Redemptive entrepreneurship
From Praxis Labs
Redemptive entrepreneurship is creative restoration through sacrifice using the agency and resources available to the redemptive actor. Blessing others, renewing culture, and giving of ourselves - an “I sacrifice, we win” approach. The motivating force behind this redemptive way is fundamentally other-centred: to love and serve.
Wherever there is loss, brokenness, unfairness, injustice, waste, or harm - and someone willingly enters into the situation by bearing a cost or taking a risk to help the person, resource, or system to be restored or repaired - that’s redemptive action. This normally requires the creation of some new product, expression, model, or norm.
This core redemptive pattern - creative restoration through sacrifice - not only describes Jesus’ work to save the world but also our daily work, especially as people of faith, to serve the world. It gives shape to our mission as those who have been written into the greater redemptive story through no merit of our own.
There are three ways a business can work:
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The Exploitative way is to take all you can get - to gain any advantage, to prevail, to possess. Exploitative actors most often approach the venture with a zero-sum, “I win, you lose” mentality. The motivating force behind the Exploitative way is fundamentally self- or tribe-centred - to win and control.
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The Ethical way is to do things right - to do no harm, keep the rules, play fair, solve problems, add value. Ethical actors pursue “win-win” whenever they can. The motivating force behind the Ethical way is to be good and do good - which can often also be self- or tribe-centred.
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The Redemptive way is creative restoration through sacrifice using the agency and resources available to the redemptive actor. Blessing others, renewing culture, and giving of ourselves - an “I sacrifice, we win” approach . The motivating force behind this redemptive way is fundamentally other-centred: to love and serve.
Every organization, like every person, contains a mixture of all three approaches - exploitative blind spots, ethical strengths, points of redemptive light. But every exploitative (or redemptive) decision makes the next exploitative (or redemptive) decision more likely, setting a dominant trajectory or approach for the venture.
How does the redemptive way change three dimensions of work and therefore its trajectory or approach?
1. Strategy centres on what we build. It's everything the venture does to express mission, serve customers, and create value - in the form of products, services, programmes, brands, and even digital and physical experiences. We define Strategy by its cultural impact: “What does this organisation do to the world?” Redemptive Strategy doesn’t set out to exploit or leverage cultural trends for gain, or even merely to advance culture in the general direction of “progress.” Instead, redemptive strategy is about building products, services, programs, brands, and experiences that renew culture by making their sphere of impact somehow more humanizing, truthful, beautiful, virtuous, lasting, and God-glorifying.
2. Operations centres on how we build. It's everything the venture does to develop, support, and deliver the Strategy in the form of culture, financial models, value chains, and partnerships. We define Operations by its people impact: “What does this organisation do to its people and partners?” Redemptive Operations refuses to use people merely as resources to achieve organizational goals; and it seeks to go further than merely respecting team members and partners. Instead, redemptive operations are about building culture, financial models, value chains, and partnerships that bless people through grace, generosity, justice, patience, and mutuality.
3. Leadership centres on why we build. It's the motives, worldviews, imagination, and practices of the leadership team, whose decisions and actions set the course for the venture’s Strategy and Operations. We define Leadership Intent by its success script: “What definition of success are the leaders of the organisation living out?” Redemptive Leadership is marked not by an ambition to live for ourselves, or even just to improve ourselves. Instead, redemptive leadership is about patiently rewiring our motives, worldview, imagination, and practices around dying to self—becoming more surrendered, humble, accountable, generous, and rested.
The Leadership dimension defines the horizon of possibility for an organization's Strategy and Operations; and the younger the organization, the more this is true. Organizations can grow bigger, faster, or in different directions than the founders imagined; but no organization has ever been more redemptive in its actual impact than the founders intended. The scripts we internalize, the practices we nurture, the imagination we cultivate, and the choices we make as leaders are the primary limiting factor on our ventures' impact.
Redemptive entrepreneurship is love in organisational action. Redemptive entrepreneurship is an aspiration - every one of us, and every organization, falls well short of it every day - but it is not an empty dream.
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From Praxis Labs, 20/11/2024