Maps

love maps. My fascination with maps began at an early age, but I don’t remember why it started. I do remember looking at historical maps, topographical maps, hurricane plotting maps, river maps, military maps, and much more. All of them were interesting to me, and still are. But maps are simply interesting, nothing more, if you don’t have one essential piece of information. That information is often conveyed with a red dot or an X that says, “You are here.” The primary reason that maps exist is to help someone get to their desired destination, but even with the greatest map in the world, you’re not likely to arrive at the correcting end point if you don’t know where you’re starting from. (For those who have never used a paper map and only use the maps on their phones, it’s like turning off the location service.) The role of a leader is to move a group of people – a church or non-profit or any other kind of organization – toward a new, desired destination. A fundamental leadership mistake is to begin the journey without understanding your starting point. It’s obvious if you’re given a map without the red dot, but it may be easy to neglect your organization’s “starting point.” That’s one reason that a leader may be tempted to press ahead without this information. Another reason is that it’s not easy to define that starting point. In fact, it can’t be defined with just one point. That starting point is really the combination of a number of factors such as organizational health and leadership depth and past history and financial strength and much more. So as you’re wondering whether it’s worth the effort to find the “you are here” dot on your organizational map, let me offer one more illustration. If you want to go to Flagstaff, Arizona, it’s an easy trip if you’re starting from Los Angeles (to the west) or Phoenix (to the south) or Albuquerque (to the east). But if you’re starting from southwestern Utah, you have a problem – it’s called the Grand Canyon. I think it’s important to know that before you start the journey. If you need help defining your starting point, just contact me and we can start a conversation. ]]>