Michaela O’Donnell Speaks on Navigating Change

In her January Series presentation on Thursday, Jan. 30, Michaela O’Donnell discussed how to navigate life’s changes and transitions well.

O’Donnell is the director of the Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary as well as the lead professor in Fuller’s redemptive imagination in the marketplace doctorate program. With a background in practical theology and in entrepreneurship, O’Donnell seeks to help students and others gain clarity about God’s calling in their lives.

When she started university, O’Donnell majored in theology. She didn’t expect to go into a career of teaching or writing, she explained, but she had heard that most university students didn’t use their specific major for a career, and she wanted to study something that really interested her. She planned to get a more practical degree, such as business or law, later.

Along the way, she said, she discovered that faith and education can influence change in the world just as much as business or law can. After graduating with a master of theology degree during the recession that began in 2008, O’Donnell and her husband, like many others, faced difficulty finding jobs. As a result, they decided to start a business, and Long Winter Media was formed.

As they built their business, O’Donnell also completed a Ph.D., and during that process, she said, she explored the idea of how the church can equip people vocationally for a rapidly changing world.

In her first book, Make Work Matter: Your Guide to Meaningful Work in a Changing World, published in 2021, O’Donnell examined how society’s relationship with knowledge has changed in recent decades. Knowledge used to be centralized in institutions such as places of education, government, and big systems and corporations, with clear guides and paths for exploring and obtaining knowledge. Knowledge today, though, is no longer centralized, and the pathways are not as clear, the book explains.

As a practical theologian, O’Donnell said, she asks four basic questions when she looks at the world and society: 

• What’s going on? 
• Why is it going on? 
• According to our Scriptures and Christian tradition, what do we think ought to be going on? 
• How do we get there?

Institutions are changing, she observed. Questions are being asked about what institutions should be and how they should respond to changes. Media has changed as well, she pointed out. What people watched a generation ago as entertainment was curated and presented at certain times on a limited number of channels. Today, because of widespread access to media online through subscription options and websites, “the burden of responsibility for sorting through the information is shifting from those well-worn curated paths . . . to ‘I’m going to decide what I’m going to watch.’” The same has happened in other areas of our lives, explained O’Donnell.

“When you take that burden of responsibility and you shift it over to getting a job, knowing your place in the world, where you want to live, what you want to be when you grow up – it just starts to get complex pretty fast,” she said.

To help in finding ways to navigate this, O’Donnell researched people who had successfully navigated the challenges of change. She asked them, “How have you learned to define success? How have you learned to define failure? What practices have moved you toward success? What practices have helped you deal with failure?”

There was no common definition of success, she learned; it was always contextual, involving people, mission, a sense of vision. Each person she interviewed, she said, was very comfortable with failure and with talking about it, but their stories differed.

They had more in common when it came to helpful practices, O’Donnell found, and the De Pree Center now uses many of those practical ideas to help others navigate change: empathy, imagination, risk-taking, and reflection.

By means of Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10, O’Donnell described what helpful characteristics and practices like these can look like. The Samaritan, she said, showed empathy in noticing the beaten man, imagination in taking the initiative of going to him and tending to his needs, risk-taking in stopping his journey along a dangerous road and taking on the financial burden of the man’s care, and reflection in planning to return after some time to cover the debt.

We might think we need a big idea, a lot of money, and a plan, O’Donnell said, but each of us needs to recognize, “What I really need to do in order to follow where God has me is to be awake to the present moment, to empathize with my neighbors, and then to steward the resources I already have toward the need of a neighbor.”

These practices can help us both discern and model God’s calling on our lives, O’Donnell suggested. We need more good leaders, she said, and these practices of moving toward our neighbors is part of what it means to step into that kind of leadership.

In her next book, Life in Flux: Navigational Skills to Guide and Ground You in an Ever-Changing World, cowritten with Lisa Pratt Slayton, O’Donnell discusses the internal work of navigating change and transition. Leaders today are dealing with a lot of change, sometimes piloting or guiding it, and always trying to make sense of it.

In  her talk, O’Donnell discussed change in terms of technical challenges and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges, she said, are those for which there are known solutions – for example, plumbing problems. They can be complex, but the solution is clear. Adaptive challenges, she said, require us to wrestle with deeply held assumptions and to experiment with new ways of being. Offering a personal example of adaptive change, O’Donnell explained that when she returned to her hometown in rural Nebraska after having spent years away, she needed to figure out what it meant to feel “at home” there again. Adaptive change is about how we make our way, step by step, through these changes, she suggested.

