Take the Stairs – Leveraging an Important Leadership Space for Innovation & Change
by Alan Howell
Director of Church Relations
Figuring out what the problem is and what to do about it can be hard for anyone in any context.
This is true in your own home context. But it can be especially complicated in a new place or organization where being in that host context means you’re also juggling additional factors like cross-cultural dynamics.
So, how can you diagnose a difficulty and then discern what to do about it?
One key practice is this: Take the stairs.
Don’t stay glued to the floor.
Don’t take the elevator.
Take the stairs.
There is often real pressure to solve problems as quickly as possible. And that deadline stress can cause us to skip or minimize the diagnostic step and move straight to action. Unfortunately, though, by not taking the time to ask questions, get multiple perspectives, and allow for alternatives, we can easily mistake our action and ambitious activity for actual advancement and real improvement.
In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, suggest a helpful metaphor for diagnosing problems intentionally. They encourage leaders to “get on the balcony” as well as spending their time on the “dance floor.”
If you stay moving on the dance floor, all you will see will be the people dancing with you and around you. Swept up in the music, it may be a great party! But when you get on the balcony, you may see a very different picture. From that vantage point, you might notice that the band is playing so loudly that everyone is dancing on the far side of the room, that when the music changes from fast to slow (or back again), different groups of people decide to dance, and that many people hang back near the exit doors and do not dance, whatever the music. Not such a great party after all. If someone asked you later to describe the dance, you would paint a very different picture if you had seen it from the balcony rather than only from the dance floor. (p. 7-8)
By moving back and forth between the balcony and dance floor, we can better assess what is happening and come up with more informed ways to respond. They suggest that “if you perfect this skill, you might even be able to do both simultaneously: keeping one eye on the events happening around you and the other eye on the larger patterns and dynamics” (p. 8).
While I certainly agree that we can and should improve our awareness of both “dance floor” and “balcony” perspectives, I’m not sure how realistic it is to assume that a singular individual can steadily do that split-level synthesis from a single field of vision. Trying to keep an eye on both might make you go cross-eyed or at least give you a headache!
When I picture this approach to diagnosis and improving systems, I see it involving a lot of time not just on the balcony or on the dance floor, but also time in that transitional space in-between - the stairwell. And while it may seem smart to minimize that time and effort by taking the elevator... what if taking the stairs and using that time in the stairwell is important?
Time in the “stairwell” is good for processing well what we're observing on the dance floor and from the balcony. And taking the stairs with others (not alone) is good for practicing naming what we are seeing, too. Whether what we are noticing are issues in our community, company, or church, we need to lean on our companions. We need to take advantage of the good acoustics in the liminal space of the stairwell to sound out and work through what we need to do and not do. We need live conversation partners for that obviously... and we need to leverage whatever other resources we have on our mental bookshelves to have with us in the stairwell, too. Getting input from multiple sources like that can make sure our stairwell acoustics are sound and won't turn into an echo chamber - a very real danger for leaders!
Bringing what we can with us to synthesize with others in the stairwell is certainly going to require a lot of stamina. Tod Bolsinger puts it this way:
To be sure, this work of looking from the balcony and listening on the floor is both exhausting and often confusing. It’s difficult to switch back and forth between the balcony and the dance floor. It’s very hard not to become defensive when you are a leader of an organization being observed, and even more, it’s easy to feel like all you are doing is running up and down stairs, changing viewpoints and taking in data without making any immediate progress. (How Not to Waste a Crisis, p. 50).
Bolsinger believes that “the balcony is where we disrupt the default to past best practices and counteract the quick-fix mentality that happens almost unconsciously” (p. 45). He sees the “balcony” as the space where the team sees the problem and works to solve that problem together – calling it “balcony work,” as “an iterative process of observations, interpretations, questions, and interventions” (p. 44).
Let me make an important adjustment to Bolsinger's suggestion, though. Instead of “balcony work,” I think we would all be better served by seeing this as “stairwell work.”
Framing the development of a change process as “balcony work” can cause a team (even with the best of intentions) to spend too much time removed from the dance floor and allow them to come up with ivory tower solutions. Christian missions, churches, companies, and organizations, have certainly made mistakes by spending too much time on the balcony. And we’ve also become so caught up with things on the dance floor that we’ve missed the bigger picture. What we need is to intentionally take the stairs. We need to leverage the stairwell as a liminal, threshold space for processing and diagnosis.
Kingdom workers often find themselves dealing with complexity and crisis. And we know that in an emergency, taking the elevator can be dangerous – instead we should take the stairs. Leading people through transformational change, will require spending a lot of time going back and forth from the balcony and the dance floor in order to innovate effectively.
Kingdom workers and those who support them need to not let deadline pressures lead to diagnostic shortcuts and blind spots. And when working with and for Gospel Movements we will need to find ways to get different generations into the stairwell together to process what we’re seeing on the dance floor and the balcony.
We should see time in the stairwell as key – an important step (pun intended!) to making sure that we are coming up with useful action steps (sorry!) that will help take things to the next level (ok, time to stop!).
For more on using field work tools to help diagnose problems, check out https://www.mrnet.org/mc-blog/2025-05
If you want to connect about what “taking the stairs” can look like for leading your team, church, organization, or mission point through big challenges and changes, please reach out to me at alan.howell@mrnet.org
Alan Howell