Redundancy

I dropped a piece of doughnut on the floor, and now it’s covered with ants. Two ants are hauling off a section while a third crawls around on top. A fourth and fifth ant push and pull, stopping the portion’s progress for a moment before letting it go again. Still, the work gets done. It makes me wonder, what’s wrong with redundancy? Why do we as humans feel such a need to streamline our efforts, to make our institutions efficient? What do we really accomplish with such work?

Here are the effects of our efficiency-minded efforts: we make people unnecessary; we divest ourselves of “extras”; we demonstrate our value of programs over people. Is that what we’re really about? Is getting it done as important as we think?