Transcript: 5 Reasons Why Long-Range Planning Doesn't Work and How to Shift into Opportunity Leadership // Roger Parrott, Belhaven University

The Flourishing Culture Podcast Series

“5 Reasons Why Long-Range Planning Doesn't Work and How to Shift into Opportunity Leadership“

June 20, 2022

Roger Parrott

Intro: Do you feel your organization’s approach to strategic planning is inflexible and ineffective? Do you feel like you’re missing untapped opportunities? Well, listen in as today’s guest suggests a new counterintuitive approach to traditional planning, an approach that shows you how unexpected opportunities may be the key to your future success.

Al Lopus: Hi, I'm Al Lopus, and you're listening to the Flourishing Culture Podcast, where we help you create a flourishing workplace. The problem employers are facing today is that more of our employees are quitting than ever before. Some people are calling this the great resignation. And now with millions of open jobs, how can churches, Christian non-profits, and Christian-owned businesses face this tidal wave of resignations while attracting new, outstanding talent? And we know that having a flourishing workplace with fully engaged employees is the solution. I'll be your guide today as we talk with a thought leader about key steps that you can take to create a flourishing workplace culture.

So, now let's meet today's special guest.

There's a leadership adage that says if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But what if there's a different paradigm of leadership that embraces the need to be flexible rather than strictly adhering to a plan? Certainly, the future we lead into will not look like the past, which impacts our ability to plan. Today's podcast might challenge our thinking and practices, but it will also give us some insight into opportunities and possibilities that God brings our way.

I'm delighted to welcome Roger Parrott, who's the president of Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. Roger has a deep experience in leadership in college settings, and he also is the author of several leadership books. Today, we'll focus on what he calls opportunity leadership, based on his recent book of that title.

Roger, welcome back to the Flourishing Culture Podcast.

Roger Parrott: Thank you, Al. It's great to be with you, and what a treat. And you and I have a lot of history. You've been on our campus to speak to all of our faculty, and of course, we've been through Best Christian Workplaces several times, showed us some really good things we need to fix, and other times we just celebrated. So, I appreciate the work you do to help all of us be stronger to honor the Lord in how we operate. So thank you for what you do, and it’s a treat to be with you today.

Al: Well, thanks for your leadership, Roger. And I'll say, also, I remember we did a workshop together at the CCCU Presidents Conference one year and highlighting how to create a best Christian workplace.

But, you know, Roger, some of our listeners may not be familiar with Belhaven, and share with them some of the distinctive qualities of Belhaven and why you've spent so much of your career in leadership in higher education.

Roger: Yeah. You know, we're in Jackson, Mississippi. I've been here as president 27 years, 33 years the university president. I think I'm the longest-serving president in the CCCU, but I love it every day, and it's terrific.

Belhaven is unique in a lot of ways. We are exceptional in the arts. We are the only Christian university in the world that is nationally accredited, which is a big deal, in all four of the major arts: music, theater, visual art, and dance. And then we also have creative writing with—one of our famous alumnae is Angie Thomas, who wrote The Hate U Give, which has been on the New York Times’ bestseller list for, I think, three years. And film and some others. So the arts is a big part of who we are. It's a wonderful campus, about 1200 traditional students. And then we've got a whole bunch of master's degrees online and two doctoral programs online as well in education and business. You know, we've branched out. We even offer a doctorate of education in China, in Mandarin, fully online. So God’s given us some very unique opportunities and kind of a place to serve here in the heart of the Deep South.

You know, this is a different time for education. So we're doing some unique things. I'm not sure I've even told you in other settings about this. We're doing a deal for our students that I really want them to do a double major, because I think they’d be broadly educated and prepared. It’s going to be better. And so we've done a thing that if they do a double major and it goes into their fifth year, they come tuition free. And that's been really popular.

And then another thing we did when COVID hit, I thought, “We've got to do something to help these students have some expectation for the future because they're discouraged with COVID and all. They're missing so much.” And so we're giving every student who comes a free master's degree after they graduate. And they’re all online. We've got, like, 22 master's degrees, and they could all take them online, and they can take them right after they graduate or ten or 20 years later.

