Aug. 25, 2026
The Surprising Power of Embracing Failure to Lead Through Rapid Change
In this episode, we explore how rapid change affects leadership and faith, why “yesterday’s logic” can fail us, and how humility, discernment, and a willingness to learn from failure can help leaders move forward with confidence. Join the conversation with Jenn Brown, Dan Blythe, and Lisa Pak to hear practical frameworks, real stories, and a vision for leading with clarity in a world that won’t stop shifting.
For more information and resources, visit: https://www.nxtmove.global/
00:00 Introduction: Leading Into the Future of Jesus Following
02:41 The Dizzying Reality: Understanding Rapid Change in Leadership
05:16 The Amateur Leader: Staying a Beginner for the Love of It
06:07 Life is Dynamic: Remembering God is a Living God
08:15 The Cone of the Future: From Probable to Preferred
10:45 Creating Safe Spaces for Failure: The Flight Simulator Principle
12:49 Yesterday's Logic Won't Solve Tomorrow's Problems
15:37 God's Preferred Future: The Ultimate Agent of Change
21:49 The Miraculous Beyond Hard Work: Seeing God's Amplification
25:45 Learning from Failure: Real Stories and Practical Wisdom
29:52 Embracing Imperfection: The Kindness of Learning Lessons
32:58 Closing: Hope in Jesus Christ for the Future
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Welcome to the Hitting the Ball You Cannot See podcast, where I get to have some great conversations with some incredible people about the future of Jesus following. So if you're new to the conversation, we were part of several conferences around the future, and then the NextMove community started having conversations about what does it look like to lead into the future. Yeah.
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which caused me to have interviews with a bunch of people and conversations. And we started a conversation around the book, Hitting the Ball We Cannot See. And Lisa, Jen, and Dan, that's with me today, they were all contributors to this conversation and are contributing to the conversation today in a big way as we're continuing the conversation on leading into the future. So it's really great to have you guys with me today. And I'm so looking forward to this conversation.
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Maybe just for the sake of people that might not know you guys and have not yet had that incredible privilege, let's do a quick round of introductions. Jen, why don't you kick us off? Yeah, great to be here, Yuri. Jen Brown served with an organization called One Hope and also served with an organization called Propel Women. Awesome. Dan?
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Thanks, yeah. Based in London, work for Alpha International, but in the youth department. And so I get to listen and learn from church leaders and youth leaders and young people from around the world. What about you, Lisa? I am currently working with Finishing the Task and Pastor Rick Warren, but also I'm working closely with Wycliffe USA. And my passion has very much been about mobilizing the marginalized, which include women. So, Jan, you know, we've been on some conversations together and obviously the rising generations.
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Exciting stuff. So as you guys can hear, incredible people that I get to chat with today, the topic today is really around this idea of the future. So hitting the ball, you can't see the metaphor of the book is that in life, in baseball or cricket or any sport, the ball comes at you quicker than what you can imagine.
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hit it, right? So your brain takes more time to see it, tell your arm to swing the bat, to actually hit the ball and get it going. But we still do it because we learn these skills of anticipation, right? We get to learn the trajectory and the likely spots. And, you know, we pick up on the trajectory and then we're able to do something about it. So it's anticipation over reaction. And it's the ability to have our mission above our methods. Those types of things is what we speak about in the book.
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But I want to chat a little bit just about the rates of change in the world. So before we kind of get into this, as each and every one of you are on the bleeding edge of reaching the next generation, of empowering women, of stimulating and empowering evangelism around the world, how's the world changing under your feet? Where are you feeling the rapidly changing realities around you right now? And feel free to jump in.
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Well, I think it's an understatement, right, that the rate of change is faster than it's ever been. I think that's probably the headline over the last few years. And it feels like everywhere we turn, I'm hearing that phrase. And I often question that.
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how much of that phrase we truly understand. It is an understatement in that we know that change is happening faster than it ever has, but I don't think we really understand the rate and the impact of that change and how it's unfolding right in front of our eyes. And so part of, I think, leading in a cultural moment in which we are leading is
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is to be a deep, committed practitioner of understanding change and understanding the rate in which it's unfolding. And so I find myself going back to the way I'm going to be
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the places of attempting to just understand as much as possible, ask more questions, be as curious as possible to be able to rightly, rightly place change in its context and then be able to discern and interpret what, what changes should I make or how should I be interpreting, you know, all of those things become really aspects of leadership now.
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But I love because that states the importance of it in a beautiful way, but it also states the emotion of it because I think it's dizzying. And you guys can tell me, and maybe this can be a counseling session for me, an intervention. But the reality is I'm finding it dizzying. I'm so numb to the rate of change that the…
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Recent events in the news has changed some plans massively in my world, but I'm just like, yeah, it's just the world we live in, right? But it's almost this numbness or dizziness in leadership of just experiencing so much change that we don't even bother to understand the change anymore sometimes.
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Yeah, and it's exactly that. It's being aware of the numbness so that we can do something about it. At the end of the day, we can become numb to grace and forget how powerful that is. My wife works in the world of anti-human trafficking and she talks about how sometimes she can hear story after story and it's easy to get numb. And that happens naturally. So we actually have to be really proactive in making sure we don't become numb. And like Jen said, that's about being a listener. I think for me, the way I do it is making sure I don't become a professional leader.
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But I'm always like a beginner or an amateur. The word amateur means for the love of, which means you do it for the love of. And I think as soon as you're a professional leader, you know everything there is to know. And you always give answers, but you stop asking questions. But I think if we're always a beginner, always an amateur, we're always soaking in, always listening, always learning. And I think it's that posture which we need in this kind of climate. I love that. For the love of, right?
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I think just hearing Jen and Dan, there's something about life itself. Certainly, let's start here. Change has accelerated. You just need to look at like the cell phones, right? Didn't exist when I was born.
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And then it went to that big blocky thing and all the flip phones, BlackBerrys, that died off. So and then now like my MacBook updates by itself. And it's just like every few months, it drives me insane. So there's something to be said for acknowledging that change has accelerated. And I think it also does us well to remember that the God that we serve is a living God and life has always been dynamic. Yeah.
