Three Days in a Canoe

How Excess Baggage Can Impact Your Mission!
J. David Schmidt 
This article provided by the Engstrom Institute

The challenge many organizations face today when it comes to knowing what to maintain and what to discard to accomplish their mission can be clearly illustrated by a canoe camping trip I took with my son this past summer.

The night before our trip, I did the exercise everyone who heads to remote or wilderness areas does: an item-by-item run-through of our gear. I considered the type of trip, what kind of conditions and weather we were likely to encounter, every function we needed to fulfill, how long we'd be out, and how comfortable I wanted to be—or how much discomfort I was willing to tolerate.

I've done a fair amount of high altitude hiking and knew the importance of packing light. (When you're gaining a thousand feet of altitude in the course of a half mile, at 12,000 feet, you learn quickly to carry and live with less.)

But this was my first canoe camping trip where everything we needed for the trip would be in dry bags. Compared to a backpack the space was absolutely luxurious. So as I put our gear together, I found myself relaxing a bit. A small gas-fired lantern and a candle lantern went in. An extra can of fuel might come in handy. I included a wood saw (even though the saw on my Swiss Army Knife had done a fine job in the past of breaking down fallen branches for a fire); water purifier; three gallons of water and 10 juice boxes; two beach towels instead of one; a large can of ravioli just in case we got super hungry; two extra changes of clothes; deodorant (Do a dad and son REALLY need it when no one else is around?); and an oversized first aid kit. On it went. Ounce by ounce, pound by pound, the weight climbed.

I got all our stuff—tent, cooking gear, food, and the assortment of items you need to survive in a range of conditions—packed tightly into several duffle bags. It didn't look like very much until you picked them up. I had a sense as I loaded the bags into the car that we had more gear than we needed. "Still, we will be in a canoe," I thought. "No big deal."

>Too Much Baggage

No matter what stage of the journey you're in, your church or organization has baggage, too. How much gear your organization or church is taking with it to accomplish its mission will have a significant impact on the pace you work at, your capacity to adapt to changing conditions, and even your effectiveness and impact in today's culture. Insuring your organization is not weighed down with low value and unnecessary baggage is a responsibility leaders must not run from, but enthusiastically embrace.

It's my experience that organizations tend to overpack for the mission God has given them to accomplish. This is never intentional—it just sort of happens as ministries pick up a strategy here, a protocol there. An organization's "way of doing things" emerges. After a while, the organization has a boatload of things it does, an overloaded mix of low and high value activities.

In well-established ministries, say over 25 years old, leaders tend to inherit strategies, past operational protocols, meeting schedules, and ways of relating to the board, each other, and supporters. Challenging what you inherit or helped to create before you became the senior leader can be daunting.

In startups or younger enterprises the tendency to accumulate stuff sets in early. There may be less baggage around but what is there can quickly become established ways, even silos of activity that may not effectively contribute to the ministry's impact.

Our trip began on a small, crystal clear river in northern Wisconsin just south of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Tall, majestic pine and white birch hugged the shore on both sides. Our destination was a wilderness area with the promise of plenty of fish to catch and the chance to spot bald eagle, bear, and perhaps even moose and wolves. As we loaded our canoe, I began to sense that less would have been more. After trying several different configurations, we finally landed on a way to get all our stuff in and keep it as low in the boat as possible. We pushed off.

>Making room for new treasures

When an organization does some strategic thinking and planning, the gravitational pull is to add new initiatives to existing work. Rarely, if ever, is the question asked: What will we abandon that is good but not the best to make room for this new strategy? For example, an organization might try to build more costly infrastructure for a new outreach, instead of outsourcing or partnering with others, because "outsourcing just isn't our way of doing things." A church might try to add a small group approach—and work to maintain a complete Sunday school program because that's how it has always been done.

Or, an organization may have an annual fall event for gathering senior leaders that has been in place for decades. The very way the meeting is organized, the low expectations of attendees, and the agenda all conspire to create a lackluster event—no matter how good the guest speaker. Leaders have a nagging feeling that what the organization really needs is a meeting with an agenda that focuses on critical issues this group of leaders is uniquely gifted and placed to address. But the same old event is continued year after year because it has deep roots or a substantial and long-term donor behind it—even if it has passed its prime in impacting lives.

From how we celebrate birthdays to how we do ministry or acknowledge donor gifts, our tendency is to accumulate and add to our ministries—without putting equal energy into occasionally cleaning out the low value activity that weighs us down, or the old ways of doing things that have outlived their usefulness and cutting edge.

Around the first turn in the river we came to some Class 1 rapids—no big deal in an empty canoe, but with three dry bags, a dry box, and firewood, rapids of any size were a deal. Sitting sideways in strong current as our canoe banged into rocks, it became clear that if we wanted to keep our gear dry and in the canoe, we were going to have to walk our boat down and out of the rapids. Second clue: a little less gear might have been better.