So, you know, I think it's a time for education to think differently about—

Al: Yeah.

Roger: —how we help families and help students, and so we're trying to be creative and make that happen. And we're seeing it in enrollment and excitement for the future.

Al: Oh, that's fantastic. Great examples. You know, many colleges, ministries, and even Christian-led businesses are using a strategic planning model, and I particularly see this in Christian higher ed. And boards seem to like seeing organizational leaders present, let's say, five-year plans. You know, sometimes it's three years; sometimes it's five years; sometimes in the context of even ten years. But why do you advocate a different way of leadership? And I've heard you present this in a workshop. What’s the problem with long-range planning?

Roger: Yeah. I'm an advocate of getting rid of long-range planning entirely, for two reasons. One is it doesn't work. It doesn't work. And the softball example is anybody who had COVID—I mean, anybody who had a plan three years ago doesn't have one now, because nobody had COVID in their plan. Zero. But over and over and over again, we see how the plans we laid out, the world doesn't work that way. Growth doesn't happen in smooth, systematic upticks. The planning does not work. But more importantly than that, we are settling for less than God's best by planning. We are taking what we think will stretch us a little bit, what we think’s a good trust for the future, but it's minimal compared to what God really wants to do with us if we get out of the way and let Him guide us.

And so, you know, I outlined the book kind of eight limits of long-range planning. One is we aim for targets we can hit. If we were probably a dozen years into planning, I did an exercise with my board, and I took my document, and I said, top of it said “five-year plan.” And it was increase enrollment 43% and raise $21 million, which was for us a lot of money; and $31 million of new buildings; seven new undergraduate programs; eight new graduate programs. And the longer board members figured out what I was doing, but the illustration was that was not the plan for the coming five years. That was what we'd actually done the previous five years.

Now, the difference being, if previous five years ago I had taken them that plan, we would have cut that back down to what we thought were manageable targets, and all that would have been about half of what it is now. And so, you know, we are trying to say, “Let's get that planning out of the way, and let's trust God to guide us into targets that are really of His direction, not limited by the best we can come up with around conference tables.”

The second thing that it does is it homogenizes our strengths. When we talk about planning, I mean, yeah, we can say we're going to look at our, you know, SWOT analysis, but we don't. We really focus on what we don't have, and we homogenize our strengths. And so what I'm trying to say is, you know, Belhaven is exceptional in the arts. But if we'd laid that out in a plan and said, “We're going to put a whole bunch of money and a whole bunch of energy into the arts, and STEMs not going to have what they need, and football still aren't going to have the kind of facility they need,” and all that kind of stuff, that never would have gone forward. But instead, by trusting God for opportunities, we were able to go faster.

And then, I think I started to say it focuses on our deficiencies. We can say we'll do a SWOT analysis, and we can look at all our strengths and weaknesses, but we don't really. Planning focuses on deficiency. It focuses on what we don't have. Opportunity leadership focuses on what we do have. What are our mission, our strengths, and our capacity? What can we make happen if God would bless it and let it happen?

And then, I think, fourthly, it's empty productivity. We spend a lot of time in planning meetings. Organizations do strategic planning. Board meetings going through these things, fine-tuning them, making sure everybody's happy, and they don't move the dial. Nothing significant happens out of them.

And I think the fifth reason is we set unrealistic expectations. We have this perfection of the future. If we just execute this plan, everything's going to be great. Well, life doesn't work that way. And over and over and over again, you know, I think one of the big hidden secrets or difficulties of planning is we never go back and report how they actually came out. And, you know, we go to donors when we announce a plan or a board, we announce the plan, “This is going to be great. Here's where God's going to go.” Well, why didn't we go back five years and report what actually happened? Because we're embarrassed it didn't come out the way we expected it to come out.

So it sets unrealistic expectations. It delays decisions. Decisions don't have to take as long as we think they do. I think it limits dialog. People tell me, “Well, if you get rid of the planning structure, how are you going to have the discussion?” I got more discussion on my campus ever about our future than we had when we had a planning structure. And then, lastly, it focuses on contrived numbers. Everybody's got a strategic plan for what they're going to be in 2030. How come nobody's got a plan for 2031 or 2029? Because we contrived the numbers to fit around, we're going to raise 10 million or 100 million, or reach a thousand, or whatever it may be. And that's fine. That's marketing. There's nothing wrong with that. Those are tools to help communicate complex ideas. But that is not planning.

