Deconstructing to Rebuild

I spent this past weekend working on my dog kennels.  Ten years ago, I built a 10 ft. x 10 ft. platform of pressure treated wood on which to set the panels.  A couple of years later, I built a second one.  I received some construction guidance from a coworker who recommended arranging the floor joists so that the platforms could be sawed in half and reconnected if I ever wanted to move them.  A couple of weeks ago, I did just that.  I sawed the platforms in half and hauled them up the mountain.

Kennel site - staked out

Last week I began the reconstruction.  I laid out the footprint and made sure everything was square.  I horsed the now 5x10 panels into place and leveled them with blocks.  Then I crawled underneath and bolted the sections back together (as my coworker described).  It worked perfectly giving me a refurbished 10 ft. x 20 ft. platform.

Kennel decking - stained

This past Sunday, I heard a missionary, Joel Lillie of Extend International, speak about his family’s work with international students at Purdue University.  Many of these are graduate or Ph.D level students who come from a variety of religious or nonreligious backgrounds.  His work is heavy on relationship building.  They not only have Bible study, but they help the students refine their English and western cultural skills.  It is a true holistic ministry.

During his presentation Joel spoke a truly fascinating phrase.  He said that before you can construct something new, most often you have to deconstruct a previous structure before building something new.  That sounds very simple.  My first vision of that statement was of a building imploding and crashing into a pile of rubble.  Then the bulldozers push away the debris and a new building is built.  A fast and efficient method of change.

Appalachian State University - Winkler dorm implosion - 2014
www.wataugaroads.com

But what he described was not removing elements of the student's culture and then seeking to make them American.  After all, most of them will return to their homes after they finish their studies.  Instead, he uses their culture as a springboard to introduce new ideas that may contrast with or compliment their customs, traditions or mores.  The apostle Paul used this same approach when he spoke to the crowd in Athens.  This creates an environment that is ripe for growth and change.

As leaders responsible for initiating and implementing organizational change, we are sometimes tempted to take the “implosion, clear the site, and start fresh with a new structure” approach.  That methodology will definitely work – to a degree.  This approach eliminates the entanglements of all the historical culture that sometimes slows us down.  But within an organization (or our personal lives), it is rare that everything has to be discarded and we have start over with something completely new - history matters.  By deconstructing piece by piece we can examine each part and it's role in the whole structure, and then evaluate whether this part will add value to the reconstruction.

Joel gave examples of this approach working for evangelism and relationship building with college students.  I have seen it work firsthand in an agency organizational review and restructuring initiative.  Heck, it even works when building a dog kennel.