Sermon Illustrations on Cooperation — page 2

Six Common Misperceptions About Teamwork

Teamwork and collaboration are critical to mission achievement in any organization that has to respond quickly to changing circumstances. My research in the U.S. intelligence community has not only affirmed that idea but also surfaced a number of mistaken beliefs about teamwork that can sidetrack productive collaboration. Here are six of them.

Misperception #1: Harmony helps. Smooth interaction among collaborators avoids time-wasting debates about how best to proceed.

Actually: Quite the opposite, research shows. Conflict, when well managed and focused on a team’s objectives, can generate more creative solutions than one sees in conflict-free groups. So long as it is about the work itself, disagreements can be good for a team. Indeed, we found in our earlier research on symphony orchestras that slightly grumpy orchestras played a little better as ensembles than those whose members worked together especially harmoniously.

Misperception #2: It’s good to mix it up. New members bring energy and fresh ideas to a team. Without them, members risk becoming complacent, inattentive to changes in the environment, and too forgiving of fellow members’ misbehavior.

Actually: The longer members stay together as an intact group, the better they do. As unreasonable as this may seem, the research evidence is unambiguous. Whether it is a basketball team or a string quartet, teams that stay together longer play together better.

Misperception #3: Bigger is better. Larger groups have more resources to apply to the work. Moreover, including representatives of all relevant constituencies increases the chances that whatever is produced will be accepted and used.

Actually: Excessive size is one of the most common -- and also one of the worst -- impediments to effective collaboration. The larger the group, the higher the likelihood of social loafing (sometimes called free riding), and the more effort it takes to keep members’ activities coordinated. Small teams are more efficient -- and far less frustrating.

Misperception #4: Face-to-face interaction is passé. Now that we have powerful electronic technologies for communication and coordination, teams can do their work much more efficiently at a distance.

Actually: Teams working remotely are at a considerable disadvantage. There really are benefits to sizing up your teammates face-to-face. A number of organizations that rely heavily on distributed teams have found that it is well worth the time and expense to get members together when the team is launched, again around the midpoint of the team’s work, and yet again when the work has been completed.

Misperception #5: It all depends on the leader. Think of a team you have led, or on which you have served, that performed superbly. Now think of another one that did quite poorly. What accounts for the difference between them? If you are like most people, your explanation will have something to do with the personality, behavior, or style of the leaders of those two teams.

Actually: The hands-on activities of group leaders do make a difference. But the most powerful thing a leader can do to foster effective collaboration is to create conditions that help members competently manage themselves. The second most powerful thing is to launch the team well. And then, third, is the hands-on teaching and coaching that leaders do after the work is underway. Our research suggests that condition-creating accounts for about 60% of the variation in how well a team eventually performs; that the quality of the team launch accounts for another 30%; and that real-time coaching accounts for only about 10%. Leaders are indeed important in collaborative work, but not in the ways we usually think.

Misperception #6: Teamwork is magical. To harvest its many benefits, all one has to do is gather up some really talented people and tell them in general terms what is needed -- the team will work out the details.

Actually: It takes careful thought and no small about amount of preparation to stack the deck for success. The best leaders provide a clear statement of just what the team is to accomplish, and they make sure that the team has all the resources and supports it will need to succeed. Although you may have to do a bit of political maneuvering to get what is needed for effective collaboration from the broader organization, it is well worth the trouble.

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J. Richard Hackman is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University and a leading expert on teams.

Political Enemies Would Die For Each Other

John 15:13

Chuck Colson was a Nixon aide and Watergate criminal who famously became a Christian. He talks about the first Bible study he attended after his conversion. Two of the key men in the group were Senator Harold Hughes, a liberal Democrat from Iowa, and Representative Al Quie, a conservative Republican from Minnesota. Colson said these two men had strong political convictions and they would rarely vote on the same side on any issue. But as brothers in Christ, they loved each other and would have been willing to die for each other.

Baptists, Ants and Swarm Intelligence

Joel 2:2

Perhaps a long-sought secret to the vitality of the Baptist movement is swarm intelligence, the “collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems.”

