This article was originally published here by Praxislabs

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

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.

Please click here to read the full article on Praxislabs

For more information on COVID-19, please see our page highlighting some of the best resources out there for Faith Driven Entrepreneurs in this season.

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[ Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash ]