Are You Being (Re)Productive?

When my wife and I got to a certain point in our marriage we decide to have children. Now not everyone is in a position to have kids and not everyone who can decides to. But we wanted children and were blessed to be able to have them. 

I have since learned that a basic principle of most healthy organisms is the ability to not only grow but to multiply. 

In fact, in nature organisms don’t grow endlessly – they grow to maturity and reproduce. An apple tree produces apples which contain thousands of seeds per tree and from them can come an entire orchard. The apples are sweet enough to bait squirrels and people and others to eating them, transporting the seeds to other places, and increasing the chance of a new orchard in a new place (God is apparently not beyond “bait and switch tactics” can be pretty sneaky sometimes!).

 At A.R.E. we have been playing with organic images. They help us to think about how we are functioning and what we are doing. And again, as we have thought and wrestled and discussed this we have learned something and been changed in the process. In addition to “being productive” we recognize that we also need to be “(re)productive.” We need to not only produce results for the present but multiply those results to change the scope of our work and influence in the future. This is impacting how we work. 

As our work grows our capacity needs to grow with it. One way is to simply have all of us work tirelessly and endlessly to accomplish more work. This ability to be “productive” is an essential part of the work we do as we move from a new entity into adolescence as a company. At the same time, entering adolescence as a company is making us ask some new questions and think about new ways of working. We will soon have grown to the appropriate size for who we are and what we can handle and will need to learn to live in this new body we develop. But then we have a choice: do we simply then work at the maximum capacity for a number of years and then hang it up? Or do we begin to multiply by adding a new generation to A.R.E. and rather than stretching the three partners beyond our limits, increase the scope of our work by multiplying through new people who we are willing to equip and support as they add capacity to our work in future cycles? We know the answer for us: we are going to begin to think about how and when to be reproductive. And we are strategically going to then pursue reproductivity within our work. 

How about you? Are you simply working to keep up with little hope of catching up as the treadmill seems to just keep spinning? Or have you found ways to multiply your work through adding well equipped, mentored and supported people who have the DNA and the energy to expand the work you do?

Reproducing – it’s about working smarter not just harder!

- Dave Daubert