The most useful metaphor for Southern Baptists’ cooperative work heretofore has been the “rope of sand” introduced by James L. Sullivan in his short book “Rope of Sand with Strength of Steel” in 1974. This metaphor gained prominence in Baptist life and thought as denominational servants and theologians attempted to communicate to Baptists and others how things work in our convention.

Swarm intelligence conveys an upgrade in two ways. First, it is a biblical metaphor:

Go to the ant, you sluggard;

consider its ways and be wise!

It has no commander,

no overseer or ruler,

yet it stores its provisions in summer

and gathers its food at harvest.

(Proverbs 6:6-8)

Baptists definitely fit in the “no commander, no overseer or ruler” group. We are fiercely independent. All our churches, entities and conventions are self-governing and autonomous. Jesus is Lord, of course, just as God is sovereign over the ants. But as far as social and business structures are concerned, Baptists have no commander, no pope or bishops.

Second, Baptists are living entities, not inert matter. Ants are an improvement on grains of sand in this regard. Grains of sand do not have even elemental intelligence, volition or initiative. But ants, though not one of the higher life forms, exhibit amazing resolve and purpose. Ants get things done even though they are not hard-wired to a central command.

Ants (and termites and other life forms) circle the project looking for something to do. If they see a grain of sand out of place or a defect in the structure, they immediately go fix it. They seem personally responsible for whatever task they notice. There is scarcely any specialization. Every ant works on the project independently, and the swarm ends up building extensive and complex living quarters for the colony.

Small robots the size of guinea pigs are now being built which employ this swarm approach, and apparently they are capable of constructing significant projects. If one robot breaks, the others keep working without interruption. If a robot is added to the group, it does not change the dynamic. Like termites building tunnels through your house, these swarms of robots work independently and without central coordination or communication. One day such robot swarms may build levees or lay bricks.

Baptists are the ants of the religious world. Our emphasis on the importance of the individual may be our finest contribution to religious thought. We insist that each individual give his or her own answer to God. Parents cannot decide for their children; clerics cannot decide for their parishioners.

We insist that all true faith is voluntary. Hence we are champions of religious liberty. Faith at gunpoint is not faith at all. Freedom of conscience is the fundamental freedom. Each individual soul is competent to respond to God. The ground is level at the cross of Christ. And each believer is competent to be a priest before God. No place in the church is reserved only for the clergy. The church may worship, observe its ordinances, and conduct its business with or without ordained leadership.

All associations in Baptist life are voluntary. Each of our 46,000-plus [Southern Baptist] churches is independent and self-governing. Each of our state and national conventions is also independent. Baptists are a swarm of individuals and independent churches working on inspiring projects for Kingdom advance.

The key to maximizing the energy and initiative of a swarm is turning them loose and staying out of their way. Any effort to centralize control thwarts the whole system.

People have asked for years how such independent-thinking Baptists ever got anything done. We can reply: “Consider the ant!”

No Lord of the Flies Scenario With These Christian Boys

In 1965, a group of “bored witless” Catholic boarding school boys on the South Pacific island of Tonga, ages 13 to 16, decided to “borrow” a boat and escape to Fiji, which was 500 miles away, and maybe even to New Zealand.

As any parent of any teenage boy will tell you, their plans aren’t always fully thought-through. Such was the case with these boys. They set sail without a map or a compass. Caught in a storm, they drifted at sea for eight days before landing on an uninhabited island where they stayed, lost and thought dead, for fifteen months, before they were found.

The story may remind you of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, in which a group of stranded boys quickly descend into debauchery and violence. But in this case, life did not imitate art. As Dutch historian Rutger Bregman recounted in an article in the Guardian last week, the Tongan boys turned the uninhabitable island into a functioning and decent community, complete with food production, workout facilities, a permanent fire, and religious services–all of which was constructed using, as he put it, “an old knife blade and much determination.”

Even more impressive than the physical infrastructure was the social stability. As Bregman put it, “The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty.” Whenever there were disagreements and quarrels, instead of dropping a rock on “Piggy” (as they did in the novel), these boys imposed “a time-out” policy to let tempers cool.

How did these boys so thoroughly confound expectations? In the article, Bregman seems to suggest that fruitful cooperation comes naturally to most people. Instead of Golding’s dark assumptions about human nature in Lord of the Flies, we should instead “always look for what is good and positive in people,” and then expect to find it.

