Warm take: when risk outweighs reward
“Initial reports from our communications center indicated a group of 15 hikers on an office work retreat had left the Blanks Cabin Trailhead at sunrise that morning, with a group completing summit attempts and a separate group ascending to the saddle and returning from there. In what might cause some awkward encounters at the office in the coming days and weeks, one member of their party was left to complete his final summit push alone.” Chaffee County Search and Rescue - South, Facebook post, August 25, 8:33pm
The rest of this story, as reported, is brutal. After the guy was separated from his group on a Colorado 14er, he got lost. Cell service was patchy. His team did not call for help for quite some time; he spent the night by himself, injured, on a mountain, in a storm. Scores of rescue workers were ultimately deployed; he regained cell service, and was found and transported to a hospital.
I saw a lot of hot takes about this story on social media. What kind of company; what the guy was probably like; whether he was boss, bully or harasser; whether workers comp would cover his injuries; who would get sued, and so on. My warm take: even if participants talk, we’ll never know what happened.
I’ve participated in more than one outdoor adventure-slash-professional-development-program. It’s not unusual for someone to get sick, hurt, or show signs of altitude sickness. If your support team includes experienced guides and medical professionals, when things go wrong, things could go right. But not always. Weather is a wild card for even the most skilled and prepared outdoorspeople.
Nature won’t solve a team’s problems.
And, whoa, human nature. I mean, raise your hand if you’ve ever been in a classroom where a team-building exercise went bad and wrong. Raise both hands if your CEO/team leader derailed the proceedings!
When a team is not cohering, true team building starts with conversation. It can be painstaking, and painfully incremental. Sometimes you have to make tough choices.
If you must with the team building programs, slow your roll. Don’t start by taking it to the mountain, ropes course, or whitewater rapids. Start at ground level. Leave the possibility of physical harm off the menu.
“As people get a little more settled in, they are more willing to express their personal perspective even if it will cause conflict,” Leslie observes. “At that point, a group can either work that conflict productively and move onto a higher level of performing, or they can avoid it and stay stagnant, they can stay stuck in conflict indefinitely, or they can just stay at a low level performance.” Stagnation or coasting at low performance levels has consequences in any aspect of life, but when the group dynamics dictate the ability to confront the real physical risks posed by the wild, low performance can be deadly.
- from Ida Benedetto's Patterns of Transformation, reflecting on experience in a wilderness leadership program with National Outdoor Leadership School guide Leslie Appling.
Outback (workplace) noir
Jane Harper’s Force of Nature is a mystery about a wilderness team-building experience where something goes wrong. I don't know why it was not on my summer reading list when it came out in the US (2018.) I do love a mystery, and Harper's Aaron Falk is a complicated mensch whose job is to investigate financial crimes. Harper makes the Australian landscape terrible, beautiful, and always integral to the story. Thumbs up to Harper's entire Aaron Falk trilogy. (I like her standalone novels, too.)
Book club idea, or is it a podcast idea
A book club, but the books are all about workplace retreats gone awry.
Any suggestions?
Thank you so much for reading my newsletter! And special thanks to the group of you who pay to support it. And many thanks to those who wrote in with reading recommendations, which I'll include in a future newsletter. What are you reading?
This Warm Take was mostly written over the weekend, and polished on Labor Day, while I sat outside enjoying my container garden. I plan to read here for the rest of the day. There may be typos. I may fix them later, on the Internet.
Enjoy the rest of your Labor Day weekend, here in the US, or your week – wherever you are.
May you and your loved ones be safe, healthy, and free,
Links
- Immobilized hiker lost overnight on Colorado 14er after getting left behind by co-workers By Spencer McKee, Denver Gazette, Aug 26, 2024
- Man who got separated from colleagues during work retreat hike is rescued a day later, Minyvonne Burke, NBC News, Aug. 27, 2024, 2:11 PM CDT This article also contains a link to the Chaffee County Search and Rescue - South Facebook page I quoted up top. (Sorry/not sorry, I can’t bear to link to FB.)
- Patterns of Transformation is experience designer Ida Benedetto's work on designing transformational development experiences, with risk in mind – well worth your time when thinking about any kind of team building experience. "Survival in the Wild" offers lessons from Ida's sea kayaking trip with the National Outdoor Leadership School.
- I'm also a fan of Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. (Which I may have learned about from Ida?)
- In Ready for your intervention? On Management #38, I recommend asking, "What do I/we wish to transform," before jumping into any change management project.
- Here's Jane Harper's website. Two of Harper's Aaron Falk outback noir novels have been made into films. I thought The Dry was a good screen adaptation, I put in a library request for Forces of Nature: The Dry 2 on DVD. Will watch.