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And we have this tendency to look at the past as if it was static. But I tell you the truth, when Moses was on the scene, things were changing fast in real time with what he had before him. The challenge that we have now is that it's not only our life and our episode or our chapter and our culture that is changing. It's everything else. And we're aware that it influences everything. And the church, I think,
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We like to hold on to that which is stable. Because again, I don't know that it's a bad thing. And it certainly reflects the stability and the steadfastness of the God that we serve. But He's also a living God. And from Eden until Revelation, Genesis until Revelation, like life on this side of heaven and on the other side, it pulsates. It's always changing.
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And I feel like we kind of look at history of like it was so stable then. No, it's always been like surfing. You have to read the currents and you have to do well.
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That's great. And it's when we gain that skill of being amateurs, of asking the questions, of loving it. And Jen's point about we've got to exegete, we've got to understand our world that we live in, right? It's the sons of Issachar anointing, right? They understood the times and therefore they understood what to do. We need that in our leadership. And, you know, there's layers of that, right? So there's the complexity layer and then there's the
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There's the complicated layer. The one you can figure out and understand. The other one is just beyond understanding. It's just reading the currents. It's feeling it a little bit. So one of the things that we've been discussing in the book is this idea of the cone of the future. So the plausible future and then the probable future and then the projected future.
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But then we're basically saying that trends, the currents is going in a certain direction. But within the certain direction, there's a moment where we could say that there's a preferred future, right? So there's a probable reality where things are going, you know, and we could speak about that. But then there's a preferred future and the role of leadership.
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is taking the probable and moving it to the preferred. Our role as leaders is to hear from the Lord, to see God's vision, to see God's plan, to read His word, and to go, this is where God wants things to go. Currently trends are going here, so now we need to steer things, right? With the rudder to the ship, the wind's blowing in a particular way, but we're able to steer it in another direction.
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How does that play out for you in the space that you lead? You know, so each and every one of us in our own right is leading, but it's hard to read the room and say, read the world, read where things are going and say, okay, how do I create a countercultural thing? Well, how do I embrace the technology that's out there to actually...
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bring about God's preferred future, right? So change isn't bad necessarily, nor is technology bad, nor is money bad. But all these things make terrible masters, but great servants, right? So how do we keep them as servants in our role as leaders to lead into the preferred future of God in the space? So why don't I pick on you a little bit, Dan? What does this look like for you?
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within the space. I know you're about to get on a plane to go meet with some leaders from around the world. As you're thinking about the world they're facing, as you're thinking about the change they're navigating, what does it look like for you to help steer them in this journey?
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They're very basic, but it'll definitely start with prayer. And often you can really ask the question, are you starting with prayer by looking at your schedule and your daily rhythms and routine? And if you say we're going to pray, but it's not actually in the schedule, then you're not going to pray. And so, yeah, we're going to be getting together and we're actually meeting in a retreat center, spiritual retreat center, which has this walk, this spiritual walk, because we wanted there to be a real spiritual journey
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dynamic to our meeting. And then when we meet together, there's a lot of build, measure, learn, ideation, what are we trying, what are we piloting, all that kind of stuff. But really, just big picture, my goal would be that we pray together, discern together, and then we try new things together with a big opportunity where it's okay to fail.
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I think this is one of the things which we really need in this season where we create space for failure. Now there's some things where there's zero tolerance to fail. When it comes to like our budgets where we're working with hundreds of thousands of dollars, you don't want to waste donors' money. When it comes to the time of a lot of our staff members, there's lots of things where we actually don't want failure. So for that to happen, we create safe spaces for failure.
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And I think about, you know, we're all going to be flying in together. And on that flight, you know, we don't want that plane to ever fail. But the reason it won't fail, hopefully, is because they've had seven years of training where they've had flight simulators and test flights. And because there's been so much training, the flights...
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you know, don't fail, the pilot doesn't fail. And so for me, we'll be coming out of this space together, telling the guys like, where are you actually going to try some things where it's okay to fail? So what is your flight simulator? What is the test flight? Because if we're doing that, creating safe spaces to fail, then we can learn, build, measure, learn from those spaces, and then actually do something which we know is hopefully going to succeed for God's glory.
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I love, Dan, how you bring together the mystical, you know, when everything changes, God remains the same, right? God isn't surprised by the future because He's in the future, right? So the reality is that He knows the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end. So I was tapping into that prayer process.
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spiritual focus, but then also designing processes that's change-proof, right? Processes that's able to, through experimentation, innovation, bring us through these changes to sustainable victory in the midst of it. Really, really good. What does that look like for you, Jen?
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Yeah, I think when it comes to change, a lot of how I've governed my leadership in change is through this quote from Peter Drucker, who is just an incredible management guru. And he says that the greatest danger in times of turbulence is actually not the turbulence or change itself, but it's to act with yesterday's logic. And when I think about it, it's so true. The greatest
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that as you face change and you're attempting to use your word exegete change, that your solution is going to be grounded in what your thoughts were yesterday or what made sense yesterday will apply to today. And I think when we think about a preferred future, there's almost an aspect of that that's
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probably prophetic, right? Like if we're sitting in a place where we're attempting to understand where the trajectory of change is pushing us, but also where do we feel like it should be going biblically? There's a bit of work in there that's not just like traditional leadership, but it is a spirit-led leadership. It's a leadership that's grounded in
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in the reality of today, but also grounded in the preferred biblical, preferred future. And I think where I find myself is challenging yesterday's logic, but then also really digging deep into the work of discernment and anticipation. So the degree that I can
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discern from the spirit, but also anticipate. It's that intersection between those two that I find myself consistently going back to, consistently going back to discernment and anticipation.
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I love how you're bringing things together from the ancient wisdom of the word to the eternal truth of who God is to the ever-changing reality of what we face, right? So it's not one of those things. It's all of those things. And I think sometimes we try and make it one of those things. But I really think there's wisdom in the model that you're presenting because it's not just, hey, we've got to be so heavenly-minded.
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but we've also got to be of earthly good. But we're not just of earthly good for whatever is good for society right now. We've got this anchor in the ancient, unchanging truth of the Word of God. And it's where these things converge that we're really able to live in the fullness of it. Lisa, you've done a lot of work in this space, and you've worked with leaders in different parts around the world around this. How does this practically play out?
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echo what I've heard Dan and Jen say as well about the operative word for me and that phrase, God's preferred future is God's preferred future. Because I think when we begin to idolize change, we like to see what we see as our preferred future. And that line between the will to power and that sense of discernment gets very blurry.