Unfortunately, Bregman’s interpretation of these events has two big problems. First, he assumes these boys from Tonga are the rule and not the exception, which is a stretch, given the sheer number of counterexamples from the daily news. Second, though Bregman did note that the boys “began and ended (each day) with song and prayer” and attended a “strict Catholic school,” he seems to miss the obvious connection between their formation and their behavior. Instead, he adopts a form of the “noble savage” thesis, as if how these boys behaved resulted from their inherent nature, not their schooling.

Of course, private religious education is certainly no guarantee against a Lord of the Flies descent to debauchery. As product of such an institution myself, I doubt the ending would have been nearly as happy if I were among their lot. And, to quote the greatest boys movie ever (“The Sandlot”), these boys got themselves in this “pickle” by stealing a boat. Still, not only did they survive, they nobly found ways to live together.

Did all that come from inside? Or was it put there?

I’m convinced that the best opening line in history is by C. S. Lewis’s in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” In selfish, snotty-nosed Eustace, Lewis personified how malforming and narcissistic, in both habit and pedagogy, education can be, especially when it encourages students to “look inside,” “express themselves,” and “be whoever they want to be.” He fully articulated his complaints about modern education in the essay, “The Abolition of Man,” which might have the best closing line in history: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Does anyone actually think that a bunch of Eustaces, lost on an island without any laws or food or authority figures, could yield such impressive results?

Underneath the story of these real-life boys from Tonga is the fact that they were formed, at their boarding school and likely elsewhere too, by a Christian faith and worldview. As scholar and author Anthony Esolen wrote on Facebook in response to this story, “religious faith is the strongest bond for any human society, especially when times are tough. Both of these truths are eminently borne out by all that we know about human cultures . . .”

What’s more, religious faith socializes young men. As Ravi Zacharias has often noted, if you found yourself in a dark alley late at night, with a group of rough-looking, burly young men walking swiftly toward you, would you feel better knowing they were coming from a Bible study?

The Catholic schoolboys from Tonga weren’t angels, but their religious background had shaped them in profound ways. They found ways to cooperate when times were tough because they were given resources to recognize and govern their own fallen natures. Without these resources, humans quickly devolve into our own devices. It’s either Eustace or Lord of the Flies. To miss this connection between faith and virtue, is an oversight almost as big as setting off in a stolen boat without a map or compass.

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Resources:

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months,” by Rutger Bregman, The Guardian, May 9, 2020.

“Is There Still a Place for Boys?” by John Stonestreet & Shane Morris, BreakPoint, February 6, 2020.

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Requires teamwork

Successful marriages require teamwork: On the farm, the best field work was done with a team of horses that were equally matched. With both horses pulling together and equally sharing the weight of the load, the plow struck a straight furrow.

Working together

Genesis 11:5

Christine Schultz wrote, "In 1770, Samuel Forbes was building a house in

Canaan, Connecticut. During that time he fell in love with a young woman

named Lucy Pierce. It was a good match, for she equaled him in physique and

strength of will. She also loved him. One night the two rode off to New

York state - as the story goes, on the same unhappy horse - and were married.

When they arrived back at their new home in Connecticut, Samuel took a long

rope and there one end over the barn.

'Now, my sweet,' he reportedly said to his bride, 'you draw down on your

end and I will draw on mine, and whichever draws the other over the roof is

to rule the roost.'

They both tugged hard. Nothing happened.

'Now, my sweet,' Samuel called, 'you come around on this side, and let us

draw together.'

Lucy complied. Together they pulled the rope over the barn.

'Let that be the way his house will be run.' declared Samuel. And

apparently it was."

Pulling together is what team work is all about. It begins in the home.

Pulling together is the key to making things work; whether that be at home.

on the job, or whatever we do.

The Lord teaches us the importance of pulling together when he made the

statement. "Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every

city or household divided against itself will not stand." Mat. 12:25.

In Genesis 11:5-7, we see the possibilities when men pull together and have

common goals. Even things which may not be so noble in character have been

accomplished by people when they pooled their resources and pulled together.

Think about it! What this could do for our homes, our church, and our

community. How sweet our environments could all become, all by simply

"pulling together".

Why Can't You Guys Get Organized?

