In high school math classes, I grew weary of teachers reminding me to “show my work” when solving a problem. I thought it was sufficient that I arrived at the right answer, but to a person, every teacher wanted to be able to follow my work and see the steps I took. They would deduct points, even from a correct answer, if my work was missing.
Turns out that mathematicians are somewhat haunted in this by the legacy of Pierre de Fermat, the 17th-century French lawyer and amateur mathematician. He is famous for writing in the margins of one of his books that he had proven a theorem (an + bn = cn) but that he lacked the space in the book to write out his work.
He died before he could document his proof, and it took mathematicians an additional 358 years to prove it, with a published proof finally appearing in the 1990s. Today, the theorem bears his name, and the story is relayed as a cautionary tale for documenting your work along the way so that others can benefit and build upon it.
In our day, when so much of the work of leadership and management is archived in cloud servers, emails, apps and text messages, it may feel unnecessary to say that we as Christian leaders have a responsibility to document our work so that others can follow behind us.
It is worth repeating the obvious though, that the day will come when we no longer occupy our positions and no longer are employed by our institutions, and new people will serve as the directors or deans, the senior pastors or bishops.
These colleagues -- our successors -- may need not just a recounting of the decisions we made but the rationales that supported them. What were our priorities? What did we hope this course of action might achieve? What were the compromises we made, the difficult but necessary tradeoffs that allowed us to move the institution and the Gospel forward? What are the things we learned by pursuing this course of action? What would we do differently because we did this way this time?
Part of the difficult work of leadership is preparing for the person who will come behind us almost from the first day that we have the job. As such, we do ourselves and our successors well if we create decision-making processes that include record-keeping. Further, we help our institutions by ensuring that there are people in place who can be keepers of the institutional memory, the storytellers who remember that we tried that the other way and found this one better.
And, of course, one of the secrets my high school math teachers knew but didn’t tell us was that there is a curious side benefit to documenting your work. Not only does it enable others to follow after you and understand you, but it can create a certain efficiency within you and within your institution. “What did we do the last time we faced this?” “Why did we do that?” “Oh, it’s right here. Remember…”
Those math teachers at Watauga High were on to something. So show your work. You and your successor will be glad you did.