, if not decades. Relish the opportunity every morning to use your gifts for the sake of others today.

You are an essentialist now. Your job is to protect your organization, not preserve it. By “preserve” we mean aiming to keep intact as much of the current offerings, operations, team, and funding model as you can. Avoid that path. Instead, “protect” your organization — create as much capacity as possible to find the new offerings, operations, team, and funding model that will fulfill your mission next month, next quarter, next year. One approach is an attempt to change as little as possible; the other is being willing to change as much as necessary so that the mission might be advanced.

Give grace, first to yourself. You, and your organization, are likely to make mistakes at a higher rate this year. You’ll misread the situation in ways that will seem laughably naive in retrospect. You’ll feel the temptation not to let people down. You’ll feel pressure not to overreact or underreact (and both are likely). Extend extra grace to those who are exploiting, panicking, making unforced errors, doing the wrong thing — especially when it affects you.

What you’re actually responsible for in a trying time is your response — to make the wisest and most discerning choices given what you know. And the most important things you must know are these: your secure identity in Christ, your organization’s assets and mission, and the needs of your stakeholders.

Because this season is a marathon conducted in sprints, you need habits and practices that sustain your reliance upon God and not yourself. Every day will bring new information and unforeseen challenges, and you’ll often be fighting through low reserves of physical and emotional energy. Consider, more than ever before, the importance of anchoring yourself to a set of shared practices (we recommend our Rule of Life for Redemptive Entrepreneurs) and a community that can support you in doing so.

2. Maximize your runway.

This is overstated but not wildly so: one of the most important and loving things you can do right now is to conserve cash. As they rightly say (at least in a temporal sense), cash is king — without it you don’t have an organization or that long-term mission you care so deeply about. If you conserve cash, you have options on how to develop and support people over time. If you don’t, and you go out of business, you will have no ability to help anyone inside or outside your organization.

Whatever was valuable yesterday that isn’t valuable today should be pruned as quickly as possible. This will include canceling plans for new hires (you can’t commit to them and you don’t even know what they’re going to do), culture perks, and many in-progress initiatives. It also includes honoring agreements while also fairly renegotiating contracts so you can actually meet them. Reconsider how work is done inside and outside your team. Many services should be brought in-house while some on your team may have less work; this may enable you to avoid headcount cuts.

Most ventures will need to cut some combination of compensation, benefits, and headcount in order to survive. For those who are staying, ask them to take less than they could; for the people who are leaving, offer more than you have to.

1. For those who are staying: You are inviting them into a new business, a new set of challenges, a new season. Recognize that “market value” for any job has fundamentally changed, and so reduced wages (and in some cases, hours) for the key people is a fair exchange of value for now. 75% of a job (or a paycheck) is better than no job at all for the foreseeable future. It may be necessary to shift some people to contractor status.
2. For those leaving: Move quickly and transparently, knowing that sooner is usually better for all. While this is likely the most difficult part of the crisis, it is still an opportunity for creative restoration through sacrifice — for example, by providing more severance than the norm; by actively working to place people with others in your network; and by supporting them off-payroll in some way.

This is the time for you, your executive team, and anyone making key decisions, to become acutely finance-centric. Have your cash balance in your head and know exactly and explicitly what’s going out in the coming days. In a time of financial contraction and conservation, every decision involves exacting trade-offs of cost and value, and nearly every call on the fence should be in favor of “don’t spend.” When decisions are made with a finance-centric lens, three things happen: you make better decisions that clarify and protect the mission; you get greater alignment on the decisions you make; and you develop in your team (and yourself!) a new literacy and discipline that will serve you well for the rest of your careers.

Keep all commitments that you possibly can, even when the extraordinary circumstances increase risk. If you cannot fulfill a commitment, then your obligation is to have an immediate and straightforward conversation with the other party about your situation, and what you can and can’t do. Under pressure, many will avoid, defer, or deflect the reasons why they’re making tough decisions; not so with you. Name your needs and constraints and make sure you understand theirs. These times are occasions for courage, empathy, and creativity — there are often ways to build a new solution that honors the spirit of the commitment.

Close any funding you can that doesn’t force you to misrepresent the truth about your organization. Take capital, credit lines, PPP funding, and short-term grants, assuming those lines may not be available within a few weeks.

Don’t make personal financial guarantees or put your family at risk as a last line of defense to preserve the business. One of the reasons you are legally structured as you are is to separate the venture and personal pools of finances and risk. It’s tempting to confuse personal bravado for bravery and put your family and future at risk in order to survive the crisis; but doing so is not surviving redemptively. Wisdom in these situations generally means to release the organization and live to fight another day.

