Why Leaders Love 2×2 Matrixes
(and Why I Love Cornelia Hancock)
I find 2×2 matrixes beautiful.
I love them so much. I've even started a collection.
Why?
Because I need them and because leaders need them.
For without them we're stuck in an either-or world.
To reduce the complexity of the challenges in leadership, leaders often find it easier mentally to adopt either-or solutions to those challenges.
The answer to every problem is either A or B.
For to think systemically requires too much work, and to think wholistically complicates decision-making.
Wrestling with the underlying factors or looking for the linkages that connect various principles and ideas requires too much energy.
So we as leaders default to dualistic A or B thinking that produces the same set of non-solutions over and over again—believing in winners and losers in a cosmic zero-sum game.
Thus, creativity is lost.
And we miss thereby the genius of the both-and.
The Power of Integrative Thinking–The Genius of the 2×2
For those of you who have been at the conference in the past, you might recall how I sent you to the National Museum. Until recently, I'd give these rather short-sighted instructions.
"When you enter the museum, pass by the first part that deals with the causes of the Civil War (all that stuff about slavery) and go back to where the museum lays out day 1, day 2 and day 3 of the Battle of Gettysburg. We're focusing on the battlefield leadership, good and bad, displayed by the leaders from the North and the South–regardless of the cause that brought them to Gettysburg. We'll only be talking about becoming gospel courageous in the battles we face."
I don't do that anymore, because the beauty and insight of a 2×2 matrix forced me to do integrative thinking–to see leadership as both gospel courageous and gospel corrective.
In his book, “The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking”, Roger Martin defines integrative thinking as:
The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of new ideas that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.
Integrative thinking looks for factors not immediately obvious, considers nonlinear relationships among the apparently opposable ideas, and tries to see the whole problem as a whole.
Thru integrative thinking, the leader resolves the tensions among opposable ideas and generates innovative outcomes.
On the other hand, the way leaders normally think is to examine the pros and cons of the presumed alternatives, then eliminating all but one. This un-systemic approach breaks the “opposable ideas” into pieces and works on them separately—only focusing on obviously relevant features. It thus leads to settling for simpler options.
That's where a 2×2 matrix comes in. 2×2 matrixes force us as leaders to move toward an integrative, systemic approach–generating all kinds of insight.
My First 2×2 Matrix: What is a Gospel Movement?
My first 2×2 matrix helped me redefine gospel movements and eventually good leadership.
Here's how I thought before I discovered the beauty of the 2×2.
In ministry, there is a choice between doing "gospel proclamation (individual salvation or justification)" or "gospel demonstration (systemic change or justice)." Belonging to an organization that's committed to the passionate proclamation of the gospel, I had to choose the former. My logic ran: Rescue the drowning as they go by; toss a life-raft to those in the river without Christ. But let someone else keep them from falling into or being tossed into that river.
Such either-or thinking between passionate proclamation or compassionate demonstration began to fall apart in me for lots of reasons.
First, there was this video from Bono, then those trips to Africa, then those two grandkids from Sierra Leone, then helping lead a mission trip to Haiti after an earthquake and then I fell into the trap of doing by lots of reading–particularly this one book from Gary Haugen, Good News about Injustice.
C.S. Lewis warned the young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist to be very careful of his reading. “There are traps everywhere — ‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as George Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”
Haugen's book coupled with those experiences hit me like a one-two punch from a very unscrupulous God who wants me to know and to care, to connect with feelings of pain, sadness and fear—to not be an atheist to the brokenness in the world. And ultimately, to wed gospel proclamation and gospel demonstration.
Gary Haugen begins his book with a 2×2 matrix built around a quote from the evangelical theologian Carl Henry. "God is the God of Justification and Justice."
Then he mercilessly shows how the Bible argues for both.
At the heart of Scriptures, Haugen argues, lies this challenge — build a 2×2 matrix around two ideas that one naturally thinks oppose each other: gospel proclamation (evangelism/justification) and gospel demonstration (social action/justice). Force yourself to integrated these ideas and see what you get.
He doesn't specifically chart out the matrix, but we can.
First, try holding both ideas in tension in the mind, for a moment. Don't default to either-or.
Next, chart them out: Take evangelism/gospel proclamation/justification, for example, and put it on the x-axis — low to high evangelism. Now, put social action/gospel demonstration/justice on the y-axis—low to high levels of social action.