In a PEANUTS comic strip, Lucy demands that Linus change the channel on the TV and then threatens him with her fist if he doesn’t.

“What makes you think you can walk right in here and take over?” asks Linus.

“These five fingers,” says Lucy. “Individually they’re nothing but when I curl them together like this into a single unit, they form a weapon that is terrible to behold.”

“Which channel do you want?” asks Linus.

Turning away, he looks at his fingers and says, “Why can’t you guys get organized like that?”

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Bruce Shelley, WHAT IS THE CHURCH, p. 38

Becoming An Enlarger

Before the NBA ever heard of Shaquille O'Neal, Dikembe Mutombo or Tim Duncan; back before anyone knew the name Hakeem Olajuwon; in the days before Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ruled the hardwoods, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell changed the nature of professional basketball with the way they played the center position.

Chamberlain was a great scorer and Russell was known more for his defense, but no matter which end of the court they were on, they played above the rim like no centers before them ever had.

Russell, however, is best known not for his offense or his defense but for something else - winning. His No. 6 jersey was retired by the Boston Celtics in 1972 to honor his contributions as the anchor to teams that won nine consecutive NBA titles. He added two more titles as a player/coach.

Here is what he said about great team players: “The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I'd made my teammates play.”

One of the qualities of a great team player, you see, is that they enlarge others. Bill Russell isn't just a large man; he's a man who enlarged others. He made them better.

Here are five characteristics of people who enlarge others.

1. Enlargers value their teammates.

When you think about your teammates, place a “10” on their heads. If we think of others as 10s, we'll do everything to add value to them. Our behavior is totally different when we think of someone else as a two. Seeing others in the very best light makes the entire team better because usually our level of performance equals the level of value placed on us.

2. Enlargers know and relate to what their teammates value.

Here's how you can tell if you value people: Do you value people who won't benefit you or only those who might contribute in some way to your success? Great team players truly value others as people, and they know and relate to what others value.

When I want to know and relate to others, I look for five things. I want to know their dreams, values, skills, attitudes and life questions. We all have questions, by the way. If you can find the pathway to a person's questions, you can always find the pathway to a person's heart.

3. Enlargers add value to their teammates.

Whatever the project, task or situation, enlargers find ways to make others around them better because they approach life as a win/win situation. They realize that making others better isn't just better for others, it's better for everyone. As the old adage goes, a rising tide lifts all boats.

4. Enlargers make themselves more valuable.

You cannot give what you do not have, so self-improvement precedes team improvement. The first step toward improving the team is to improve yourself. The only way I can keep leading is to keep growing.

The greatest way that I can add value to my team is to make myself more valuable. If I can become a better player, if I can continually increase my skills, if I can continually become enlarged within myself, then I have the capacity to enlarge others. Too many people are still trying to give what they learned fifteen years ago, and they're in trouble.

5. Enlargers initiate.

Enlargers believe in others before they believe in themselves, serve others before they serve themselves, and add value to others before they add value to themselves. See the common thread? The word “before.”

They have the ability to see potential in another person before they even see potential within themselves. They have the ability to start action. They have the ability to start belief. They are initiators.

Initiate. Enlarge. Be a great team player.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #15885]

Learning To Lead

John 17:23

My wife and I were in Sydney, Australia, and we had an opportunity to attend a performance of the Sydney Philharmonic Orchestra at the famed Opera House... When we arrived thirty minutes early, the orchestra members were already warming up... As they warmed up, the music sounded like noise to me.

At one minute before eight the conductor walked onto the stage. Immediately everybody sat up straight. As he stepped onto the riser, everybody came to attention. At eight o'clock he raised the baton, and when his arms came down, the music started. What had been noise a few seconds earlier became a beautiful melody.

The orchestra leader had converted a team of all-stars to an all-star team... No one instrument dominated any other; rather, each harmonized with and became part of the others.

The conductor had, for a number of years, been a musician in an orchestra. He had learned to be obedient and follow the orchestra conductor when he was a performer. In short, he had learned to obey so that later he could command.

I once saw a young man with a T-shirt emblem proclaiming, "I follow no one." What a tragedy! Because until he learns to follow, he will never be able to lead.

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59 Sermon Illustrations on Cooperation