An Interview with Kate Coleman

In a world marked by uncertainty, rapid change, and a societal unravelling, we are challenged to listen more intently rather than leading harder. In this conversation with Rev Dr Kate Coleman, founder of Next Leadership and author of Metamorph, the Commons Cooperative explores what today's disruption is revealing about ourselves, our institutions, and the Church. Kate challenges traditional models of leadership built on certainty, control, and individual achievement, inviting us instead toward humility, collaboration and transformation. Take a peek at a digital interview between Kate Coleman and The Commons Cooperative.

The Commons Cooperative: Where are we at in the world at present? What has happened?

I think we’re living through a period of profound disruption, disorientation and exposure.

Systems, institutions and assumptions that shaped the world we’ve known are being shaken. We’re living with polarisation, distrust, inequality, conflict, technological disruption and enormous cultural change. But we’re also learning the truth about ourselves. Things previously hidden beneath layers of assumption are now much more fully on display.

There’s something of Ezekiel 37 about this moment for churches and Christian leaders in all walks of life. God, in His grace and mercy, is taking us on a tour of a valley of reality and asking, “What do you see?”

And what we see depends enormously on where we’re standing and whom we’re standing with.

Some talk about the age of certainty giving way to an age of chaos. But that’s really only true for those parts of the Western world (and the Western Church) that could afford the privilege of certainty in the first place. For many people, the world has always been volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

Women have known things about power that men haven’t had to know. Black and Brown people have known things about institutions that White people haven’t had to see. People on the margins have experienced the underside of systems others experienced as successful. And much of the Majority World has learned to lead and follow Jesus without the stability, resources and cultural influence the Western Church has come to regard as normal.

Perhaps chaos hasn’t suddenly arrived. Some of us are simply experiencing what others have been navigating for generations.

And that matters because crisis is revelatory. It exposes who we are, what we really value and, in Christian terms, which gods we’ve actually been serving and which story we’ve actually been facilitating.

It’s exposing our assumptions about power, growth, success, effectiveness and leadership itself. We’ve privileged efficiency over relationship, expertise over wisdom, individualism over community, scale over depth and measurable outcomes over formation. We’ve become addicted to more; more growth, reach, activity, platform and productivity, without always asking what all that “more” is actually for or where it’s leading us.

Perhaps, in some ways, we’ve been taking our learning from the wrong places and even asking the wrong question. Rather than simply, “How do we overcome the chaos?” perhaps we should be asking, “What is the chaos revealing—and whom are we becoming within it?”

But this is also a genuinely dangerous moment, particularly for Christian leaders. Chaos is not only revealing who we are; it is also revealing whom we could become, depending on whether or not we take hold of the God-given opportunity within it. Some things need to be preserved. Some need to be reformed. And some need to be allowed to die so that something more faithful—and closer to the heart of God—can emerge.

The Commons Cooperative: What are the implications for leadership?

Where do you want me to start! The task is definitely not simply to find better techniques for holding the old world together.

For one thing, leadership as performance is no longer enough.

We have to let go of the pressure to appear strong, certain, successful and in control. Sometimes the most important thing a leader can say is, “I do not yet know, but let us listen together.”

We also need to let go of heroic, command-and-control and endlessly expansionist leadership—the idea that one or two exceptional people hold the vision, possess the answers and carry everybody else. And we definitely need to let go of leadership that prizes homogeneity. In a complex and rapidly changing world, sameness becomes a serious weakness.

The world is simply too complex for that and perhaps it always was.

We need more diverse, collaborative, discerning, courageous and adaptive leadership. Diversity that isn’t simply about different faces around the table, but different voices on the table. People whose gender, ethnicity, culture, class and experience of power enable them to see things that those who have traditionally led (particularly White men in the Western context) may simply never have needed to see.

That means whom we do life and leadership with matters. If everybody around me looks like me, thinks like me, reads the same books, attends the same conferences and experiences power in broadly the same way, there are things I simply will not see. Difference is not a problem to be managed; it is a source of wisdom, correction, creativity and resilience.

And we have to pay much greater attention to whom leaders are becoming.

Because leaders are not detached change agents dispensing transformation to everybody else. We are agents who are also being changed (for better and for worse). We are part of the systems we’re trying to change, carrying assumptions, habits, privileges, fears and wounds shaped by those very systems.

Our untransformed wounds don’t remain private. Neither do our insecurities, privilege, ego or need for control. Eventually they become leadership practices, cultures and systems that other people are forced to inhabit.

So we need leaders who understand power differently; who listen before they pronounce; create capacity rather than dependency; make the way wider for others; and understand leadership as stewardship and responsibility rather than ownership and control.

And as Christian leaders, we need always to remember (thankfully): there’s already a Saviour—and it’s not us!

God initiates. God calls. God reveals. God empowers. God brings transformation. We listen, respond, obey, act and take responsibility. We are not the source of transformation. But neither are we spectators.

So the task isn’t to hold the old world together. It is to become a different kind of people, capable of recognizing and participating in what God may be bringing to birth.

That’s why formation before fruitfulness matters.

The questions we need to attend to now are not simply, “What should we do?” as important as that is, but, more fundamentally, “Who are we becoming? Who are we doing life and leadership with? What can they see that we cannot?”

Rev Dr Kate Coleman

Founder and Co-Director, Next Leadership

Author of Metamorph: Transforming Leaders from the Inside Out