Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Always Learning

These last weeks of the football season are marked by injuries. Teams that were having a great season, suddenly find their quarterback gone for the duration, or a defensive line reduced to half its former glory. This is when you become aware of how much depth your team has. There are only 53 players on an NFL team, so you can’t back up every position with a dozen guys. Moreover, there are salary caps, so you can’t have too many highly paid backups on your roster. You have to choose. Which positions do you back up with strong players, and which do you expose to risk?

When I worked at Clendenin Brothers Inc, in Baltimore they had an amazing system of backups. Right after you learned your own job, you then trained on the job you would come to back up. So after I was competent on the switchboard they taught me to do the billing. Whenever anyone in accounting was sick, everyone moved one seat to the left, and a retired woman came in as needed to cover the switchboard. The idea was that not only were all essential functions covered when someone got sick, but that this gave us all opportunities for advancement. It was understood the if the Biller quit, or moved up into the Accounts Payable position, that the Switchboard Operator got the Biller’s job.

Lately I’ve been applying this lens to my own life. How do we as a community plan for the inevitable absence of key people? How do we constantly create redundancy so that the absence of one person is simply a challenging shift to the left, and not a cessation of our flow? How do we create a system where each of us is always learning and each of us is always teaching? Like the nuts and fruit a tree drops to create the tree that will replace it, like it was planted by the tree that came before.