I’m an admirer of the ambition and diligence of beavers. I’ve been watching them on a particular parcel of land for four years, and they’ve built channels, redirected streams, cleared areas, and changed the landscape in some pretty remarkable ways.
But then I also encounter these strange projects that don’t make any sense to me. This is a huge tree, upland of any channels. It’s not part of a dam, and they don’t appear to be eating the bark for food. (They strip the bark off smaller saplings, eating the tender inner bark like corn on the cob, but they don’t digest wood pulp.) But someone has spent a lot of time and energy on this. Was it time well spent? I wish I could ask the beaver whose idea this was, and the other beavers in the lodge.
Sometimes I give clients an assignment to divide their work into quadrants. I love a good quadrant exercise. On one axis is “Important to me.” On the other axis is “Important to the organization.” Of course the goal is to mostly do work that’s important to you AND important to the organization, and avoid work that doesn’t really matter to either of you. The juicy places are where it’s important to one of you but not the other. It’s worth looking at those from time to time.
Maybe this project was important to the beaver community, but not to any particular beaver. I’m imagining a training exercise, where an older beaver had a group of young ‘uns and they were practicing technique, or giving the kiddos a way to keep busy gnawing at something without getting in anyone’s way. The youngsters might have been frustrated — why can’t we work on the dam, or bring back food to the lodge? Or maybe it was a passion project, that a beaver decided to tackle just for the joy of a challenge, to refine her craft, to build the confidence to head out for a bigger stream.