And so we've got all these limitations. And then you've got the board's pressure and the donors’ pressure and all. I'm just laying out—

Al: Yeah.

Roger: —a prescription. It doesn’t work. We can do a lot better, and I can prove to you it works if you get rid of planning and really let God lead.

Al: Okay. Wow. You’re upsetting the applecart for a lot of people here, Roger. And so we've got them at the edge of the seat. It's like, okay.

You've used the analogy of a sailboat rather than a powerboat to explain the concept of opportunity leadership, and how it differs from a traditional planning model. So help us understand the fundamental difference in leadership models that you've outlined there.

Roger: Yeah. What I'm really focused on is getting rid of long-range planning—

Al: Mm-hmm.

Roger: —destination planning, what that future’s going to look like. I'm deeply committed to operational planning. We do lots of operational planning. We know we're going to teach English. We know we're going to play soccer. We know we're going to feed students that dine in Commons. We know we're going to offer a dance program. So how do we operate that with get the most out of what God's given us? What I'm saying and recommending is get rid of the destination planning.

And when we started this 20 years ago, I had to get some model to help my faculty and staff understand it, and God kind of gave me this image of the difference between a powerboat and a sailboat. And powerboat goes where we think God wants us to go, but it ignores the wind. And the Christian community’s gotten pretty good at building very impressive powerboats that go and turn heads and go where we think God wants us to go, but we are ignoring the wind in the process. Instead, let's be a sailboat, to prepare to catch the wind of God and go wherever God's wind takes us.

And so the difference is we're getting rid of destination planning, we're focusing on the best out of what we can get, and expecting that God will bring opportunities for that future.

And I'll tell you, Al, there are many times I sit in my office here at the beginning of a school year, and I wonder, “What in the world are we going to do new this year? I really don't know.” And then within weeks, they jammed us full of all kinds of new things that we never anticipated.

I gave you that example from the book about the enrollment growth and the money and all. I did that same thing this spring with my board just to make sure it still worked. And the list was even more impressive, but there wasn't one thing on that list that was even in our thinking five years previously.

Al: Right, right.

Roger: God brought opportunity after opportunity when we trust God and we get out of the way, because His plans are always going to be better than the best we can come up with around conference tables.

Al: And the world is changing so fast, isn't it, Roger? I mean, really, that's another thing that's coming up is the world is changing so fast. So, you know, a destination plan five years out is becoming more and more irrelevant, isn't it?

Roger: It really is. You can't get the benchmarks. I mean, you know, the economy’s up and down, the political system.  is a great example of opportunity leadership. And of course, the bad side of it's horrible, beyond horrible. But the good side of it is when we didn't have a plan, look how innovative we got. Look how much more in tune we got with the needs of the people we're trying to serve. Look how much faster we could move in the responsiveness. All good things happened. When we had to get rid of the plan, we were all forced to get rid of the plan, and a lot of good stuff happened out of that. And that's, when you live that way all the time as a Christian leader and you really live out the theology that you have, I call opportunity leadership a theology of trust. You have to absolutely trust that God’s in charge and God knows what's best.

Al: And you're also putting trust in your faculty and your staff, to listen to their suggestions, to let the things bubble up so that you can see where the wind is blowing. But this is really fascinating, Roger. Thanks. This is great. You know, we can feel the energy from the wind even as you describe it. I love it.

How about an example or two about how you've seen this work? That's what people are thinking. “Okay, so, I like your concept, but give me a couple of examples.” What are some initiatives that you and your team at Belhaven have taken to move forward by seizing opportunities rather than the destination planning?

Roger: Yeah. Again, some of the examples I give, and I gave a number of examples in the book because you got to show people it can work.

Al: Mm-hmm.

Roger: And the easiest way to understand this can work wherever you are, whoever’s listening to this right now, go back to the last five years, and count what was really significant in your ministry. How much of that was planned, and how much of that was opportunities? And I guarantee it was opportunities, over and over and over again. So, you know, you have to create a culture that can really be responsive to opportunities. And at the beginning, those were little opportunities. And sometimes they were a person that came along that we would hire, or sometimes they were a new program, or sometimes they were a friendship, whatever it might be. So little things.

But as we grew in it and as the culture transformed, and it really takes a transformative culture to get away from dependency on long-range planning, you transform that culture, and then you create an environment that ready for opportunities and really responds to that.

And a great example is four years ago I had a phone call on July one about an opportunity to provide an MBA in China to teach fully online in Mandarin. And we loved it. It fit with our mission, our gifting, and our capacity, which are the three benchmarks that I use and we're guided by. And that was July one. August one, we signed a contract. September one, we started writing curriculum. And we enrolled the first students October one.

Now, Al, you've worked enough universities to know they can't change a light bulb in four months. You know, we added this whole new program in four months because we had a culture that was ready for opportunities.

Al: Not only four months, Roger, but over the summer.

Roger: Over the summer. Yeah, the faculty weren't here, and the faculty never even voted it. That's part of the uniqueness of it. We had such a culture that the faculty were very accepting of it. And I had a great story from when we finally introduced it to the full faculty. We, of course, included many through the summer who had an interest in China or expertise. But we introduced it to the full faculty, and I told them, you know, “We've got to go to China, and we're going to go. You can’t go and do what we do here. We can’t do the deep discipleship we do. We’ve got to be careful. Get approved by the government. We’ve got to be careful within their laws.” And I said, “It's kind of like sowing and planting. We're going to sow the seeds, and somebody else will probably harvest them someday.” And one of my faculty members who's married to someone from China said, “You know, before you can even sow the seeds, somebody’s got to cut down the trees and clear the land before we can even sow, and maybe that's what we're doing.” So they caught this concept of opportunities aren't a start-to-finish product that’s all our responsibility. Let's take our role as God gives it to us, and let's trust Him for that.

So that's one that's been fun for us. Of course, the arts has been a big one. So many of the opportunities have come through a person who just came across our path. We weren't necessarily looking for somebody in that area, and it worked, and we built something around them. And I've got story after story of those kinds of things.

I think the bottom line is in the Christian world, we somehow think God has called us to lead this ministry, and He hands us the keys, and now it's my responsibility. And no, it's not. He's still in charge. I'm a good steward of it, but He's in charge, and I'm going to follow what He has. And I think the difference being that most Christian ministries don't really expect God to bring opportunities. They think God will help bless their plans, but they really don't expect Him to bring opportunities. And that's the difference for us. We really expect opportunities. We don't know what they're going to be, but we know they're going to come, and when they do, we’re going to make the judgments and be responsive that we can move very, very quickly to capture those moments.

Al: Now, Roger, you mentioned there are three criteria that you look for for new opportunities. Was it mission…?

Roger: Mission, gifting, and capacity. Yeah.

Al: Mission, gifting, and capacity.

Roger: Yeah.

Al: Talk a little bit about that because, so, those are, as opportunities come up, you have a way of evaluating those, and—

Roger: We do. And, you know, when you live in this world, you get a lot more opportunities than you could ever do. And it's kind of amazing how many come when you're sensitive to them. When you're focused on your plan, you don't even see them, because you're not feeling the wind of God.

Al: Yeah.

Roger: And so when you get rid of the plan and you're dependent on God for what's next, it's amazing how many come.

So what we look at is, first of all, mission. We've got to understand our mission inside and out. And in the book, I ask 15 really hard questions about mission because I think most of us don't drill down that mission. And a mission is not survival. That's not a mission. So what is that mission that drives us that we can uniquely do? One of the chapters in the book’s about staying in your lane, because it's so easy to be going the same direction as something else, kind of in the same kind of vehicle, and drift over to another lane, and in doing so, we lose, or at least diminish, our mission. So we've got to know our mission.

Then, we’ve got to know our gifting, and part of that is the people and what we're good at and what we're not good at. And I build a team of people who are generalists, who can adjust and flex. And we're changing job descriptions all the time and taking on this thing and taking on this one, or letting this one go. That’s another part of it is stopping stuff. Well, that’s a different topic.