3. Prototype in sprints.

Generally speaking, a significant reset of fundamentals favors the agile — smaller over larger, 70% over 100% fidelity, prototyping over strategy. If you can manage cash well enough to maintain a strong team, and you can learn at a faster rate than ever, you are likely to “find the new business” that will advance your mission and serve your stakeholders for the long term.

There are things you did to respond to the blizzard that have a very short shelf life. This was appropriate, for the blizzard has been about sheltering from the most dangerous threat (and remember, there are more public health spikes — more blizzards — to come). Yet winter is about survival for the medium- and long-term. If it was working even two months ago, you cannot assume it will work now or later; if you can find something that works now, it probably will work later. Resolve now to do as little as possible that won’t be useful beyond the winter.

Conventional strategy isn’t much help right now, as it presumes visibility that none of us have. Instead, it is a time to prototype everything (programs, products, services, pricing, delivery modes, partnerships, team structures, messages) that both help you now and provide real data and direction for initiatives that have considerable long-term value for those you partner with and serve. Your winter prototypes are designs for the ice age beyond.

Design and iterate your prototyping as rapidly as possible — two-week sprints are probably ideal for the kind of learning you need now. In the case of Praxis, we suspended most current roles and assignments to pivot to several new workgroups with twice-weekly reporting. This enabled us to create new offerings, attend to our community in new ways, and produce core content at a far faster rate than usual.

Customers and partners have new and (for now) more forgiving expectations of you and your team. They’re dealing with their own limitations and shifts in focus. Like you, they’re mentally repricing value propositions daily. Use this opportunity wisely to offer thinner or more experimental versions of your offerings. Make commitments as late as you practically can without creating intolerable risk for partners, knowing that situations on the ground will change more rapidly than normal.

4. Organize for resilience.

Use this time to demonstrate to your team how agile and fast they can be. Scramble their assignments and teammates to optimize around new, prototype-driven streams of work. Base those assignments on passion over position, and don’t assume that rank correlates exactly with authority in this new context. If your team is committed and understands your situation, they can operate in a context where workstream leadership roles are sometimes reversed and hierarchies inverted.

Even in a willing and high-functioning team, this kind of redeployment will create stress. Your most important steps to manage this stress are to:

• Celebrate agility, experimentation, and essentialism over perfection.
• Make it clear what existing tasks, projects, and workstreams are suspended; conscientious workers will not easily lay down their current responsibilities unless you give them explicit permission.
• It’s possible that only you can see across teams, so they will rely on you to adjust cross-team priorities as new insights emerge. Consider deputizing someone as an interim chief of staff to help you integrate work across interim streams.
• Identify where you or other executives are a bottleneck to innovation and pace to market, and free people to experiment with less interaction where possible.

This is a great time to assess talent and take active mental notes about what you are learning of each team member’s capacity, especially new skills and leadership abilities. You have all been pulled into a “wartime” context — consider what skills and traits (like self-initiative) are critical in your team right now, and who has them. Raise up the most agile team members and develop their ability to run and build.

In the midst of all the concerns you have for your organization’s work, create space to reach out to others. Ask how you can be praying for them and serving them in this time. You’ll build their resilience—as well as yours.

One important (and countercultural) way to build your team’s resilience is to lead them in lament. Some of the world we knew is now gone. It is inevitable that you will be bearing not just your own griefs, but the griefs and burdens of others as you count the losses. However, as a leader, your role is to get out in front, and therefore, it is essential that you make the space to grieve now if you have not done so already. The sooner you can arrive at acceptance, the sooner you can provide direction and clarity for those in your care.

Name first to yourself and then guide your team in celebrating what you’ve accomplished and grieving what’s gone. As a leader, it will be particularly important to mourn the loss of illusion of control over your venture. For many, this will be the most profound lesson of this crisis.

Lament is not only about honoring and letting go what is past; it is equally about building forward. For an excellent discussion on the productive power of lament in times of organizational crisis, listen to “Creative Action Begins With Lament,” an episode of The Redemptive Edge podcast featuring Andy Crouch and Donna Harris.

5. Lead by naming.

Max DePree’s dictum that “the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality” is often quoted. When so much of what we perceive as reality is shifting, one of the greatest gifts you can give to your team, board, customers, and partners is not certainty (you’d be lying if you tried) but extra clarity.

