Sufficiency Versus Efficiency: Fighting a Clockwork World of Tasks
Robert Kanigel's biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor
A while back, I heard a speaker present a talk on the crucial difference for the Christian leader between pursuing God’s sufficiency over human efficiency.
The idea struck a chord with me, especially during a busy season of long-term ministry planning, budgeting, and vision casting. For months, I had been working on a five-year strategic plan, which I carried around in my briefcase and updated regularly. I tweaked and revised, as if my perfectly articulated vision were the key that could unlock all the doors of “ministry success.”
Now, in my mind, there is nothing wrong with careful planning. Scripture demonstrates that God values order and thoughtful preparation. But there is a fine line between ingenuity rooted in self and creativity grounded in God. It is a line, I am afraid, I cross too often. To pursue human efficiency is to live under the illusion that it is all up to me. Scripture warns against such an orientation to life and work.
Continuing to reflect in this area, I reacquainted myself with a biography on the life of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor, born in 1856, was the father of scientific management and looms as one of the most important figures in the development of American industry. The book’s author, Robert Kanigel [http://robertkanigel.com/work3.htm], wrote:
“Taylor bequeathed a clockwork world of tasks timed to a hundredth of a minute, of standardized factories, machines, women, and men. He helped instill in us the fierce, unholy obsession with time, order, productivity, and efficiency that marks our age. . . .
“Today it is only a modest overstatement to say that we are all Taylorized, that from the assembly-line tasks timed to a fraction of a second, to lawyers recording their time by fractions of an hour, to standardized McDonald’s hamburgers, to information operators constrained to grant only so many seconds per call, modern life has become Taylorized” (from The One Best Way, Viking Press).
Whether you agree or disagree with Taylor’s methods and insights, the impact this one man had on our systems of work and production were revolutionary. As Kanigel rightly observes, “His ceaseless quest for the ‘one best way’ changed the very texture of twentieth-century life.”
As much as I value efficient systems and “smart work,” I worry that much has been lost in our modern workplace. Too often, the clock, sales quotas, shifting consumer demands, and tempermental financial markets rule the day. I am no more exempt from such pressures because I work for a Christian ministry. At times, I engage my work with a greater allegiance to Taylor than to Jesus. If I can only do things faster, more efficiently, more intelligently, then, and only then, will the ministry grow.
However, God’s economy—his kingdom—is much different. It is like a mustard seed, Jesus tells us, the smallest of all seeds, “yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches” (Matthew 13:31-32, NIV).
Sure, I want to be more efficient and to plan well. No doubt, I will continue to labor over a strategic plan. But I hope to grow in a minute-by-minute dependency upon God. This, contrary to Taylor, is truly the “one best way.”
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