So we’re looking at our gifting, and then we’re looking at our capacity. What can we really take on? What do we have the bandwidth to do in addition to what we're doing? And maybe something has to go in order to do that. So we're looking at that.

So when it lines up with all those three, we know it's right if God blesses it. But God doesn't always open those doors. We had one here recently we thought was a slam dunk of a fit, to offer education to students in the four major prisons of Mississippi. And we were headed down the path very quickly to make that happen. And we didn't get an approval from the federal government about something, and it stopped it. And, you know, there's a tendency to say, “Well, how do we call the feds? And how do we make this happen? And how do we push this?” I told my team, “Hey, God brings opportunities, and if He blocks an opportunity, that's just as good. God's protecting us. God's got something else for us. There's a reason why He doesn't want us to do that.” And we let it go within hours. We didn't push to say, “How do we fix it?” We just said, “That door’s closed, and that's fine. We'll go.”

So opportunity is not just about adding. It's also about backing off in order to stay within what we do very best that He's called us to.

Al: I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.

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Al: And now, back to today’s special guest.

That’s a great example. As we oftentimes teach people that we're in the discipleship process with, well, oftentimes, God answers our prayers with the answer, no, stop.

Roger: God's no is as good as God’s yes.

Al: Yeah.

Roger: But we don't like it. But often, His no is even better than His yes—

Al: Yeah.

Roger: —because He's protecting us from something.

Al: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love that example. Prison. But mission, gifting, and capacity, three great values or characteristics or keys to really identify, is this God's will for you or not?

Well, so I'm listening to this podcast or reading your book Opportunity Leadership. And again, it's called Opportunity Leadership: Stop Planning and Start Getting Results. And I'm convinced about the need to adopt this new paradigm. How do I make this transition? You know, people are, “Okay. I'm throwing away my five-year plan.” In fact, as we're talking, I'm thinking about where I was five years ago, 2017. This is coming out in the summer of 2022, so 2017 was five years ago. And I walked the Camino de Santiago that summer, so 500 miles across Spain. I had some time to think about the future. And as I look back at that, all of the premises of where I thought we would be disappeared.

Roger: Yep.

Al: And so any long-range plan I would have had at that point evaporated. So I'm listening with open ears here. But now it's like, okay, how do I make this transition?

Roger: First of all, it's the single best decision I've ever made as a leader, and it is freeing. I have such joy in leadership that I never had, because the burden’s not on me. This is God's name on this university, not mine. And if He wants us to flourish, we're going to flourish. If He doesn't want us to, He wants us to do something else, then that's fine. So there is a wonderful relaxation in freedom that I don't have to force things to happen. So, it begins there.

But how you do it, first of all, you don't do it abruptly or you're going to get fired. I guarantee you. Boards like long-range planning because they come out of that arena. Donors expect it. People assume the decisions take a lot of time. For a lot of leaders, this is how they visibly lead. And so when you take that away, what are you going to do instead? For a lot of leaders, they either raise money or they lead long-range planning, vision. And if you take that away, what do you do? And so to me, it starts slow. It starts by reflecting on the past; what have you actually done?; helping to embrace the concept, the theology behind it, because it is a theological decision of sovereignty of God in all that we do. It’s equipping a core team to really understand it and embrace it and the beginning to spread that out with some purposeful progress where you work off of planning; you don't just cut off planning. You know, you've got to help people to realize that the security blanket of planning that they think is a stability really isn't, and help them to realize there's something different instead. And so you've got to show that, you've got to build a culture of that, and that's where the art of this really comes in.

And, you know, as I've written in the book, there's not one way to do it. Every ministry is different. I’ve probably helped 50 different ministries walk through this through the years, and some consulting and other things to get there, because every one of them is different because if they can get to this point where the ministry embraces it, it just explodes with all this good stuff. But when you hang on to this assumption that if we get rid of planning, we're not going to have a future, you never get out of the grip. You know, when I first started talking about this, people, I'd make this, and I'd just talk about it, and I'd say, “God's sovereign. We're going to trust God for the future. We're going to go where He wants us to go,” and people say, “That’s great. It's wonderful,” and then they’d pull me aside afterwards, and they’d say, “Yeah, but if that doesn't work, what's the real plan?” And the real plan is there is no plan.

