Surface Ripples

I Went Sailing...

This is not a rip-off of the Rod Stewart classic, but rather a review of a valuable learning experience.

Toward the end of last month, I had the chance to go for a weekend's sailing instruction thanks to a good friend and former colleague.

Sailing is not something that you can learn only from a book or from a course filled with lectures, debate, syndicate work and dissertation. I found it a remarkable parallel to business life and realised how far we have moved from "hands on" experience to theory being the current driver.

If you want to be a competent yachtsman/woman, you will have to read books and go to classes as well as pass exams on the subject. However, you must actually get out, learn and practice before being allowed to take the helm on your own.

You need to understand how wind, tide and weather affect your proposed course. You need to understand what to do when the unexpected happens (man overboard) as well as how to avoid other craft on the high seas. There are "rules" of the sea that you have to obey to ensure that fatalities do not occur.

You also need to learn a new language (a "sheet" is not something you sleep on/under on a yacht, for example) and to be able to communicate effectively otherwise you may well end up with a big problem...

We left home with what we thought was plenty of time to get to our start point - and took two hours more than expected because of holiday traffic (it was a Saturday morning) and by the end, I was fuming! Thanks to the miracles of modern technology (mobile phones), we were at least able to let our hosts know of the problem.

We finally arrived and were given a quick safety talk, followed by a discussion of the plan for the weekend, and then we set off. All the way, we had to change course (literally) and even our destination in the end thanks to lack of available mooring there, but we were aware of the constraints and all were able to agree an alternative. Had we had more time/better weather/better luck with finding berths I have no doubt that the weekend would have turned out differently.

The lesson was simple: the sea, wind and weather (as well as weekend traffic) are not under our control and we can either fume about it or change course. Of course, we can do our research and prepare for problems (we had wet weather gear, lifejackets, etc), but in the end, it may take us longer to get where we want to go, we may have to divert along the way and we may have to change the original plan quite a bit to get there. No amount of fuming or criticism will change that simple fact.

Now contrast this with landlocked corporate life where you are expected to plan in detail and deliver without fail - otherwise there is something wrong with you. Insisting on all "deliverables" being met on time/budget without reference to external circumstances is simply unrealistic. However much you try to predit what will happen, you need to accept that your predictions could be rendered invalid by anything and that you will then depend on your natural experience and ability to get through. In the end, we end up "fudging" the results to make it look like we got it right.

I am not saying that we shouldn't plan - we need direction and measures to tell us if we are going off course. However, we need to understand that things can change very dramatically on the economic, regulatory and competitive landscape to force a major change in course (the present crisis is proof of this). As long as we know our direction, we may just take longer to get there, and there is nothing we can do about it. We plan for contingencies and this helps keep us more on course than if we had blindly hoped that all would go "according to plan", but in the end, experience and savvy will also play their part when the unexpected happens.

I know that I am not capable of getting a Feeling 39 from Dartmouth to Brixham on my own after one weekend's instruction. I have an appreciation of what it takes, but I would never have the temerity to tell an experienced yachtsman/woman how to do it, or to analyse their performance after so little time (no matter how many books I had read). However, current culture today suggests that a theoretical knowledge backed by case study has all the answers. It doesn't.

Yachtsmen (not the racers) have a lot to teach us, and I would certainly recommend a sailing course as part of any team-building exercise (starting at the top).

Labels: Strategy

posted by William Martin @ 01:08