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Jeremiah 17, 9 will tell us that the heart is deceitful of all things. You can fool yourself into thinking that you are thinking God's preferred feature, but it is not. It is what you say it is. And you can whip up a lot of emotion and passion around that because you say all the right things in the right Christian way. Yeah. Yeah.
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That's where I think when, Dan, you were talking about discernment, like how significant that is. Because if it is the will of God, you will get alignment. God doesn't tell Chen one thing, you one thing, Yuri and Dan one thing, and have us all come together and just battle it out to see who's the strongest. And therefore, now that is a preferred future. That is not the way God works. So the leaders and the captains of the industry, quote unquote, today from the church, we really need to be praying about what that is. Because as you were saying, Yuri, nobody knows like God knows. Yeah.
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And God's preferred future may not be his future. The route might not be your preferred way, but you need to have the courage to be able to make those hard decisions, persevere through them and lead to that preferred future so that the rising generations can receive that which is God's will and not necessarily just what we want to see in X number of years because, hey, I'm going to be getting out of the C-suite when I'm 72.
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And so that's where I think the timing of things and the discerning of things, and you mentioned the ancient ways, and that just reminds me of Jeremiah 6.16. Stop at the crossroads. Stand at the crossroads and watch. Look for the ancient paths and walk in them. There are some things that are low bearing walls of the kingdom of God. You get rid of those and you will be setting yourself back generations. Good.
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God will let you because he uses our human free will. But I love what Dan said about discerning because there's a purity of heart in all this and the freedom to fail. God doesn't expect us to be perfect. And what other people do, whatever the world does, and even my mistakes, they do not thwart God's plans. And so the freedom to failure with the purity of heart, I think God, there's a lot of grace and mercy in how God will unfold this plan even through that.
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And so that's where I think the posture of leadership needs to be one of humility, alignment, all under the umbrella of this is God who's leading this. And no generation gets to say to another, I've got monopoly over this vision because you are as human as I am. And I have my own lens on all this. So let us look beyond that to what God is really revealing to us.
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And actually in all of what we're saying, one of the things we're touching on in chapter two of the book is this whole idea of part of, in a world that's rapidly changing, understanding what isn't changing is as important as understanding what is changing.
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So there's ancient paths, there's pillars, there's truths, there's God himself, there's the love and grace of God. Dan, your point earlier, those things are not changing. So we're not saying that it sometimes feels like we're in a world where everything's changing, but we know very well the things that aren't changing.
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And knowing what isn't changing and accurately knowing what isn't changing and accurately knowing what is changing is really key to this journey. And I think we touch on it. But I want to call out a paradox a little bit in what I'm hearing you say, because I think people might be listening to you hearing the same paradox and allow me to be an advocate for a moment. I won't say who's advocate. I'm Jesus' advocate only, but I'm going to be an advocate for a moment. But the...
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The reality is we're saying the world's changing rapidly. And then we're saying as leaders, God's got a preferred future and we need to change the change to get to God's preferred future. So essentially, we're saying that we're catalysts to change to a world that's already changing, right? So how does that work, right? Practically, if we're having fatigue and dizziness over the rate of change in the world,
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doesn't it make leaders work 10 times harder in trying to bring about change because we're bringing another component in right people are just struggling to keep up with economic changes and now we're saying well god's got a preferred future how does that bring stability and not further chaos uh in the journey and i'm asking easy questions today as you can tell so so any any thoughts ideas
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I think for me, Yuri, because I felt like I may have highlighted that paradox, is to recognize that the ultimate agent of change is God. He's got these markers in all of human history throughout eternity, and he will make that happen. Our job is not to...
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Our job is not to create the fruit, it is to abide with Christ. And in that, yes, it's changed. And we don't want to add to the chaos because God is a God of order. What we want to do is be able to discern and maybe if there's like currents of water, guide that in a certain way.
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And say, this is the path that the Lord has carved out. And I love what Joseph says at the end of his life. He doesn't know when Moses is going to come on the scene, but he's understood something about the will of God in his life and that it is not going to end in Egypt. So he says, you take out my bones. And then he...
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He's understanding that God will always move and he's done his part. Acts 13, 36 says this about David as well, that he did fulfill this purpose in his generation, then he died. And so that is a discerning piece where how are we as leaders today going to make and guide and counsel and pull together what God is doing rather than, as you were saying, hinting, doing the work of the enemy for him.
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and making it more challenging. God will win at the end of the day. You can either be a part of it or you can be passive or you can be against it. I mean, that's the way that I distill obedience. That's great. So good.
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Yeah, I love what Lisa just said, and I totally agree. Like, what we should be seeing in terms of the miraculous isn't a result of our hard work. So, like, the wedding at Cana, you know, brought the barrels of water, but Jesus did the miracle of turning it into water wine. The loaves and the fish, and I know we read these parables and stories all the time, but, like, at the end of the day, like...
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we just do our bit and then God does everything which is above and beyond the fruit, the visible evidence of God at work. And so if what we're seeing equals the hard work we're putting in, then that's not God at work. That's just results from human hands at work. Whereas with Alpha, we're literally just having the conversation with our team.
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compared to the work we put in to actually seeing what we're seeing now in terms of the amount of people doing it and the opportunities and the collaborations. This is the miraculous. This is what we're seeing does not match the hard work we put in and we have worked hard, but it goes above and beyond that. So I think in this area of change is exactly what Lisa says. It's like us doing sure the hard work, what is required, but then the results should be above and beyond anything we could possibly imagine.
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I love that. I love that because it's the, you know, somebody once said that if God didn't show up at your church on Sunday, would you notice? Right? And I think sometimes we've got high expectations of ourselves and low expectations of God. What I'm hearing you say is we've got to up our expectation of God and we've got to find those small levers, those small moments of obedience that God can amplify in a great way. Jen, anything you wanted to add to that?
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No, I think it's, I mean, I think it's a beautiful question to sit with and wrestle with. And I think the check to me as a leader, as I'm hearing this conversation is always going back to ensuring that whatever change I'm leading in or through or bringing about, that it's grounded in
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in a future that always is leading towards where God has always been leading, which has always been the resurrected life and the building and the growing of His body around the world. And so if the change in which I'm leading is,
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is grounded in that reality, then there actually isn't a dissonance between God's change that He's bringing about. It's actually, how am I in alignment with that? And then how do I feel like He's asking me to steward that change in an effective way? And so I'm kind of just sitting here challenged myself and thinking through, am I in alignment with where God has always been moving, His biblical orientation from the very beginning? Wow.