Third, now label each of the four quadrants created. [Here are some of my suggestions, place them in their appropriate quadrant: no gospel movement, individual salvation, social reform, gospel movement (individual and systemic change). The process of labeling provides insight–so try choosing your own labels.]
Fourth, what creative solutions arise from the upper right quadrant? Assuming, as I do, that gospel movements ought to contain high gospel proclamation and high gospel demonstration, what things could you implement to bring that about both on your campus, in your church, in your community?
Leadership as Both Courageous and Corrective
Laying in the shadow of this thicker gospel is the truth that biblical leadership must also be both individual and systemic. Leadership, in other words, finds its fullest expression when it is both courageous and corrective.
True leadership ought to span the range from individual to community, from individual motivations to systemic change. Individual, as well as culture change, is at the heart of great leaders.
So I can't really talk about biblical leadership, or the gospel, without the consideration of both individual brokenness and systemic brokenness. Our leadership, as I'm learning to say, must be "gospel courageous and gospel corrective."
Here's that matrix I've built . . . try labeling the quadrants. This time, put in names of leaders (or non-leaders) who balanced or failed to balance both the gospel courageous and gospel corrective ideas. I'll start you by putting some names in the upper right quadrant.
More Practice:
I brainstormed in the past some of the apparently “opposable ideas” in building spiritual movements. I’ve found it very insightful applying integrative thinking to these ideas and not defaulting to “either-or” choices. Again, if we use “either-or” thinking, we end up producing the same set of non-solutions all over again— a “giant list of stuff” that lacks perspective on the underlying factors that contribute to the items making the list and/or misses the linkages that connect various principles or other phenomena.
But if we build a 2×2 matrix, we won't default too quickly to simple alternatives and we'll both imagine and generate new ideas that contain elements of both.
Remember how we talked at Gettysburg how the best leaders are both courageous in the cause and caring in building community. If you recall, Alan Hirsch called the quadrant of high cause and high community—communitas. The best leaders build a “company of friends in pursuit of a great cause.”
Practice the Power of 2×2 Matrixes
To practice using 2×2 matrixes, choose one of the pairs below. Set up a 2×2 matrix which will put those ideas in creative tension. What happens?
Evangelism — Social Action
Evangelism — Discipleship
Cause — Community
Individual — Team
Truth — Grace
Leaders —- Marginalized (poor, widow, orphan)
Justice —- Justification
Free Will — Sovereignty
Ministry — Movements
Local — Global
Simple — Complex
Intuitive — Structured
Why I love Cornelia Hancock
Thinking thru the lens of "gospel courageous and gospel corrective" leadership, I'm finding all kinds of leaders I have often overlooked–like Cornelia Hancock.
You won't find her in most books about Gettysburg, but her story challenges me as much as the leaders I normally talk about at the conference.
And the more I read about her, the more I love her. In my search for empathy, her blending of knowledge and care becomes an inspiration.
Miss Cornelia Hancock departed Salem, New Jersey and her Quaker community as soon as she heard of the great battle of Gettysburg. Her brother-in-law, Henry Child, was a doctor and needed an assistant. Cornelia's brother William and all of her male cousins had joined the Union Army and were away at war. Cornelia desperately wanted to contribute, more than just praying for the soldiers and joining a sewing circle. She wanted to do something real, something that mattered.
But Cornelia was not a trained nurse—at least not yet.
She’d get the training soon enough.
As Henry and Cornelia rushed to Gettysburg on July 4th, their train connection to Gettysburg was stopped in Baltimore. Dorthea Dix, superintendent of the Union Army nurses, boarded the train to inspect the nurses headed to Gettysburg. She told Cornelia to get off the train, not because she was untrained, but because she was too young and too pretty.
Dix insisted that all female nurses, according to regulations, must be “mature in years (at least 30), plain almost to homeliness in dress, and by no means liberally endowed with personal attractions.”
With men bleeding to death in Gettysburg and in need of care, Cornelia Hancock remained in her seat and dared Mrs. Dix to remove her.
Cornelia described this first encounter with Dragon Dix–as Dix was called:
“Dix looked the nurses over and pronounced them all suitable except me. She immediately objected to my going farther on [account] of my youth and rosy cheeks . . . A discussion among the other nurses on Dix's staff waxed warm, and I have no idea what conclusion they came to, for I settled the question myself by getting on the [railroad] car and staying in my seat until the train pulled out of the city of Baltimore. They did not forcibly take me from the train, so I got into Gettysburg the night of July sixth—where the need was so great that there was no further cavil about age.”
