LEI Virginia Blog

posted on August 18, 2011—by Kenney Grigg
Stepping Forward: Positive Change or Status Quo?

In his book Developing the Leaders Around You, John Maxwell writes that “Leaders see what is, but more important, they have vision for what could be. They are never content with things as they are… Dissatisfaction with the status quo does not mean a negative attitude or grumbling. It has to do with willingness to be different and take risks. A person who refuses to risk change fails to grow. A leader who loves the status quo soon becomes a follower.” Maxwell defines the term status quo as Latin for “the mess we’re in.” 

The Navigators are an international Christian ministry founded by Dawson Trotman. People who knew Trotman recall that whenever he heard “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” his immediate response was “we need to do it differently.”

Reinhold Niebuhr prayed that God would “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Mahatma Gandhi encouraged people to “Be the change that you would like to see in the world.”

When I first started practicing law in 1982, the law firm where I worked was on the cutting edge of a new technology that was going to revolutionize the way lawyers did business: computers.  We had Radio Shack TRS 80 word processing computers that used 8 inch floppy disks! Today, those are most likely to be found in science and technology museums. At the time, that was a huge change from the days of memory typewriters, or the old days of manual typewriters with carbon paper. The idea that workers would have individual PC’s or laptops would have been a plot for a futuristic movie. The “Future” arrived in a few short years. You can imagine what would have happened to law firms and businesses that insisted on typewriters, and that resisted adapting to the changes in technology and accompanying changes in the marketplace. In today’s classrooms, fewer and fewer students even take class notes by longhand. A few years ago I was a guest lecturer in a class at the University of Virginia Law School. When I started to speak, I was suddenly aware of a scratching, clicking sound similar to sleet falling, or a squirrel trying to scratch its way through my roof.  It was the first time I had heard a large group of people typing notes on their laptops at the same time. It startled me. I remember thinking “how can they hear me with all the noise?”

Of course, change can also be negative. Unfocused, undirected, or random change merely for the sake of change can be negative. The sort of change that Maxwell, Trotman, Niebuhr, and Gandhi refer to is positive change that improves situations, individuals, organizations, communities, nations, and the world. Change that honors God and in some way improves human relationships and conditions is the best change of all.

Are we being the agents of positive, God-honoring change in our spheres of influence? Or are we just going with the flow, accepting the status quo as the world and opportunities rush past us?  Depending on our answers, we are either leading, or becoming followers, or stagnating.