Integrity Ideas are specific actions a leader can consider during the Re-Align step of Integriosity^®–actions that will begin to Re-Align the organization with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities.  You can find more Integrity Ideas at Integrous | Integrity Ideas (integriosity.com)

INTEGRITY IDEA: Pour a Foundation

A few people have asked if we were planning something special for the 100th Integrity Idea. We weren’t. What arrived, though, may be the most important of all 100.

Integrity Idea 100 is about when a faithful leader should ignore the first 99 Integrity Ideas–at least for now.

That may sound wrong. It may even sound irresponsible.  But there are times when focusing on “what to start doing” is exactly the wrong place to start.

“Pour a Foundation” is about pouring a foundation for the pursuit of faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing before trying to build or decorate the house.

Because without a foundation, even the right actions—done with good intentions—can take a leader in the wrong direction, detouring them from the ancient path to Biblical flourishing.

It recognizes that without a RENEWED understanding of God’s purpose for work and business, the pursuit of faith/work integration is at a much greater risk of heading down a faith as usual Side Road and missing God’s best for the leader, the organization and its people.

Integrity Ideas are practical actions toward implementing a bigger WHY for the organization.  Some are helpful ideas to consider as a faithful leader prayerfully discerns the best stewardship of the organization. Others may be important steps in the RENEW/RE-ALIGN/RE-IMAGINE/RESTORE process.

But without RENEW, they can quietly become another form of “doing more”—even if that “more” is faith-based.

“Pour a Foundation” is in the “necessary” category.

The Importance of Foundation

At the very end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned his followers to build on a strong foundation–a foundation of rock rather than sand.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.  And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.  And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.  And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.

In his book The Economic Awakening: Using God’s Economics to Change Your Family, Industry, Culture and World, author Scott Nelson emphasizes the heightened importance of a solid foundation built on Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities when pursuing counter-cultural change:

If we start to build before we are matured by this process, we build on sand. It is more important to be mature than to do great things. You can’t do great things in the Kingdom without being mature. Nowhere is this more important than in changing the economic system. This system which the Bible calls Babylon is the most powerful stronghold of our enemy and it funds the influence of evil in our culture. As the storms come, and they will come as soon as you start trying to do something for God, there will be forces that attack you.

We believe a faithful leader who wants their pursuit of Biblical flourishing to stand up against the rains, floods, and wind that the kingdom of the world will send, must build that pursuit on a RENEWED understanding of God’s purpose for work and business, as well as an understanding of business as usual, work as usual, and faith as usual.

Like the steps of Integriosity, in The Economic Awakening, Nelson lays out a framework for change that starts with renewal and transformation of the individual.

Kingdom-minded people are often focused on changing culture by destroying or disrupting the current system. In actuality, we don’t need to look at how we can eliminate or disrupt anything that’s currently in operation—we simply need to focus on two goals: First, we need to be transformed as individuals so that our hearts will faithfully steward what God has entrusted to us; and second, we need to use a different economic model to build a new system that displays the image of God.

The pursuit of faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing starts with RENEWING the leader’s mind and transforming their heart so that purpose–rather than performance–drives how the organization is RE-IMAGINED and RE-ALIGNED. Only then will the house be built on the foundation of a new and bigger WHY–a new heart for the organization.

Refresher: The Journey to Biblical Flourishing

We break the Integriosity journey toward Biblical flourishing into four steps–RENEW, RE-IMAGINE, RE-ALIGN and RESTORE–each of which lays the groundwork for the next. In the four-step process of Integriosity, Integrity Ideas fall in the RE-ALIGN step.

The nature of entrepreneurs and leaders is to “do something,” but jumping into RE-IMAGINE or RE-ALIGN before RENEW would be like going out on the field before you learned the rules of the game or the fundamental skills.  It is building the house and decorating the walls before pouring the foundation. Likewise, jumping into RE-ALIGN before RE-IMAGINE would be starting the game without a game-plan or framing the house without a blueprint.

As a refresher, here are the steps:

• RENEW:  This first step is about renewing a faithful leader’s mind about faith/work integration.  Renewing a leader’s mind (about things like business as usual vs. business a better way, God’s purpose for work and business and faith as usual Side Roads) builds the foundation for dreaming and planning–Re-Imagining what their organization would look like in alignment with business a better way.

RENEW focuses on a few key Biblical principles that we believe are the “first things” that a faithful leader needs to “keep first”–Righteousness, Kingdom, Love, and Humility.  Central to RENEW are five key “mind-shifts” that re-order disordered priorities as to the WHAT, WHO, WHY, HOW and WHEN of faith-work integration.

The RENEW step of Integriosity is exciting because it reveals the sacred nature of work and business.  It may be the first time a leader comes to understand the intrinsic Kingdom value of their work and the organization they lead.  Moving across the four “gaps” (Sunday/Monday, Sacred/Secular, Knowing/Doing, and Safety/Surrender) of faith/work integration equips a leader to see their role, their organization and all its people in a new light.  But there are several potential challenges for a leader going through the RENEW stage:

• Being willing to lay down old beliefs and doctrines (as comfortable as they may be), including some that may still be taught in their church.

• Being willing to honestly admit “misses”–Placebos ingested and Side Roads travelled.

• Being willing to embrace the increased responsibility of being a “steward” of God’s organization, and the increased trust needed for that stewardship to be “faithful stewardship” rather than merely “religious stewardship.”

• RE-IMAGINE:  This second step involves a faithful leader taking their RENEWED understanding of faith/work integration and beginning to RE-IMAGINE their leadership and organization aligned with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities.  This step creates the blueprint for Re-Aligning the purpose, values and culture, step by step.

The RE-IMAGINE step is exciting because a leader has the tools and the permission to imagine WHAT COULD BE!  RE-IMAGINE focuses in four areas: Alignment, Purpose, Foundation and Implementation.   The principal challenge is honestly assessing WHAT IS:

• Recognizing when a vision statement really doesn’t lay out a vision.

• Recognizing when values do not align with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities.

• Recognizing where the culture does not align with the vision or values.

• Recognizing where the “real” culture is far from the intended culture.

The product of the RE-IMAGINE step is a Re-Imagined Vision, Re-Imagined Values and Re-Imagined Culture.

• RE-ALIGN:  Re-Aligning is when a leader and an organization begin executing their Re-Imagined Vision, Re-Imagined Values and Re-Imagined Culture. It is where Integrity Ideas can help shape a Re-Imagined Culture.

The excitement of the RE-ALIGN step comes in actually beginning to implement change rather than just learning and dreaming–it is fully crossing the Knowing/Doing gap.  It is planning and executing change along several Overt-Covert Continuums.

There are five key ingredients for executing Re-Alignment: Flexible Approach, Intentional Leaders, Trust, Prayer and Patience.

The challenge of the RE-ALIGN step is realizing and accepting that Re-Alignment is a SLOW process.  A Re-Imagined Vision and Re-Imagined Values can be changed on a website in a matter of minutes; however, buy-in at all levels of an organization can take months (or years) and reinforcement is a never-ending process.  A Re-Imagined Culture takes time, and the amount of time depends on how ingrained the existing culture is.

We turn (once again) to the wisdom of Seth Godin:

A commitment, from the top, that this place is going to be different. The commitment is open-ended. It involves leading and showing up and keeping promises, for months and years into the future. . . .  This is going to take a long time.

• RESTORE: Restore is called a “step” in the Integriosity process, but it is really the product of the first three steps–it is the fruit.

The excitement of the RESTORE stage is seeing the fruit of leading faithfully through business a better way. That fruit can be seen in people, in the organization and in work relationships.

If you think of a flower garden, leaders have loosened the ground in order to plant (shared the heart behind proposed changes), planted the seeds (a purpose statement and values), regularly watered and fertilized (reinforcing the purpose and values through statements, education, reminders, reinforcements, rewards to achieve credibility, buy-in and commitment), and weeded the garden (eliminating forces and influences, such as disruptive employees or ineffective managers, that are working against the flowers) before the roots structure of the weeds choked the flowers.

In the RESTORE stage, the three bigger WHY’s of work and business materialize in the organization:

• People are Humanized

• The World is Beautified

• God is Glorified

CONTINUUM: People

The Integriosity model organizes “heart change” along six Covert-Overt Continuums.  There is nothing inherently magic about these categories, but we believe they are helpful in thinking about practical execution of a Re-Imagined Purpose, Re-Imagined Values, and a Re-Imagined Culture.  The Continuums are Prayer, Proclamation, Policies, Practices, Products, People.

Each Continuum represents an area in which leaders can begin to think about, plan, and institute Re-Alignment changes to the heart of the organization.

“Pour a Foundation” is on the People Continuum. It is not about organizational practices or formal policies. It is about a faithful leader taking the initiative to RENEW their mind about faith/work integration and God’s purpose for work and business from a Kingdom perspective.

COVERT-OVERT RATING: Very Covert

The Integriosity model breaks the Covert-Overt Continuums into six gradations—from Highly Covert to Highly Overt—that we believe are helpful in beginning to pray and think about what is most appropriate for an organization at a particular moment in time.

Most Integrity Ideas have one place on the scale.  Some can vary depending on how they are implemented.  We identify “Pour a Foundation” as Very Covert (An overtly faith-based action known only to the leader) because a faithful leader can pursue RENEW privately.

“Pour a Foundation” can be moved toward the Overt end of the Continuum by, for example, opening up the process to a larger group of management.

STAKEHOLDERS SERVED: Employees, Customers/Clients, Owners, Suppliers/Vendors, Community and Kingdom.

When we categorize faith-based actions, we also consider the stakeholders principally impacted by the action: Employees, Customers/Clients, Owners, Suppliers/Vendors, Community and Kingdom.

“Pour a Foundation” serves all stakeholders by laying the groundwork for an organization’s pursuit of Biblical flourishing as an end, and the maximization of Biblical flourishing impacts all stakeholders.

IMPLEMENTATION

We shared the importance of implementing “Pour a Foundation” all the way back in post #001 (The Foundation). Here is what we said back in January 2020:

We believe there are many leaders who are guided by the Bible in their personal lives and sincerely want to live an integrated faith life at work. They have heard about “faith/work integration” in a sermon or conference or book and genuinely want to pursue God’s purpose for their work and for the people and organizations they lead.

Sadly, many are confused or frustrated or even intimidated. Some have given up. Others think they are doing it, but they are actually missing the mark. These problems frequently are the result of hearing a misguided message, an incomplete message or a purely theological message (and then wondering how it practically applies “back at the office”).  Many fall into what has been called the “knowing-doing gap”.

Without using the title, we described “Pour a Foundation” as “going back to Biblical basics and then rolling up our sleeves to see how to actually implement them “back at the office” in a way that humanizes people, adds beauty to the world and glorifies God.”

We promised to use our blog posts to “explain the need for a different approach to faith/work integration . . . debunk the ‘myths’ that create confusion, frustration and intimidation, identify the “faith as usual” misses . . . and explain the path to Integriosity® and its fruit.”

One way to begin implementing RENEW is to go to post #301, which catalogues the prior 300 posts with links, and begin reading. Another is to contact us about engaging Integrous to guide you through RENEW, one-on-one. It usually takes 6-8 hours, which can be done in one day or broken up.

But as Hebrew scholar Dr. Skip Moen observes in reflecting on Romans 12:2 (“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind“):

[R]enewal is not merely a cognitive process.  It involves new thinking, of course, but it is not limited to mental change.  The whole person is involved; thought, action, and attitude.  In other words, Paul is calling for a complete transformation, centered in a major paradigm shift . . .. It isn’t simply a matter of making other choices.  We’re powerless.  Unless God intervenes, we can’t do this.