The first step is to name your assumptions — about priorities (what’s most important this week?), about prototypes (what are we trying to test?), about customers (how are they likely to behave and what will they value?), about timetables (how long will this stage last?), about funding sources (what are the wins and losses?), about spending (what are the trajectories and scenarios?). Even if your assumptions are wrong, naming them is much more productive and empowering for your team than leaving them to speculate on their own. (Not to mention the fact that voicing your assumptions provides others the chance to inform them.) As you accelerate your cadence of naming assumptions, your team will be more responsive to what would otherwise seem like abrupt changes in course.

The essence of communication for a redemptive leader is to tell the truth — early, clearly, and often. Your capacity to be bracingly transparent is more critical than ever to your venture’s survival, for several reasons including these:

• Because it builds trust, which you cannot afford to lose.
• Because it speeds the change process for people, most of whom will not be able to process the change as quickly as you.
• Because it establishes an objective basis for the unpopular decisions you need to make and allows you to bring the team into the decision making process.

Identify philosophical shifts that the organization will need to go through in this new environment, and put them on “communication repeat,” since cultural habits and assumptions are hard to break, and people will not process it all at once. The farther from the center of decision-making a team member is, the more likely they are to lag in processing the magnitude of the shift; and the less personally they can carry the weight and impact of the change.

Telling the truth is about the good news as well as the bad. Remain convinced for as long as possible that there is opportunity even in the depths of winter; certainly many good things can come out of struggle and discipline. As you name the threats of your situation, be quick to highlight the equally real new opportunities to continue your mission.

6. Design for a different future.

Explicitly name the fundamental assumptions you had about your industry, geography, customers, partners, funding sources, and your team sixty days ago, and contrast them with new ones. Use these questions as a prompt:

• What was possible that may not be possible for some time?
• What was global or national that may need to be local for an extended time?
• What seemed important that may feel superfluous now?
• What was undervalued that may hold greater value now?
• What “margin” or “lack of margin” was built into organizational or industry norms?

Dial up your expectations about how severe, and how long-lasting, your constraints will be. For example, assume that gatherings of more than 50 people will be impossible for an extra 6–12 months beyond your current hope, or that your nonprofit’s expenses may need to decrease 50%, or that your customer’s 2021 budgets will be 50% of previous years. Much of what you learn and design under these scenarios will still apply if the constraints are milder or relaxed sooner. For example, as our team redesigns our core programs for the next year, we’re discovering that when we “assume the worst” about limitations related to physical gatherings, we’re arriving at design insights that we will now incorporate even if there proves to be minimal interruption.

As you progress from clarifying assumptions to idea generation and design, consider these prompts:

• What role must our industry play in national and global recovery?
• What relationships of trust can be built on and strengthened in the next few weeks and months?
• What do we consider our venture’s greatest assets, assuming that pandemic and economic disruptions continue for an extended period?
• What considerable long-term changes in the big picture of our society — new realities that could come into being during the ice age — that I would like to be part of bringing about through our venture?

Make sure you are both divergent and convergent when it comes to the ideas you generate and develop. Too much divergence for too long — an endless stream of new ideas — makes it hard to prioritize and understand what is essential, and feels like chaos. Too much convergence — eliminating ideas with an authoritarian approach — doesn’t allow team members or projects to show their possibility.

Don’t go it alone. We encourage you to be reaching out to your customers, funders, and stakeholders who all have a reason they’ve partnered with you through these prior years of growth. They‘re extremely busy—but they do want to hear from you.

We began by saying that your main aim right now is to survive the winter by building for the ice age. The path we’ve outlined will give you a fighting chance of organizational success long-term, but it is no guarantee. Many organizations will go under in the wake of COVID-19, and if that becomes the final act of your organization’s story, you will certainly grieve, get angry, feel guilty, and second-guess yourself. Those are all natural responses to losing something beautiful and useful, something you believed and invested in, something you cast vision and raised money for.

Later — a year from now, ten years from now — most likely you will think back and ask yourself these questions: Did I do my very best to act in that time of crisis, knowing as little as I did, with the resources that I had? And did I love and honor my family, friends, neighbors, team, customers, partners, investors, and donors?

The good news is that you can trust God, whatever happens. Your organization will survive this season — or it won’t. That is no prescription for apathy or passivity; it’s a green light of freedom to take action, knowing that in all things God will accomplish his purposes and has actively placed you in your position.

Remember, even if your organization survives the winter, it will end someday. As Praxis board chair Kurt Keilhacker is fond of saying, “Organizations are temporal; people are eternal.” The one thing we can trust about the future is that God will rescue and redeem all we have done, and all we have not done, to serve the persons who were entrusted to us.