A backyard garden can produce delicious tomatoes one year and then struggle to produce any at all the next.
A multi-national manufacturer, on the other hand, can produce the same product line year after year with a high level of precision.
With our talk of “pipelines,” “moves management,” and “engagement scores,” we sometimes trick ourselves into believing that advancement work resembles the manufacturing process much more than a backyard garden.
Similar to a manufacturing process, we are led to believe that advancement efficiency is the goal. We are led to think that benchmarking our results against other institutions makes sense. We are asked to make projections based on our annual “run rates.”
But, the reality is that our soil, our weather, the amount of sunlight we receive, the prevalence of pests, and other factors will always make our results different from others. And that’s whether we are talking about gardening or advancement.
When done well for long periods of time, advancement is much more like the personal tending, care, and nuanced attention we must pay to our backyard gardens to make them successful and much less like establishing a sterilized, precise manufacturing process.
The real goal isn’t efficiency and precision.
The real goal is the unique joy experienced when serving a home-grown, sun-warmed tomato.