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And that's the safe place, right? Everything can change. If I'm in alignment with what God has for me, what God wants me to do, I'm good, right? It's the success isn't a number. It isn't a place. It isn't an activity. Success is obedience. And when we're obedient, He does that amplified supernatural way and beyond.
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things. I want to get real here for a moment before we start wrapping up. And I want to just ask the other side of all of this, right? So people are listening, that's facing real challenges and going through difficulty. And it might be that, you know, people aren't asking the big questions, they're asking the survival questions right now. They're not asking the significant questions or the success questions. They're just wondering how they're going to make it through crisis X.
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Um, I'd love to hear from each of you an instance in your story where you've tried and failed and maybe not tried and failed in the experiment where it really didn't matter that much, but you've tried and failed in a, in a big part, be it because of you thought it was one way and then the world changed under your feet, or be it because you thought this new idea was going to be amazing. And then you've invested time and effort into it. And then it just fell flat on its face. Um, yeah.
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You know, I believe the best way to learn in life is through mistakes, preferably those of others. So I'm going to abuse you guys a little bit on behalf of everybody that's listening, but
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We don't always get this right. We don't always get obedience right. We don't always get bringing about God's change right. We don't always get innovation right. Sometimes we fail because of this rapidly changing world around us. And what does that failure look like? And what do you do when you fail? How do you deal with failure in trying to lead in this world of infinite complexity and complication?
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But he wants to break the ice. Dan, you look like you've had a story. No, I can go first. I've got lots of things in the area of failure. I mean, one thing, which isn't even a thing, but like QR codes, when they came out, I was like, you know what? I don't rate them. I don't think they're going to take off. They're not going to be around in the future. And here we are every day scanning QR codes. So I was well off there.
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But a real one, I think, with the digital revolution taking place, what happened is instead of having meetings face to face, we went online. And then from online, we kind of went to like emails and DMs and WhatsApps. And Sir Albert Meribyr was a scientist and he said when it comes to communication, 5% of it is words, 45% of it is body language and 50%.
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and what he was saying is like, pretty much without the body language and the tone of voice, you're missing how to communicate. And what happened is the digital revolution took place, and whether I was responding to what people were giving me, I don't know, but anyway, I was giving briefs via text, and I was giving feedback via text, and it just got really unhealthy.
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And it just got to a place where no one actually could read my body language and turn it with my voice. So what I've had to learn the hard way is to make sure whether it's a brief, whether it's feedback, as much as I can face to face in a meeting, FaceTime so people can get my heart, my body language, my turn of voice, make sure they know I'm saying it to help them, not hurt them, trying to lift them up, not pull them down. So yeah, it was hard, but learn from it. And so now I would say we'd operate in a much healthier way.
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What I love about the example you're putting out there is it was an attempt to adapt to the world we were in, but the failure was not the change you saw. It was the parts of change you didn't see, right? So it's the unknown changes. It's not the things that change that we see changing. It's the things that change that we don't see changing that kind of has us miss it. But to keep on innovating, I'm learning from you to just say, listen, the horse is dead. Let's try something
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keep adapting in the journey. I think one of the I'll have two thoughts, but I think one of the like, easiest way to swallow failure, I can use that is, is actually to prepare and plan to fail ahead of time. So like creating the environment that can absorb failure when it comes actually helps you in the long run. So what do I mean by that? Like,
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What's, what's, what's terrible and cringy about a failure is when you just didn't anticipate, you didn't like you didn't think that it was going to happen. And then everything sort of shifts overnight. And it's like, how did we get here? But what I've learned is, is building systems and processes that start far earlier.
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that allow you space to gradually learn and gradually pivot. And if you don't, that's okay. But like, there's a safe space to land when something does go wrong that you're able to process, you're able to learn from. So I think like, you know, in a strange way, planning for failure actually builds in some longevity into, into our work, into our like overall
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So good. Self, like our wholeness, like all of that really matters in the long run. And so I've seen I've seen failure be easier to swallow. It's a little bit. It's got a little honey to it when I've built and designed a process and a system that allows me to adjust and pivot.
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And then the second thing I would say to maybe some of the younger leaders, just a point of failure that was brought to my attention even this morning was how many times I have compared myself as a younger leader to like the 60, 70 year old version of Jen as a way to minimize the lessons that I'm learning right now.
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as a way to project some level of perfection or whatever it may be, the lessons that I'm leaving on the table, because I'm unwilling to just acknowledge where I'm at today in my leadership, I've left so many lessons on the table. And I think for so many people, we...
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our preferred preference is perfection. And because of that, we keep ourselves from learning lessons that we should that are going to help us in the long run. And so I think like the more that we can just ease into failure or ease into our imperfections, the greater our leadership can be.
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Man, that's so powerful. There's such kindness in your words, Jen, because if leaders apply what you're saying, it'll be kind to themselves. And I don't think we always are kind to ourselves, right? So that not comparing yourself, but allowing yourself the space to learn, the space to fail, and then finding the psychological safety where I'm in a group where I can actually fail as well, it's incredible kindness in that. Lisa? Lisa?
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The thought that comes to mind is that if you want to recover from a failure or move on from it, you have to acknowledge it full-faced. Even as Dan was saying, and you were also saying, the unintended and unforeseen consequences of a decision that you're like, oh, I didn't realize that now that we're doing everything over text, people won't get my heart behind it because they don't see me, they don't hear
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I think you need to fully embrace that. And this is what Jen was saying as well, like be kind to yourself, nobody's perfect. And I think that's where, and moral failures are the hardest, aren't they? Or life decision fails. Like you decide to pick up and move somewhere and all of a sudden you discerned along the way, this is not what actually God wanted, but you kind of forced God's hand. I think it's at those moments where,
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We take a page from King David's book where you go back to God and you go back as quickly, as severely as the mistake is. Because then you will see that the Lord is kind. He is merciful. And the way he restores some relationships where you were in the wrong, but you had the courage to face it and ask for forgiveness. The way that he moves hearts so that he can build up his people humbles you.
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And then you begin to understand that God is bigger than your failures. But I love what Jen and Dan were saying, which to me, I hear create a culture where failure is not where you want to stay, but certainly it's allowed. Because even in your failures, perhaps for me, sometimes in my failures, you learn the deepest lessons of who God is and how much you need each other. Yeah.