Al: Yeah.

Roger: That is the real plan. If you come to our website, there is no Belhaven 2030. It does not exist. And often I'm asked that question by prospective faculty or others, even the media, “What’s the university going to look like five or ten years from now?” And my transparent answer is, “I don’t know. But I do know that God’s got a much better plan than the plan we could come up with.”

So helping people to embrace that, to feel comfort in it, to feel participating in that, and that comes down to mission. They've got to be so driven by mission they see their role in this as not being included in the planning process, but the really heart and soul of the mission wherever they are.

Al: Yeah.

Roger: And, you know, it was a great story I wrote in the book about I was coming across campus one day, and a couple of my maintenance guys had dug a hole in the center of our campus. They were clearly fixing a water leak. They were down about to their waist, and then they were up to their knees in mud and water, and they're working. And so I come up to the edge of the hole. I’m headed to lunch, in my double-breasted suit and my wingtips, and I tried not to get dirty. And I lean over the edge, and I said, “Guys, what are you doing?” And they said, “We're educating students for Christ.” And I said, “Yeah. That’s it.” They are, because they know that's their role—

Al: That’s right.

Roger: —in educating students for Christ.

Al: Yeah.

Roger: So the mission has to so drive that the fear of not having the structure begins to dissipate. But it's a process, and it is a transition, but it can be done. And when it's done, there is no better way to lead, because we are settling for less than God's best by being married to our planning process.

Al: Yeah. Roger, when you embrace opportunity leadership, it isn't just something that you as a president or a CEO of an organization does. It impacts everyone, and from the leadership team to frontline employees. And here at BCWI, we're all about workplace culture and have employees who are engaged in their work. Share with us how opportunity leadership impacts workplace culture. You've already talked about, you know, changing the corporate culture. But what are some of the attributes of workplace culture that you need to create and emphasize where you're practicing opportunity leadership?

Roger: I think several things are critical. One is that so often in leadership we talk about what's new and what's the future—

Al: Mm-hmm.

Roger: —rather than what's the grinding kind of work to execute every day what we do every day. And I always want to lift those up. I want to build those people up. I want to know them personally. I want to let them know how valuable they are. Sometimes we can announce a new initiative as leaders. The only response they have is, “How is that going to put more work on me?” and to help them to deal with those kinds of things right up front. So everybody's got to see their personal role in where they fit with this.

But yes, if you try opportunity leadership on your own as a leader, you won't get very far. Everybody's got to embrace it, all up and down the line. And so because of that, it's a broader dialog. It's learning from people wherever they are. I mean, the people on the front lines have got a lot more information than some of us in the corner office, and we've got to learn from them. They've got to have flexibility and freedom to know they can have those discussions and those insights and criticisms that are helpful. It really is a culture-embracing concept of where is the wind of God blowing?

And what they find is—let’s take financial aid on my campus, a hard, difficult work; very technical; very, just, you know, it never stops it. It’s just one after another after another. But we talk often about how every one of those student engagements is an opportunity to transform a life. Every one of those is a moment where a mom or dad will feel differently about higher education because of how they interacted with them, how they explained federal financial aid and loans and other kinds of things. Every one of those is a transformative moment for a family who doesn't understand even the questions to ask about financial aid. So they see the opportunities God brings them.

You know, some of my administrative assistants, I tell them, “God’s going to bring you an opportunity every day I won't get, because somebody’s going to walk into your office. And how you respond to them and how you interact with them is either going to show godly grace or it's not.”

And everybody gets a chance to do opportunities, and we’ve got to understand that our most important work is opportunities. You look at the life of Jesus. How often do we read Jesus was headed some place and somebody grabbed Him, took Him someplace else; or somebody touched the hem of His garment; or somebody called Him someplace else; and He didn't go where He originally planned? And over and over and over again, we see that pattern. And we've got to free our people we work with to capture their personal opportunities as they work, and we're going to get so much more done. They may not get the same checklists done, but they're going to capture opportunities, really, because that's frontline ministry every single day. And our folks who are not in the corner office have a lot more options with that and moments when they can do that. They may not be big, they may not show up in the big report to the board, but they're going to be the things that matter the very most. And you’ve got to create a culture where people understand that, embrace that, and celebrate that.

