Don Sull's blog

The Counter-Reformation bred a host of new religious orders, but within a few decades the Jesuits rose above the others newly-formed religious orders in terms of size, global spread, and influence. My last post described how the Jesuits attracted talented priests and allocated them to the most promising opportunities, and the post before that introduced the remarkable success of the early Jesuits as depicted in John O’Malley‘s outstanding history The First Jesuits. O’Malley demonstrates that Ignatius of Loyola did not have a clear master plan to guide the Society of Jesus in its early years. Rather the early Jesuits explored multiple ministries, pulled back from those that didn’t work, ramped up those that did, built a cadre of priests who could be deployed against any opportunity that arose, all without losing sight of their overarching mission to save souls.

The Jesuit’s approach is best characterized as “strategic agility,” or an organization’s ability to seize opportunities to achieve long-term goals as they arise and build the resources–including people, cash, and brand–to exploit unforeseeable opportunities. Strategic agility combines clear long-term mission (saving souls for the Jesuits) with a recognition that the best opportunities cannot be planned in advance. Strategic agility describes how organizations including Chinese food leader Tingyi and the U.S. Marine Corps proceed into a foggy future. The early Jesuits illustrate key principles of strategic agility in action:

• Plunge into the fray. In uncertain situations, plunging into the fray is a better way to spot opportunities than contemplating the situation from a far.  The early Jesuits emphasized “the world is our house,” meaning that unlike monks who fled from other people, the Jesuits would plunge into society, seeking out the company of others “in order to help them” (68). Strategic agility requires organizations to explore multiple opportunities, recognizing that not all will advance their objectives. The early Jesuits explored what O’Malley terms a “laundry list” of ministries, including preaching, administering sacraments, comforting prisoners and hospital patients, among others (5). Messy though the process might appear, it placed the Jesuits in the flow of opportunities and maximized their chances of discovering new ways to save souls.
• Pass surfaces. When exploring multiple opportunities, organizations will sometimes encounter hard “surfaces” where obstacles impede progress.  Strategic agility requires organizations to pass surfaces when they encounter them, rather than dissipating scarce resources trying to punch through entrenched obstacles.  In certain ministries the Jesuits encountered surfaces, discovering, for example, that parish priests were better positioned to administer sacraments, and that tending to plague victims killed too many priests to constitute a sustainable ministry. In these cases, the Jesuits pulled back, and redeployed priests to more promising activities.
• Swarm gaps. When advancing into an uncertain future, organizations will also discover “gaps,” or opportunities to advance their objectives. Just as they should pass surfaces of resistance when they encounter them, leaders should swarm gaps, rapidly redeploying resources to exploit opportunities. While conducting other activities, the Jesuits received repeated requests to educate the local clergy, university students, or the young. They often complied on an ad hoc basis, but local priests viewed education as a distraction from their core activities. Ignatius, in contrast, believed education was a promising opportunity. When the city of Messina formally requested a Jesuit-run school, Ignatius sent ten of his most talented priests to establish the school. When the initial experiment succeeded beyond expectations, the Jesuits swarmed the gap, allocating the best priests to the schools, and opening between four and five schools each year for the next decade. Within a decade, education represented an activity equal in importance to all other ministries combined (200).
• Focus on how not what. Strategic agility requires organizations to avoid a premature commitment to a specific way to achieve its mission. If the Jesuits had locked into a single ministry, such as preaching or visiting prisoners, too early, they might have abandoned their search for new opportunities, and never explored education. They avoided premature lock-in by committing to a way of doing things, rather than a single activity. Noster modus procedendi, or “our way of proceeding,” encapsulated not only the Jesuits’ core values including flexibility and judgment, but also their approach to all activities they undertook. The Jesuits summarized their way of proceeding in the phrase, “spiritu, corde, practice,” or acting in the Spirit of God, from the heart (rather than with intellect alone), and practically in the sense of helping others in the real world.
• Powerful leaders and empowered employees. People often view organizational power as a zero-sum game, where any increase in top management decision making automatically decreases autonomy among front-line employees. Strategic agility, however, requires strong top executives and empowered employees. Top leaders determine organizational priorities and allocate resources to the most important opportunities, while leaving front-line employees wide latitude to pursue objectives as they see fit.  The Society of Jesus vested great power in its general, who was elected for life, and served without the regular congregation of priests that set policy and made decisions in other religious orders (52).  As the first general, Ignatius wielded great power, tracking local experiments, deciding which ministries to support, and allocating the best priests to the most promising opportunities to save souls. The local Jesuits, however, were often separated by oceans from the order’s headquarters in Rome, and exercised tremendous autonomy in their local activities.