Managing for abundance

The article Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity and the free audiobook "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" (on the same page) provide a helpful introduction to the different kind of thinking that the Internet has brought about and its implications for many areas of life, including ministry.

When publishing a book, a "scarcity" mentality is prevalent because publishing a book is expensive and it needs to be perfect and complete before going to press because it is difficult to change after the fact. Contrast that with a wiki approach to publishing on-line. This models an "abundance" mentality because it costs very little (virtually nothing) to publish and it not only can be changed easily, it is intended to be modified and improved upon over time.

This change in mentality has a direct implication for ministry. We are coming from a long history of scarcity thinking, especially in the area of equipping the church with discipleship tools such as Bible translations. If your end goal is a published book, the process necessarily is going to tend to a scarcity mentality of controlling everything - the process, the people involved, the strategy - all in an effort to ensure perfect quality in the finished product. This is time-consuming, and, if we are honest, still does not result in "perfect" translations in the first publishing.

The nature of creating discipleship tools (including Bible translations) lends itself very readily to an "abundance" model, especially as we see the continual rise in digital means of content distribution. If we are e-Publishing and pushing the content to digital devices, it is easy and virtually free to modify, update, revise and improve the material. This promotes a "release early, release often" strategy, which tends to get more people involved in the process, leading to increased ownership of the content by the target audience, which can be an important factor in the continued use and maintenance of the discipleship material over time.

"The funny thing about waste is that it's all relative to your sense of scarcity."

Photo credit: angelocesare, by-nd