Perhaps today’s is a slightly offbeat and philosophical post. But I hope you continue reading.
For a forest to become established, nature has to expend a tremendous amount of energy for it to become a sustainable and self-maintaining eco-system.
The mighty oak #
Here’s a fascinating fact (I hope 😊). An oak tree can produce up to 2000 acorns each year and each acorn contains around 400 calories. 800 000 calories is an amazingly energetic effort for the mighty oak to ensure its future.
The mighty oak does all it can to make the forest, its own environment, sustainable.
If we turn to projects within our businesses, are they just slightly like nature’s effort to build and maintain a well-established forest?
Plant a tree and it needs lots and lots of attention and feeding. The relationship needs cultivating
Give it no attention and it starts to die but can be re-visited and brought back to full health, if it is not too late.
Our projects #
A project needs a heck of a lot of energy input to get it underway.
But we only have a certain amount of time. We only have a certain amount of mental capacity. We only have access to a pre-determined amount of labour to establish and maintain our projects.
Once our project reaches maturity and processes are in place to maintain its momentum, we can start to reduce our labour input and lean on technology and automation. Our project becomes sustainable and technology can help with the harvest.
Our massive labour input can then be redeployed to the nurturing of other projects, to bring them up to speed and make them sustainable.
The blend of the human touch and technology allows our projects (forests) to flourish and benefit from recurring and sustainable revenue flows – the acorns. Our acorns can then be used to fund (or seed) future projects.
The right blend of human activity plus implementation of technology and process equals a sustainable project.
A robust, sustainable project is very similar to a robust, sustainable forest.
Everything comes back to nature #
Process + trust = good execution
“Prioritising execution requires you to think of your business strategy as a living, evolving entity, meaning you’ll routinely revisit, reanalyse and make updates based on how things are going in real-time. In other words, you’ll be able to course-correct more frequently, and with better results” – franklincovey.com
The mighty oak trusts in its own abilities and has a process in place to ensure survival.
We must place trust in our own processes to ensure good execution of projects.
Thank you for reading.
