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silence as we saw it and took it in, then an excitement began to fill the room with an immediate sense of “Let’s get started!”
    We weren’t looking at months of “rolling it out” to people who would be hearing it for the first time, but rather we were trying to steer the energy and direction of people who had been an integral part of creating it and who were already chomping at the bit to get started.
    Personally, I would rather lead people I have to pull back and steer a bit than those who need a constant fire lit under them. Welcoming collaboration from the start is a significant way to create the former situation.
    But vision is just the first part. Next comes reality. Realityisn’t nearly as much fun as vision, but it is quite necessary. In fact, my mentor Max DePree says that the first job of a leader is to define reality. Max and I may disagree just a bit on the order, but suffice it to say that vision doesn’t happen without considering your current reality.
    It takes a lot of courage from a leader to accurately assess current reality. One of the reasons that is true is that to a large degree, the leader is responsible for the current reality. Only new leaders can avoid that responsibility, and sooner or later we all have to get comfortable with owning our failures as well as our successes.
    Assessing the current reality almost always involves bad news. It includes hearing about what is not working, what or who has lost effectiveness, and ways in which people have felt marginalized, used, and overlooked. Current reality includes details about systems or programs that no longer deliver what they were originally intended to, as well as places where the organization is stuck.
    This is one of the reasons why leadership is so much work. The vision is full of possibilities and optimism. Reality is more often filled with disappointments and difficulties. And a leader needs to stand between those two things.
    It is so much easier to choose one or the other. Tension implies pulling—and when does that feel good? The tendency to move to the either/or is often driven by the desire to avoid that pain. But leadership doesn’t allow for that luxury. It requires the orchestration of opposites. The space between the vision and reality creates a gap, a painful gap. And leadership is about bridging that gap. More on that later . . .
    In Axis, we soberly and honestly assessed our current reality. But before we did, we coached ourselves on the importance of engaging in this part of the discussion with a ruthless honesty. If we held back, we knew we would not come to the correct conclusions. If protecting feelings was our highest value, we would miss the truth. Fortunately, our enthusiasm for moving toward the vision helped us garner the necessary courage to do what needed to be done.
    Our discoveries were painful, but interestingly, they were also remarkably freeing. In the face of our vision, the very things that initially seemed scary and hard to admit became great tools for overcoming the obstacles that were blocking our future.
    Our weekend service was one of the most important things we did each week. We began to see how these services had become predictable more than provocative. Now that we understood our vision, we realized that the services weren’t as focused or participatory as they needed to be.
    Our small groups were mostly superficial and were notbeing led very well. Many of them were stagnant, and few were growing. We knew we needed to make the ties between our weekend services and our small groups much stronger and clearer.
    Then we looked at serving. Okay, well, our current reality was that there was no current reality in the area of serving. There were some random acts of serving, but not much beyond that. Serving was not a force in our community.
    Rather than being collaborative and interconnected, the areas within Axis were more like silos. The various teams that worked during the weekend services