Al: Yeah. And I love your point. We call this, connecting routine work with transforming opportunities, you know, where you're just calling that out on people. That's life-giving work. That's a key to a flourishing workplace, and that's exactly what you're calling out.

But you say that leaders need to be more like baseball managers than football coaches to create this kind of culture. What do you mean by that?

Roger: Well, yeah, as I was thinking about leadership and how this all works, you know, we've kind of gotten this “enamored by football coaches” as the model for leadership. And whether that's Tony Dungy or Nick Saban or whoever it is, you know, they are in total control of everything that happens. There’s a preciseness of what happens. Everything has a timed exactness to it. There's a team synchronization that they want to be perfect. There's a predetermined plan. But in football, you've got to win every game if you're going to be good, or almost every game. You might lose one and still have a chance to the national championship. But that's about it.

Baseball, on the other hand, rewards anticipation. It's reactionary. It encourages personal ingenuity. It's about flexibility. It's about interwoven purposes. Each of those players has a different set of skills interwoven in those purposes. And in baseball, you can lose about 30% of your games and still win the World Series.

So, you know, we've gotten this thing in the Christian world where we want to be so precise and we want to win every single time, we're never even taking any chances on things where God might have the opportunity to work. And I want us to be more flexible, take the model of a baseball manager, who’s in the dugout; who’s quiet; who’s kind of working as their players are the focus, not the coach.

And here's the distinction that really is interesting. If you watch a baseball game and a football game on TV, when the pressure's on, in football, the camera always goes to the coach, every single time. When you watch a baseball game and the pressure's on, the camera goes to the player. And we as leaders need to be putting the camera on our players, not on ourselves. And so there's a whole bunch of kind of similar and interesting contrast between baseball and football that I think gives us a better model for opportunity leadership than the kind of take control that we do in planning like football coaches do.

Al: Well, going back to where we started, with the sailboat analogy, let's get a little deeper here for our audience, and that is about spirituality. To really listen to God and discern what He's bringing to your organization, how do you as a leader attend to your own spiritual health and also encourage those on your team to be attentive to God and be able to discern, you know, what God is saying and how He's leading?

Roger: Well, I tell you, opportunity leadership’s helped my prayer life. I've really got to trust the Lord. I really do. You know? When COVID came and I saw students going home, you know, what do you do? And you start, really, a deep dependency on God. And I think that is one of the great benefits personally of this to me, that my dependency on God and really living out the theology I know how to preach and living it out every day becomes its lifeblood. You can’t do this if you don’t absolutely believe it to be true. I've seen God work over and over and over again in His time, often just in time, but it’s remarkable.

Then, I think you've got to be sensitive to, what is God saying through the godly people who are around you? because God uses those and, of course, Scripture and being, you know, systematic in study and those kinds of things are important. But it really—it's a spiritual plane on what you have to live. If you don't have that—this is not a technique. This really is a theology. It's a culture. It's an outlook. It's a mindset. It's not just a process. It's not a technique. And I'm not asking people to get rid of everything they've learned from Harvard Business Review or their MBA, but to add things on top of that, that really do highlight our spiritual values in leading, over what the world's taught us is the way to lead, which you can do pretty much without God and be pretty successful.

Al: Yeah, great.

Well, let's use the planning word here, but let's talk about succession planning. Now, that's a different type of planning. You're a seasoned leader, and God has been using your leadership at Belhaven in amazing ways for a long time, many years. So how are you and the board looking ahead to raise up the next generation of leaders for the university? And how does opportunity leadership work when it comes to succession planning, Roger?

Roger: Succession planning’s an interesting topic for me because I've been in this long enough and I've watched presidents come and go.

Al: Yeah.

Roger: I'm not a great believer of it, in formal succession planning. And that may go against what may be good advice. I don’t know. When the moment comes, I may feel differently about it. But I do take note that when the disciples needed a replacement for Judas, they had two good candidates and cast lots. So, you know, there is that. The Lord has picked out people. But on the developing leaders, I'm always looking at who we can develop, give people opportunities, let them grow, let them stretch, let them have the chances to succeed and to fail.

