The Whitewater MBA

Whitewater rafting is fun, a little bit perilous, and requires teamwork.?

What it doesn’t require is expertise, or a lot of planning. You and your raft will get to the end. Rafting is all about how you get there. Together? Upright? Pointed in the right direction? With a smile on your face and a sense of accomplishment??

During a recent extreme whitewater rafting weekend, I took away some business insights that apply to rafting and to work. I’d like to share them with you.

The Team

• Adventure is more fun with an engaged team.?
• Teamwork can be people sharing a goal and agreeing on who the leader is.
• Leadership only requires simple, easily understood, commands. Paddle forward, backward, or stop.?
• Leaders set the direction, give guidance, and let everyone else do the work. At no time did the leader try to take over paddling or position for any of the rest of us. The leader was in the boat with us, steering and setting the course with clear commands while the group was paddling. She was guiding on our where and our how. We needed to listen and follow instructions to achieve the results we all wanted and have a great experience.
• Leaders set expectations early. Teach the skills in quiet water. Practice together. Then use those skills to traverse choppy waters.
• Dead weight can be cut without sacrificing the outcome. When one guy got out of the boat due to his fear, his absence didn’t prevent us from achieving the results.?
• Know when to get out. If the risk or effort required isn’t for you, it’s ok to get out.
• Sometimes to rescue someone, you need to fall backward. We learned we can all lift 3x our own bodyweight. But you don’t use your arms. To pull someone back into the boat, you grab hold of their vest and then fall backwards into the boat. Your bodyweight and momentum rescue your teammate.?

Sending It

• Making the decision to go do a thing is often the hardest part of it. The preparation and planning takes hours longer than the event itself. Time is not a metric of success or value.
• Challenge your fear of new experiences.
• Before the sprint, launch, or event, practice and build the team. Practice builds confidence in the team and among each other. Practice builds confidence in the strategy and approach.?
• When you’re in it, don’t start easy. Start medium. That will give you the confidence that you and your team can accomplish something you might have thought was too big. Then do an easy one. That reframes what you might have thought was hard (before you started), but now that you have tackled a medium sized challenge, the easy ones are, well, easy.? Then rest. After you rest, go for the biggest, nastiest, hardest challenge available. You will get through, but it will be messy. Still the confidence you’ve gained from the medium challenge and the easy challenge got you through. Now reflect on that hard challenge and do the hard thing again. You’ll be amazed at how you accomplish so much more than you thought you could before you started.?
• Startups, listen up. When you go, you need to commit 100%. You can’t go for the ride. There is no room for passengers. Everyone has work to do. The work can be short bursts of intense energy and then a boisterous review and appreciation for the group's accomplishment.?
• In a small boat there is no room for passengers. No option to hide under a blanket with a bottle of wine. If you don’t go 100% you will get hurt. In a small boat, holding back puts others at risk. Interestingly, there is much less fear in “going for it” when others are equally engaged and invested. Fear comes in hard when you feel that you’re alone.?
• Just because you did something one time doesn’t mean you can relax next time. You need to stay agile and aware even when you’re a little more experienced. Don’t let the fact that you got through it once before lead to complacency. The rapids are just as dangerous next time. One difference is your expectation.

Reflection

• Things can look and seem more frightening ahead of time than they do during the experience itself. Good, confident leadership is important to overcome second thoughts.
• When you look back on an experience, it looks bigger and more extreme than it did while you’re in the middle of it. Hindsight can show just how amazing and extreme the experience actually is. You did that. You were capable of that before you started, even though you didn’t think you were.?
• An experienced leader is one who projects confidence and equips the team with what they need but doesn’t weigh them down with more than they need.

This was a 10/10 adventure experience in Michigan / Wisconsin. The rapids were class 1-4. We got wet, we did things we never thought we could. And the lessons in teamwork, leadership, and business were unforgettable.