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And in many ways, failure is safer than success because success causes us to copy, paste and repeat, whereas failure causes us to figure out and repent and try and ask. It has, as always, been incredible to get a couple of minutes with each and every one of you. And I'm so excited about the podcast that lies ahead. I know we're going to have each and every one of you as a guest in the future on the podcast again.
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how the world is changing so that we're able to better respond to the changing world and lead better in it. It was great spending time with you guys. I want to just celebrate and thank you guys for one thing in particular, and that's the incredible hope in Jesus Christ that you communicated today. I'm hopeful for the future because God is in our future, and thank you for representing Him so well today. It was great to get some time together. Thanks.
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Welcome to the Hitting the Ball You Cannot See podcast, where I get to have some great conversations with some incredible people about the future of Jesus following. So if you're new to the conversation, we were part of several conferences around the future, and then the NextMove community started having conversations about what does it look like to lead into the future. Yeah.
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which caused me to have interviews with a bunch of people and conversations. And we started a conversation around the book, Hitting the Ball We Cannot See. And Lisa, Jen, and Dan, that's with me today, they were all contributors to this conversation and are contributing to the conversation today in a big way as we're continuing the conversation on leading into the future. So it's really great to have you guys with me today. And I'm so looking forward to this conversation.
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Maybe just for the sake of people that might not know you guys and have not yet had that incredible privilege, let's do a quick round of introductions. Jen, why don't you kick us off? Yeah, great to be here, Yuri. Jen Brown served with an organization called One Hope and also served with an organization called Propel Women. Awesome. Dan?
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Thanks, yeah. Based in London, work for Alpha International, but in the youth department. And so I get to listen and learn from church leaders and youth leaders and young people from around the world. What about you, Lisa? I am currently working with Finishing the Task and Pastor Rick Warren, but also I'm working closely with Wycliffe USA. And my passion has very much been about mobilizing the marginalized, which include women. So, Jan, you know, we've been on some conversations together and obviously the rising generations.
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Exciting stuff. So as you guys can hear, incredible people that I get to chat with today, the topic today is really around this idea of the future. So hitting the ball, you can't see the metaphor of the book is that in life, in baseball or cricket or any sport, the ball comes at you quicker than what you can imagine.
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hit it, right? So your brain takes more time to see it, tell your arm to swing the bat, to actually hit the ball and get it going. But we still do it because we learn these skills of anticipation, right? We get to learn the trajectory and the likely spots. And, you know, we pick up on the trajectory and then we're able to do something about it. So it's anticipation over reaction. And it's the ability to have our mission above our methods. Those types of things is what we speak about in the book.
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But I want to chat a little bit just about the rates of change in the world. So before we kind of get into this, as each and every one of you are on the bleeding edge of reaching the next generation, of empowering women, of stimulating and empowering evangelism around the world, how's the world changing under your feet? Where are you feeling the rapidly changing realities around you right now? And feel free to jump in.
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Well, I think it's an understatement, right, that the rate of change is faster than it's ever been. I think that's probably the headline over the last few years. And it feels like everywhere we turn, I'm hearing that phrase. And I often question that.
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how much of that phrase we truly understand. It is an understatement in that we know that change is happening faster than it ever has, but I don't think we really understand the rate and the impact of that change and how it's unfolding right in front of our eyes. And so part of, I think, leading in a cultural moment in which we are leading is
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is to be a deep, committed practitioner of understanding change and understanding the rate in which it's unfolding. And so I find myself going back to the way I'm going to be
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the places of attempting to just understand as much as possible, ask more questions, be as curious as possible to be able to rightly, rightly place change in its context and then be able to discern and interpret what, what changes should I make or how should I be interpreting, you know, all of those things become really aspects of leadership now.
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But I love because that states the importance of it in a beautiful way, but it also states the emotion of it because I think it's dizzying. And you guys can tell me, and maybe this can be a counseling session for me, an intervention. But the reality is I'm finding it dizzying. I'm so numb to the rate of change that the…
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Recent events in the news has changed some plans massively in my world, but I'm just like, yeah, it's just the world we live in, right? But it's almost this numbness or dizziness in leadership of just experiencing so much change that we don't even bother to understand the change anymore sometimes.
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Yeah, and it's exactly that. It's being aware of the numbness so that we can do something about it. At the end of the day, we can become numb to grace and forget how powerful that is. My wife works in the world of anti-human trafficking and she talks about how sometimes she can hear story after story and it's easy to get numb. And that happens naturally. So we actually have to be really proactive in making sure we don't become numb. And like Jen said, that's about being a listener. I think for me, the way I do it is making sure I don't become a professional leader.
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But I'm always like a beginner or an amateur. The word amateur means for the love of, which means you do it for the love of. And I think as soon as you're a professional leader, you know everything there is to know. And you always give answers, but you stop asking questions. But I think if we're always a beginner, always an amateur, we're always soaking in, always listening, always learning. And I think it's that posture which we need in this kind of climate. I love that. For the love of, right?
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I think just hearing Jen and Dan, there's something about life itself. Certainly, let's start here. Change has accelerated. You just need to look at like the cell phones, right? Didn't exist when I was born.
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And then it went to that big blocky thing and all the flip phones, BlackBerrys, that died off. So and then now like my MacBook updates by itself. And it's just like every few months, it drives me insane. So there's something to be said for acknowledging that change has accelerated. And I think it also does us well to remember that the God that we serve is a living God and life has always been dynamic. Yeah.
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And we have this tendency to look at the past as if it was static. But I tell you the truth, when Moses was on the scene, things were changing fast in real time with what he had before him. The challenge that we have now is that it's not only our life and our episode or our chapter and our culture that is changing. It's everything else. And we're aware that it influences everything. And the church, I think,
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We like to hold on to that which is stable. Because again, I don't know that it's a bad thing. And it certainly reflects the stability and the steadfastness of the God that we serve. But He's also a living God. And from Eden until Revelation, Genesis until Revelation, like life on this side of heaven and on the other side, it pulsates. It's always changing.
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And I feel like we kind of look at history of like it was so stable then. No, it's always been like surfing. You have to read the currents and you have to do well.
