The Stockdale Paradox

Every year, the church leadership at the church I was at in Arizona went to a conference called the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. A few years ago, they changed the conference to a satellite conference - which meant that you didn't have to actually go to Chicago in order to attend the conference, you met at a satellite church near your own church, and watched everything on the big screens and such. The church that planted us hosted the Summit every year, which made it pretty easy for us to go.

I have to be honest - most of the time, the Summit didn't do much for me. I'm just not that kind of learner - to sit and listen to different speakers talk about leadership, take notes, and hopefully absorb it into my life. However, I found some of the speakers rather interesting - Dan Allender, Daniel Goleman, Tim Sanders (founder of Yahoo), and Pat Summit (coach of the Tennessee Volunteers women's basketball team).

This year, I'm excited, however, and I'm trying to find a way to get to attend the Summit: Bono from U2 is going to be one of the featured guests. I think it will be fascinating to hear what he has to say on leadership and the church. I wonder if there will be a profanity filter, maybe a five second delay or something ;^) .

If Willow Creek hasn't brought in Jim Collins to speak (I can't remember if they have or not), they certainly should. He's the author of the best-selling business books Built To Last and Good To Great. I have not read the first one, but I'm in the middle of reading the second one. Now, I'm not the kind of person who goes out, buys a bunch of books on secular leadership, and then tries to integrate human business management principles into church. Personally, most of it doesn't work. The main reason is that businesses are organizations, churches are organisms. Businesses are also mostly made up of salaried and hourly workers; the church is mostly made up of volunteers. There are some principles that just don't make the intersection of secular and sacred.

However, reading this book, there is a principle I would like to share with you. It's something Jim Collins calls "The Stockdale Paradox". The name comes from the life of Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest ranking officer in the "Hanoi Hilton" prisoner-of-war camp during the Vietnam War. Stockdale was tortured several times during his eight year stint in the camp and lived without "any prisoner's rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again." However, he did not stop being a leader. He attempted to keep morale strong in the camp, exchanged secret intelligence information with his wife, and developed a secret communication system within the camp.

Collins talks in the book how he read Stockdale's account of his experiences, and became very depressed reading of the conditions. He wondered how Stockdale could rise above everything against him in Vietnam - if Collins himself became depressed reading the story, even though he knew the happy ending (Stockdale was released, became a hero, etc.), how on earth did Stockdale deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?

Stockdale gave a profound answer when Collins asked him later on. "I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which in retrospect, I would not trade."

What is the Stockdale Paradox? It's simply this: when you accept the brutal facts of reality, but you maintain an unwavering faith in the endgame and commit to prevail despite the brutal facts. You can apply this in any situation: being the underdog team in a sports competition; being a business facing some severe problems, being a church dealing with hard situations, being a Christian who is going through unbelievable trials. You have to have both sides of the paradox to truly come out of a situation better than before. If you accept the facts, yet don't have faith in what will happen in the end, you have existentialism, essentially. If you have faith in what will happen in the end, but don't accept the facts of the here and now, you have a false optimistic "pie-in-the-sky" idealism. Stockdale says that the latter type of people were the people who died the quickest in the POW camp.

Think of the Biblical characters who displayed this kind of Stockdale Paradox: Abraham when he is called to go to a foreign land - he had the promise of God but still had to face the brutal trip there (wars, kings, fighting between Sarah and her servant, etc.) Joshua took up the mantle of leadership from Moses and was told that the land of Canaan was his for the taking - but he had to take it first, facing battles, defections, sin (Achan), and more. And of course, the greatest example was Jesus.

Admiral Stockdale died in July of this past year - it's too bad, on one hand, because he would have made a great Leadership Summit guest. On the other hand, he lived an amazing life: all because he decided to face the brutal, hard facts about his situations in life, yet knew that God would see him through to the other side.