As soon as Hancock and the other nurses arrived, they rushed to a nearby church that had been converted into a temporary hospital.
Hancock saw "for the first time what war meant. Hundreds of desperately wounded men were stretched out on boards laid across the high-backed pews as closely as they could be packed together. Thus elevated, these poor sufferers’ faces, white and drawn with pain, were almost on a level with my own. I seemed to stand breast-high in a sea of anguish.”
Hancock spent that night going from one pallet to another, writing letters from the soldiers to families and friends.
“To many mothers, sisters, and wives I penned the last message of those who were soon to become the ‘beloved dead,'” she wrote.
On July 7th, Cornelia heard that the wounded of the 12th New Jersey were at the Second Corps’ field hospital about five miles away. Hancock’s group determined to go there to minister to familiar faces; Cornelia willed herself to the battlefield where so many had fallen.
“I was the first woman who reached the Second Corps after the three days of fighting,” Cornelia wrote. She learned later that 2,000 men of the Second Corps had been wounded in the battle.
“It is very beautiful, rolling country here,” she told her cousin, “but now, for five miles around, there is an awful smell of putrefaction. As we drew near our destination, we began to realize that war has other horrors than the sufferings of the wounded or the desolation of the bereft. A sickening, overpowering, awful stench announced the presence of the unburied dead, on which the July sun was mercilessly shining, and at every step the air grew heavier and fouler. Not the presence of the dead bodies themselves, swollen and disfigured as they were, and lying in heaps on every side, was as awful to the spectator as that deadly, nauseating atmosphere which robbed the battlefield of its glory, the survivors of their victory, and the wounded of what little chance of life was left to them.”
To the dying and the wounded, Cornelia with other volunteer nurses became angels sent into the darkness of war. 
She spent the next day at a field hospital containing “about 500 wounded.” She was the only nurse present; “not another woman within a half mile,” she told a cousin in a letter written July 7. Four surgeons “were busy all day amputating legs and arms.” Among the wounded were many Confederate soldiers, known as Johnny rebels. “I have one tent of Johnnies in my ward, but I am not obliged to give them anything but whiskey,” she wrote in her diary.
Eventually, the Union Army established a large general hospital—Camp Letterman—outside of town, where Cornelia labored until early September.
Caring for the wounded at Camp Letterman usually occupied Cornelia 10 hours a day.
In a letter to her mother dated August 17, she reported her displeasure with Army conventions: “I am alive and well, doing duty still in the general hospital. I do think military matters are enough to aggravate a saint. We no sooner get a good physician than an order comes to remove, promote, demote or something. Everything seems to be done to aggravate the wounded. There are many hardships that soldiers have to endure that cannot be explained unless experienced.”
While regularly reporting on the tribulations of her patients, Cornelia rarely mentioned the toll their suffering took on her.
“I have nothing to do in the hospital after dark, which is well with me,” she wrote to her mother. “All the skin is off my toes…. I am not tired of being here; [I] feel so much interest in the men under my charge. The friends of men who have died seem so grateful to me for the little that it was in my power to do for them. I saw a man die in half a minute from the effects of chloroform [used as an anesthetic]; there is nothing that has affected me so much since I have been here. It seems like almost deliberate murder.”
In the midst of all this, she told her mother not to worry about her because, "I am permanently calculated for getting along under very trying circumstances.”
In one of her last letters home from Gettysburg, addressed to her mother, Cornelia wrote, “One of my best men died yesterday…. He was the one who said if there was a heaven, I would go to it. I hope he will get there before I do.”
Cornelia left Camp Letterman in early September. After spending some time at home in Salem County, she took the train to Washington, where she cared for former slave families who had fled Southern plantations. Cornelia later returned as a nurse to Union Army encampments in Virginia until the end of the war. In 1866, relying on donations from Philadelphia Quakers, she opened a school for freed Negroes in South Carolina.
She taught there for nearly 10 years.
I love Cornelia Hancock. I want to be like her–like her gospel courageous and gospel corrective life. Oh and add her name to the chart above–next to Jesus and Wilberforce and MLKjr.