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That's great. And it's when we gain that skill of being amateurs, of asking the questions, of loving it. And Jen's point about we've got to exegete, we've got to understand our world that we live in, right? It's the sons of Issachar anointing, right? They understood the times and therefore they understood what to do. We need that in our leadership. And, you know, there's layers of that, right? So there's the complexity layer and then there's the
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There's the complicated layer. The one you can figure out and understand. The other one is just beyond understanding. It's just reading the currents. It's feeling it a little bit. So one of the things that we've been discussing in the book is this idea of the cone of the future. So the plausible future and then the probable future and then the projected future.
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But then we're basically saying that trends, the currents is going in a certain direction. But within the certain direction, there's a moment where we could say that there's a preferred future, right? So there's a probable reality where things are going, you know, and we could speak about that. But then there's a preferred future and the role of leadership.
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is taking the probable and moving it to the preferred. Our role as leaders is to hear from the Lord, to see God's vision, to see God's plan, to read His word, and to go, this is where God wants things to go. Currently trends are going here, so now we need to steer things, right? With the rudder to the ship, the wind's blowing in a particular way, but we're able to steer it in another direction.
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How does that play out for you in the space that you lead? You know, so each and every one of us in our own right is leading, but it's hard to read the room and say, read the world, read where things are going and say, okay, how do I create a countercultural thing? Well, how do I embrace the technology that's out there to actually...
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bring about God's preferred future, right? So change isn't bad necessarily, nor is technology bad, nor is money bad. But all these things make terrible masters, but great servants, right? So how do we keep them as servants in our role as leaders to lead into the preferred future of God in the space? So why don't I pick on you a little bit, Dan? What does this look like for you?
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within the space. I know you're about to get on a plane to go meet with some leaders from around the world. As you're thinking about the world they're facing, as you're thinking about the change they're navigating, what does it look like for you to help steer them in this journey?
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They're very basic, but it'll definitely start with prayer. And often you can really ask the question, are you starting with prayer by looking at your schedule and your daily rhythms and routine? And if you say we're going to pray, but it's not actually in the schedule, then you're not going to pray. And so, yeah, we're going to be getting together and we're actually meeting in a retreat center, spiritual retreat center, which has this walk, this spiritual walk, because we wanted there to be a real spiritual journey
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dynamic to our meeting. And then when we meet together, there's a lot of build, measure, learn, ideation, what are we trying, what are we piloting, all that kind of stuff. But really, just big picture, my goal would be that we pray together, discern together, and then we try new things together with a big opportunity where it's okay to fail.
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I think this is one of the things which we really need in this season where we create space for failure. Now there's some things where there's zero tolerance to fail. When it comes to like our budgets where we're working with hundreds of thousands of dollars, you don't want to waste donors' money. When it comes to the time of a lot of our staff members, there's lots of things where we actually don't want failure. So for that to happen, we create safe spaces for failure.
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And I think about, you know, we're all going to be flying in together. And on that flight, you know, we don't want that plane to ever fail. But the reason it won't fail, hopefully, is because they've had seven years of training where they've had flight simulators and test flights. And because there's been so much training, the flights...
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you know, don't fail, the pilot doesn't fail. And so for me, we'll be coming out of this space together, telling the guys like, where are you actually going to try some things where it's okay to fail? So what is your flight simulator? What is the test flight? Because if we're doing that, creating safe spaces to fail, then we can learn, build, measure, learn from those spaces, and then actually do something which we know is hopefully going to succeed for God's glory.
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I love, Dan, how you bring together the mystical, you know, when everything changes, God remains the same, right? God isn't surprised by the future because He's in the future, right? So the reality is that He knows the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end. So I was tapping into that prayer process.
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spiritual focus, but then also designing processes that's change-proof, right? Processes that's able to, through experimentation, innovation, bring us through these changes to sustainable victory in the midst of it. Really, really good. What does that look like for you, Jen?
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Yeah, I think when it comes to change, a lot of how I've governed my leadership in change is through this quote from Peter Drucker, who is just an incredible management guru. And he says that the greatest danger in times of turbulence is actually not the turbulence or change itself, but it's to act with yesterday's logic. And when I think about it, it's so true. The greatest
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that as you face change and you're attempting to use your word exegete change, that your solution is going to be grounded in what your thoughts were yesterday or what made sense yesterday will apply to today. And I think when we think about a preferred future, there's almost an aspect of that that's
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probably prophetic, right? Like if we're sitting in a place where we're attempting to understand where the trajectory of change is pushing us, but also where do we feel like it should be going biblically? There's a bit of work in there that's not just like traditional leadership, but it is a spirit-led leadership. It's a leadership that's grounded in
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in the reality of today, but also grounded in the preferred biblical, preferred future. And I think where I find myself is challenging yesterday's logic, but then also really digging deep into the work of discernment and anticipation. So the degree that I can
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discern from the spirit, but also anticipate. It's that intersection between those two that I find myself consistently going back to, consistently going back to discernment and anticipation.
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I love how you're bringing things together from the ancient wisdom of the word to the eternal truth of who God is to the ever-changing reality of what we face, right? So it's not one of those things. It's all of those things. And I think sometimes we try and make it one of those things. But I really think there's wisdom in the model that you're presenting because it's not just, hey, we've got to be so heavenly-minded.
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but we've also got to be of earthly good. But we're not just of earthly good for whatever is good for society right now. We've got this anchor in the ancient, unchanging truth of the Word of God. And it's where these things converge that we're really able to live in the fullness of it. Lisa, you've done a lot of work in this space, and you've worked with leaders in different parts around the world around this. How does this practically play out?
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echo what I've heard Dan and Jen say as well about the operative word for me and that phrase, God's preferred future is God's preferred future. Because I think when we begin to idolize change, we like to see what we see as our preferred future. And that line between the will to power and that sense of discernment gets very blurry.
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Jeremiah 17, 9 will tell us that the heart is deceitful of all things. You can fool yourself into thinking that you are thinking God's preferred feature, but it is not. It is what you say it is. And you can whip up a lot of emotion and passion around that because you say all the right things in the right Christian way. Yeah. Yeah.
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That's where I think when, Dan, you were talking about discernment, like how significant that is. Because if it is the will of God, you will get alignment. God doesn't tell Chen one thing, you one thing, Yuri and Dan one thing, and have us all come together and just battle it out to see who's the strongest. And therefore, now that is a preferred future. That is not the way God works. So the leaders and the captains of the industry, quote unquote, today from the church, we really need to be praying about what that is. Because as you were saying, Yuri, nobody knows like God knows. Yeah.