And my wife sometimes will say, you know, “Well, why’d you let so-and-so do that? You could have done it so much better.” And I said, “Well, you know, a couple of reasons. One is when I was that age, somebody let me do it, and I wouldn't have learned how to do it as well as I do now if they hadn't. And secondly, you know, I can't do everything. They've got to grow. They've got to develop.” And so as a CEO, my kind of guideline is I try not to do something anybody else on the campus could do. If somebody else could do it, I'm going to try not to do it. And that's hard sometimes because I like to be involved in things. But I'm hyper aware of what's happening. I'm not a micromanager; I'm a micro-awareness. So I know what's going on, I know when to interject, and I also try to know when to stay out of the way.

But you've got to help people and let people grow and develop because especially as organizations get bigger, we've got to have people who can do it and people who can take leadership. I don't run this place day in and day out. I'm a failure if I do. I've got to have people who really have both the ability and the push and drive and ownership to run it day in and day out. And I’ve got a super team because of that, and they've been with me a long time.

Al: Yeah. That's right. And giving people special projects is a great way for them to learn and grow, to move into good leadership roles.

Well, Roger, this has just been a fabulous conversation. Something for us to all think deeply about, and that is how we can get rid of long-range, destination planning, as you call it. Now, you're not saying we don't do operational planning. We're not saying we're going to just go into work in the morning and say, “Well, we're just going to let the Spirit tell us what to do today.”

Roger: Exactly. No, we’re going to grind them. Look, if God's given us a resource, we need to get every ounce of goodness out of that.

Al: Yeah.

Roger: It's just the future we're going to trust Him for, without our planning.

Al: Yeah. And I like the powerboat versus sailboat analogy. Let's catch the wind. Let's catch the wind of the Holy Spirit as He is guiding in these ever-changing times. And as you say, and we can have confidence. I believe that God will bring opportunities to us. But all we have to do, then, is be able to evaluate, are these the opportunities that He's actually bringing to us? and by looking at the mission and our gifting and capacity. I love your criteria for evaluation. And it's something if you're going to start leaders and changing from traditional long-term planning to opportunity planning, well, that takes a transition. And you led us through a great process to bring joy back to leadership through this type of an approach and to clearly to equip a core team to help in that transition planning, and creating a culture where people are giving input as to what they feel God is leading you to so that you can help evaluate that, and, of course, it is and it does, and that’s a beautiful thing about this. It causes us to have deeper faith as we really depend on God. It's not a mechanistic approach; it requires deep faith.

So, Roger, this has just been great. Is there anything else that you'd like to add now that we've had this conversation? What comes to mind?

Roger: Well, I’d just encourage leaders. So many are discouraged and overwhelmed and feel so burdened. There is a better way. This is not a new model of leadership. Now, I wrote it, and you know I'm enough of an academic that once you got into it, I said, “Yeah, this is a model.” And I define it, and I defined it as grounded in waiting and anticipation for God-given opportunities that mesh seamlessly with our mission, giftings, and capacity to propel us to destinations that are heavenly ordained. So it is a model of leadership, but I don't call it a new model of leadership. It's a real old model of leadership because of it’s a biblical model of leadership. And so it's really calling us back to the kind of leadership that God intends for us to have and to trust Him for our future and to really have the joy back, as you said, in leading again. So many are missing that. And it's really a shame because God has been so good to privilege us in leadership. It should be a joy to do it, not a burden to do it. And letting go of this planning changes everything.

Al: Yeah. Right.

Roger, well, thank you so much for your contributions today. And really, most of all, and this is a deep love of mine, I appreciate your commitment to equipping the next generation of Christians through your leadership in higher education, training and equipping the next generation of Christian leaders. And as you follow God to embrace the opportunities He brings your way, you're encouraging other leaders to step out in faith, to exercise faith, to catch the wind, as you say, as a sailboat. And so thanks for your time and taking time out of your day and speaking into the lives of so many of our listeners. I appreciate it very much.

Roger: Thanks so much, Al. What a treat to be with you.

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