O’Donnell reflected that as Christians we believe God is leading the way; the Holy Spirit is our compass when the way is unclear. And because of that, she said, Christian institutions and places of higher learning have a lot to speak into the challenges of change facing society today. “We’re not making our way into the ambiguity without a guide . . . but the Spirit is out ahead.” she noted. “I also think that’s why places like Calvin [University], Fuller Seminary, and faith-driven business leaders are uniquely positioned to guide so much of this change. We have this compass that says, ‘This is hard, but we do have a path in that we believe God is out in front of us.’”

O’Donnell described a story in which a young man and his friends were out on a boat off the coast of Maine enjoying a beautiful sunny day on the water. Very suddenly, a thick fog rolled in while they were far offshore, and the young man had left his compass at home. His instinct, he later said, was to turn up the engine and just go. Without direction, though, he needed to know where to go before setting out. He cut the engine so that he and his friends could hear the buoy bells and fog horns, and they headed toward the familiar-sounding ones. Slowly, cutting the engine every so often to hear, they were able to make their way back to shore.

Adaptive challenges, O’Donnell explained, require us to slow down in a similar way, listening, taking stock, to find direction. Our compass setting needs to be, at its core, the call to follow Jesus, she said. Everything else – loving and serving others, creativity, participating in redemption, and vocational calling – stems out from that central call to follow Jesus.

Sometimes, O’Donnell suggested, we try to start with our vocational calling, for example, but if we don’t start with belonging to God, that calling can feel hollow. Following Jesus first can remove a lot of pressure imposed by the other callings in our lives.

When you come to the end of yourself, when you realize that you’re not flourishing in what you’re doing, you’re in a place of tremendous opportunity, said O’Donnell. She and colleagues had found in their study of flourishing leaders that all were guided by a sense of calling, but not a calling to a particular field or position. Mature disciples of Christ were flourishing leaders. In addition, all of the leaders they studied had faced really hard challenges as part of their story; they hadn’t welcomed adversity, but they had leaned in and met the challenges in order to go through them.

Further, none of the flourishing leaders they spoke with had tried to gain success on their own; they all gave credit to friends, loved ones, coworkers. We’re made for relationships and community, O’Donnell said, and we thrive when we’re in them.

Responding to a question from a student about how to embrace the uncertainty of their stage of life, O’Donnell reflected that a theme at many colleges and universities is to discover what you’re passionate about, and to figure out what you want to do with your life. “That’s a beautiful set of directives, and it makes perfect sense. And also, it takes time and trying things to discover what you’re passionate about, to discover how you’re made, to discover what you want to do,” said O’Donnell. “And so that pressure and that tension are very real. At the risk of sounding pejorative, we’ve got to take it one step at a time.” 

She encouraged people who are navigating change to think about who is “on their boat” – family, friends, professors, mentors – and to work through questions with them. She also challenged students and adults not to be afraid to change their minds when necessary.

O’Donnell noted that people who flourished in leadership after a period of change and failure had in common a comfort with grief as they processed the end of a dream or a project they had come up with. They also got comfortable with failure and began to see it as an opportunity to learn. When things didn’t work out, they knew they could handle the outcome because they had done so before, and they were excited about what they could learn from it.

Asked about spiritual disciplines, O’Donnell advocated for the examen prayer, in which, at the end of each day, one looks back and asks, “Where did I feel most connected to God, and where did I feel most distant from God?” Going through your day in your mind, thinking about where you felt most energized, alive, and connected to God, and where you didn’t, can help you make adjustments to turn your life more toward God and his calling, she explained.=

Sarah Visser, who moderated the interview-style presentation, ended the session with a prayer that is included at the end of a chapter of Life in Flux (Baker, 2024). “Lord, I long to know you, and I’m learning that I cannot truly know you until I know myself. As I look at the parts of myself, help me to accept what I see, to acknowledge my protective shell, to name what feels broken, and to release the habits that keep me feeling safe but also keep me stuck. Sometimes I can’t help but hide behind a mask of my own creation. Help me peel back the layers of performance and productivity, releasing the expectations of others, and accepting what is mine to do. In this fog, help me to more deeply understand who you have made me to be, and to love myself just as you love me. Amen.”