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And God's preferred future may not be his future. The route might not be your preferred way, but you need to have the courage to be able to make those hard decisions, persevere through them and lead to that preferred future so that the rising generations can receive that which is God's will and not necessarily just what we want to see in X number of years because, hey, I'm going to be getting out of the C-suite when I'm 72.
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And so that's where I think the timing of things and the discerning of things, and you mentioned the ancient ways, and that just reminds me of Jeremiah 6.16. Stop at the crossroads. Stand at the crossroads and watch. Look for the ancient paths and walk in them. There are some things that are low bearing walls of the kingdom of God. You get rid of those and you will be setting yourself back generations. Good.
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God will let you because he uses our human free will. But I love what Dan said about discerning because there's a purity of heart in all this and the freedom to fail. God doesn't expect us to be perfect. And what other people do, whatever the world does, and even my mistakes, they do not thwart God's plans. And so the freedom to failure with the purity of heart, I think God, there's a lot of grace and mercy in how God will unfold this plan even through that.
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And so that's where I think the posture of leadership needs to be one of humility, alignment, all under the umbrella of this is God who's leading this. And no generation gets to say to another, I've got monopoly over this vision because you are as human as I am. And I have my own lens on all this. So let us look beyond that to what God is really revealing to us.
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And actually in all of what we're saying, one of the things we're touching on in chapter two of the book is this whole idea of part of, in a world that's rapidly changing, understanding what isn't changing is as important as understanding what is changing.
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So there's ancient paths, there's pillars, there's truths, there's God himself, there's the love and grace of God. Dan, your point earlier, those things are not changing. So we're not saying that it sometimes feels like we're in a world where everything's changing, but we know very well the things that aren't changing.
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And knowing what isn't changing and accurately knowing what isn't changing and accurately knowing what is changing is really key to this journey. And I think we touch on it. But I want to call out a paradox a little bit in what I'm hearing you say, because I think people might be listening to you hearing the same paradox and allow me to be an advocate for a moment. I won't say who's advocate. I'm Jesus' advocate only, but I'm going to be an advocate for a moment. But the...
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The reality is we're saying the world's changing rapidly. And then we're saying as leaders, God's got a preferred future and we need to change the change to get to God's preferred future. So essentially, we're saying that we're catalysts to change to a world that's already changing, right? So how does that work, right? Practically, if we're having fatigue and dizziness over the rate of change in the world,
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doesn't it make leaders work 10 times harder in trying to bring about change because we're bringing another component in right people are just struggling to keep up with economic changes and now we're saying well god's got a preferred future how does that bring stability and not further chaos uh in the journey and i'm asking easy questions today as you can tell so so any any thoughts ideas
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I think for me, Yuri, because I felt like I may have highlighted that paradox, is to recognize that the ultimate agent of change is God. He's got these markers in all of human history throughout eternity, and he will make that happen. Our job is not to...
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Our job is not to create the fruit, it is to abide with Christ. And in that, yes, it's changed. And we don't want to add to the chaos because God is a God of order. What we want to do is be able to discern and maybe if there's like currents of water, guide that in a certain way.
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And say, this is the path that the Lord has carved out. And I love what Joseph says at the end of his life. He doesn't know when Moses is going to come on the scene, but he's understood something about the will of God in his life and that it is not going to end in Egypt. So he says, you take out my bones. And then he...
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He's understanding that God will always move and he's done his part. Acts 13, 36 says this about David as well, that he did fulfill this purpose in his generation, then he died. And so that is a discerning piece where how are we as leaders today going to make and guide and counsel and pull together what God is doing rather than, as you were saying, hinting, doing the work of the enemy for him.
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and making it more challenging. God will win at the end of the day. You can either be a part of it or you can be passive or you can be against it. I mean, that's the way that I distill obedience. That's great. So good.
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Yeah, I love what Lisa just said, and I totally agree. Like, what we should be seeing in terms of the miraculous isn't a result of our hard work. So, like, the wedding at Cana, you know, brought the barrels of water, but Jesus did the miracle of turning it into water wine. The loaves and the fish, and I know we read these parables and stories all the time, but, like, at the end of the day, like...
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we just do our bit and then God does everything which is above and beyond the fruit, the visible evidence of God at work. And so if what we're seeing equals the hard work we're putting in, then that's not God at work. That's just results from human hands at work. Whereas with Alpha, we're literally just having the conversation with our team.
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compared to the work we put in to actually seeing what we're seeing now in terms of the amount of people doing it and the opportunities and the collaborations. This is the miraculous. This is what we're seeing does not match the hard work we put in and we have worked hard, but it goes above and beyond that. So I think in this area of change is exactly what Lisa says. It's like us doing sure the hard work, what is required, but then the results should be above and beyond anything we could possibly imagine.
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I love that. I love that because it's the, you know, somebody once said that if God didn't show up at your church on Sunday, would you notice? Right? And I think sometimes we've got high expectations of ourselves and low expectations of God. What I'm hearing you say is we've got to up our expectation of God and we've got to find those small levers, those small moments of obedience that God can amplify in a great way. Jen, anything you wanted to add to that?
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No, I think it's, I mean, I think it's a beautiful question to sit with and wrestle with. And I think the check to me as a leader, as I'm hearing this conversation is always going back to ensuring that whatever change I'm leading in or through or bringing about, that it's grounded in
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in a future that always is leading towards where God has always been leading, which has always been the resurrected life and the building and the growing of His body around the world. And so if the change in which I'm leading is,
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is grounded in that reality, then there actually isn't a dissonance between God's change that He's bringing about. It's actually, how am I in alignment with that? And then how do I feel like He's asking me to steward that change in an effective way? And so I'm kind of just sitting here challenged myself and thinking through, am I in alignment with where God has always been moving, His biblical orientation from the very beginning? Wow.
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And that's the safe place, right? Everything can change. If I'm in alignment with what God has for me, what God wants me to do, I'm good, right? It's the success isn't a number. It isn't a place. It isn't an activity. Success is obedience. And when we're obedient, He does that amplified supernatural way and beyond.
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things. I want to get real here for a moment before we start wrapping up. And I want to just ask the other side of all of this, right? So people are listening, that's facing real challenges and going through difficulty. And it might be that, you know, people aren't asking the big questions, they're asking the survival questions right now. They're not asking the significant questions or the success questions. They're just wondering how they're going to make it through crisis X.