As the hours passed, I got my third clue we had packed too much. Canoes are never terribly roomy, but put a lot of gear in your boat and you redefine what tight space means. Bags were stacked in front of me making it impossible to stretch my legs. As we paddled my legs got stiffer, requiring occasional pauses to stand up or shake off the stiffness.

>How to tell if you're carrying too much gear

In the same way I was experiencing the effects of too much camping gear, ministries also feel the pinch when they're carrying around unnecessary baggage. Excess gear in ministry tends to show up in three areas:

• Strategies—how an organization delivers its mission or ministry to its marketplace.
• Operations—the systems and structures an organization employs to support the delivery of its strategy.
• Social Architecture—the protocols such as meeting schedules and agendas, values, organizational climate and ways it treats its employees and volunteers.

When these areas become overloaded and are not strategically examined, four problems are likely to occur:

• Tired workers. It's safe to assume that some of the longer hours and the sense of many people feeling overextended or overloaded is a result of an organization carrying a lot of good things in its portfolio without focusing on what's essential or best. Consider the value of a workforce not encumbered with less-than-effective programs, systems, and ways of doing things.
• Lack of innovation. When there is no organizational room to experiment, to breathe, to try new things or fail, little innovation occurs. Again, what's the potential value of more innovation in your organization?
• Unresponsiveness. When we're busy maintaining, are overloaded or are simply carrying too much stuff, we rarely have the capacity to move quickly to explore opportunities or respond to a need that quickly arises.
• Sagging results. When we're carrying excess organizational baggage we can find ourselves staring at flat or declining impact from our ministry strategies. We keep investing human and financial resources hoping that they'll bear fruit.

If excess baggage creates all these problems, then why do ministries continue to operate this way? For emotional comfort. Often, we add to our strategies, systems, and social protocols without shedding, to avoid the pain, fear and conflict. When we throw things out we don't need, or say "No" to adding them to our ministry canoe in the first place, we're usually confronting our fears of the unknown. We're forced to depend more on God's promise of unwavering faithfulness to us, and less on what props up our sense of confidence. Packing for effectiveness and packing for emotional comfort are two different things—and so is the weight of each.

By the time we got to our first campsite early that first evening, I got my fourth clue. Situated on a turn in the river, our site sat up on a beautiful bluff covered with towering white pine. Note I said, up on a beautiful bluff. We paddled into our landing spot only to discover that all our gear had to be lifted out of the boat onto the shore—which was about four feet above the boat top—then carried up a small hill.

>Sorting through treasures, baggage, and garbage

Almost every organization that wants to shed unnecessary weight and excess baggage will benefit from a guided process. Some organizational cultures are adept enough to do this on a continuous basis. It's built right into the DNA to regularly clean house or think strategically about eliminating worn out strategies, operations, or social protocols. For most, however, it takes a disciplined process.

Peter Drucker challenged industry leaders years ago to put every product and service on trial for its life about every three years. His method was severe, but effective. Simply consider a product or board room) unless there was good evidence that it was extremely effective in accomplishing the mission.

Drucker's contention was that if organizations did this, they would reduce the distraction factor, eliminate the costs of carrying marginal or ineffective activity and staff, keep leadership and teams nimble, and in so doing, help the organization better connect with its context.

In his book Reinventing Evangelism, Donald C Posterski spoke of an organization's treasures (those things that give identity and strength and that are well worth keeping), baggage (the way things are done, the externals, activities and things that don't really give or sustain vitality) and garbage (the accumulation of stuff, those "dark realities where God's spirit has been set aside in favor of personal choice and human preference").

Treasures, for the most part, are easy to identify. Garbage is a little harder to assess—but using Posterski's definition, God can show us through his Spirit what needs to go. Baggage is the difficult category to determine. Using Drucker's acid test helps: "Does it add value?" If not, out it goes.

Few of us can afford to carry organizational baggage in an uncertain, complex, rapidly changing world. The key to making this kind of process work is to make a set of decisions that protect treasures, abandon excess baggage, and take out garbage. Without firm decisions the process lacks authenticity. With them comes nimbleness, lighter organizational loads, and increased organizational capacity to do good—something we all long for in the world God has called us to touch and reach.

My son and I had a fabulous trip—just being together in the wilderness, spotting bald eagles, fishing. And of course, staying on high alert to keep all the gear we were lugging around out of the river.

When we got home, I took stock of some of what we had used and what was simply baggage we paddled around the north woods. Two pair of socks—never worn. One large can of ravioli—eaten the night we got back home. The small gas-fired lantern—still had all its gas. And the deodorant—well, we used that when we got home, too.

David Schmidt is president of J. David Schmidt and Associates, a consulting firm assisting church and parachurch ministries in the areas of research, organizational development, and strategic planning. For more information visit www.wiseplanning.net