Dr. Moen notes that Romans 12:2 is preceded by the command in Romans 12:1 to present our bodies as a “living sacrifice,” and suggests that Paul’s ordering means: “Obedience comes before knowledge. Sacrifice before renewal.”  It sounds to us a lot like crossing the Safety/Surrender Gap.

RENEW is not just about learning something new—it is about becoming someone new.

To be clear, implementing Integrity Ideas 1-99 without RENEW is not bad, just like faith as usual Side Roads are not bad.  They are intrinsically good, but they risk missing God’s best if they come from performance rather than a bigger purpose.

And that risk is not theoretical.  It is the quiet drift to faithful performance serving a worldly purpose. It is the drift into faith as usual. It is quiet because everything being done appears “good” and may even be applauded by the church and the faith/work community.

We will wrap up with a final quote from The Economic Awakening:

If your foundation is not anchored on rock, the building you build will fall. All your hard work will be destroyed.

That is why a faithful leader must sometimes “ignore” the first 99 Integrity Ideas. Not because they are unimportant, but because they are built to sit on something deeper.

RENEW is that foundation. Pour it first.

PERSONAL NOTE (from PM): I recently began reading The Economic Awakening.  It is a huge book, but it is also hard for me to put down. Integriosity is about transforming the heart of an organization.  Nelson has developed a model for transforming the global economy.  Both are grounded in alignment with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities. It was reading the pages about the importance of building on a rock that inspired this post.

Interestingly, Nelson points out the limitations of transforming organization’s operating within Babylon.  It is the challenge we addressed in post #138 (Succession or Secession?).  Nelson observes:

I spent many years of my life working within Babylonian structures and trying to reform them. I was able to introduce people to Jesus, but all my reforms to the Babylonian systems went out the window as soon as I was replaced by a new leader . . .. Remember, organizations are artificial persons with a plug-in brain and heart, which is called the leadership. If the leadership changes, the “brain and heart” of the organization will change.

ESSENCE:  Integrity Ideas are specific practical actions a faithful leader can consider in leading faithfully through business a better way.

INTEGRITY IDEA: Pour a Foundation

A few people have asked if we were planning something special for the 100th Integrity Idea. We weren’t. What arrived, though, may be the most important of all 100. Integrity Idea 100 is about when a faithful leader should ignore the first 99 Integrity Ideas–at least for now. “Pour a Foundation” is about pouring a foundation for pursuing faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing before trying to build or decorate the house. It recognizes that without a RENEWED understanding of God’s purpose for work and business, faith/work integration is at a much greater risk of drifting down a faith as usual Side Road and missing God’s best for the leader, the organization and its people. In the four-step process of Integriosity–RENEW, RE-IMAGINE, RE-ALIGN and RESTORE–Integrity Ideas fall in the RE-ALIGN step. The nature of entrepreneurs and leaders is to “do something,” but jumping into RE-IMAGINE or RE-ALIGN before RENEW would be like going out on the field before you learned the rules of the game or the fundamental skills.  At the very end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned his followers to build on a strong foundation–a foundation of rock rather than sand. We believe a faithful leader who wants their pursuit of Biblical flourishing to stand up against the rains, floods, and wind that the kingdom of the world will send, must build that pursuit on a RENEWED understanding of God’s purpose for work and business, as well as an understanding of business as usual, work as usual, and faith as usual.  This begins with RENEWING the leader’s mind so that purpose–rather than performance–drives how the organization is RE-IMAGINED and RE-ALIGNED. RENEW is not just about learning something new—it is about becoming someone new. Only then will the house be built on the foundation of a new and bigger WHY.

COVERT-OVERT CONTINUUM (six Continuums for action): People

COVERT-OVERT RATING (several levels from Highly Covert to Highly Overt): Very Covert

STAKEHOLDERS SERVED: Employees, Customers/Clients, Owners, Suppliers/Vendors, Community, Kingdom

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Photo credit: Original image by Acton Crawford on Unsplash (photo cropped)