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Um, I'd love to hear from each of you an instance in your story where you've tried and failed and maybe not tried and failed in the experiment where it really didn't matter that much, but you've tried and failed in a, in a big part, be it because of you thought it was one way and then the world changed under your feet, or be it because you thought this new idea was going to be amazing. And then you've invested time and effort into it. And then it just fell flat on its face. Um, yeah.
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You know, I believe the best way to learn in life is through mistakes, preferably those of others. So I'm going to abuse you guys a little bit on behalf of everybody that's listening, but
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We don't always get this right. We don't always get obedience right. We don't always get bringing about God's change right. We don't always get innovation right. Sometimes we fail because of this rapidly changing world around us. And what does that failure look like? And what do you do when you fail? How do you deal with failure in trying to lead in this world of infinite complexity and complication?
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But he wants to break the ice. Dan, you look like you've had a story. No, I can go first. I've got lots of things in the area of failure. I mean, one thing, which isn't even a thing, but like QR codes, when they came out, I was like, you know what? I don't rate them. I don't think they're going to take off. They're not going to be around in the future. And here we are every day scanning QR codes. So I was well off there.
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But a real one, I think, with the digital revolution taking place, what happened is instead of having meetings face to face, we went online. And then from online, we kind of went to like emails and DMs and WhatsApps. And Sir Albert Meribyr was a scientist and he said when it comes to communication, 5% of it is words, 45% of it is body language and 50%.
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and what he was saying is like, pretty much without the body language and the tone of voice, you're missing how to communicate. And what happened is the digital revolution took place, and whether I was responding to what people were giving me, I don't know, but anyway, I was giving briefs via text, and I was giving feedback via text, and it just got really unhealthy.
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And it just got to a place where no one actually could read my body language and turn it with my voice. So what I've had to learn the hard way is to make sure whether it's a brief, whether it's feedback, as much as I can face to face in a meeting, FaceTime so people can get my heart, my body language, my turn of voice, make sure they know I'm saying it to help them, not hurt them, trying to lift them up, not pull them down. So yeah, it was hard, but learn from it. And so now I would say we'd operate in a much healthier way.
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What I love about the example you're putting out there is it was an attempt to adapt to the world we were in, but the failure was not the change you saw. It was the parts of change you didn't see, right? So it's the unknown changes. It's not the things that change that we see changing. It's the things that change that we don't see changing that kind of has us miss it. But to keep on innovating, I'm learning from you to just say, listen, the horse is dead. Let's try something
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keep adapting in the journey. I think one of the I'll have two thoughts, but I think one of the like, easiest way to swallow failure, I can use that is, is actually to prepare and plan to fail ahead of time. So like creating the environment that can absorb failure when it comes actually helps you in the long run. So what do I mean by that? Like,
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What's, what's, what's terrible and cringy about a failure is when you just didn't anticipate, you didn't like you didn't think that it was going to happen. And then everything sort of shifts overnight. And it's like, how did we get here? But what I've learned is, is building systems and processes that start far earlier.
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that allow you space to gradually learn and gradually pivot. And if you don't, that's okay. But like, there's a safe space to land when something does go wrong that you're able to process, you're able to learn from. So I think like, you know, in a strange way, planning for failure actually builds in some longevity into, into our work, into our like overall
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So good. Self, like our wholeness, like all of that really matters in the long run. And so I've seen I've seen failure be easier to swallow. It's a little bit. It's got a little honey to it when I've built and designed a process and a system that allows me to adjust and pivot.
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And then the second thing I would say to maybe some of the younger leaders, just a point of failure that was brought to my attention even this morning was how many times I have compared myself as a younger leader to like the 60, 70 year old version of Jen as a way to minimize the lessons that I'm learning right now.
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as a way to project some level of perfection or whatever it may be, the lessons that I'm leaving on the table, because I'm unwilling to just acknowledge where I'm at today in my leadership, I've left so many lessons on the table. And I think for so many people, we...
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our preferred preference is perfection. And because of that, we keep ourselves from learning lessons that we should that are going to help us in the long run. And so I think like the more that we can just ease into failure or ease into our imperfections, the greater our leadership can be.
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Man, that's so powerful. There's such kindness in your words, Jen, because if leaders apply what you're saying, it'll be kind to themselves. And I don't think we always are kind to ourselves, right? So that not comparing yourself, but allowing yourself the space to learn, the space to fail, and then finding the psychological safety where I'm in a group where I can actually fail as well, it's incredible kindness in that. Lisa? Lisa?
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The thought that comes to mind is that if you want to recover from a failure or move on from it, you have to acknowledge it full-faced. Even as Dan was saying, and you were also saying, the unintended and unforeseen consequences of a decision that you're like, oh, I didn't realize that now that we're doing everything over text, people won't get my heart behind it because they don't see me, they don't hear
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I think you need to fully embrace that. And this is what Jen was saying as well, like be kind to yourself, nobody's perfect. And I think that's where, and moral failures are the hardest, aren't they? Or life decision fails. Like you decide to pick up and move somewhere and all of a sudden you discerned along the way, this is not what actually God wanted, but you kind of forced God's hand. I think it's at those moments where,
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We take a page from King David's book where you go back to God and you go back as quickly, as severely as the mistake is. Because then you will see that the Lord is kind. He is merciful. And the way he restores some relationships where you were in the wrong, but you had the courage to face it and ask for forgiveness. The way that he moves hearts so that he can build up his people humbles you.
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And then you begin to understand that God is bigger than your failures. But I love what Jen and Dan were saying, which to me, I hear create a culture where failure is not where you want to stay, but certainly it's allowed. Because even in your failures, perhaps for me, sometimes in my failures, you learn the deepest lessons of who God is and how much you need each other. Yeah.
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And in many ways, failure is safer than success because success causes us to copy, paste and repeat, whereas failure causes us to figure out and repent and try and ask. It has, as always, been incredible to get a couple of minutes with each and every one of you. And I'm so excited about the podcast that lies ahead. I know we're going to have each and every one of you as a guest in the future on the podcast again.
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how the world is changing so that we're able to better respond to the changing world and lead better in it. It was great spending time with you guys. I want to just celebrate and thank you guys for one thing in particular, and that's the incredible hope in Jesus Christ that you communicated today. I'm hopeful for the future because God is in our future, and thank you for representing Him so well today. It was great to get some time together. Thanks.