August 2007 - Why we need to recruit survivors

Far and away the best book on management, leadership and employment I have read this year is Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales.

I mention it now because I know that some of you, like me, will be heading off for a well earned holiday just now. The last thing you need in your beach bag is yet another step-by-step guide to management and workplace relations.

Good holiday reading lets you lose yourself for a while and, hopefully, makes you think. Many workplaces don’t allow us time to think or to escape anymore so we have to do that in our downtime.

That’s why I recommend Deep Survival. It is not intended as a management book although the author recognises that many of its messages can be applied in business. You won’t find diagrams or boxes or 10 tips for doing anything. You will find some amazing stories of survival, however, accompanied by some sharp analysis of human behaviour.

You won’t find many references to leadership either, and yet the whole book is about leadership – the leadership that any one of us might need to discover in ourselves, sometimes hidden and unrecognised until events demand that we react.

Most of all it’s about change - inevitably change for the worse, given its concentration on survival - and the way people adapt to sometimes catastrophic reversals in their personal circumstances.

In some of his examples, the need to survive would never have occurred in the first place if people had digested warnings such as forecasts of severe weather, or had understood the implications of their actions at various times.

One walker, heading in to the mountains with a friend, falls behind his partner. Although he has a map, his friend has the compass. Instead of retracing his steps while he can, the man heads deep in to the wilderness, way off his planned route. Only when he comes to terms with his predicament – that he is well and truly lost – does he begin to start thinking of providing himself with the warmth and shelter he needs for survival.

There are echoes here of the story of the two mice in that ridiculously simplistic but best-selling book about workplace change, Who Moved My Cheese, but Gonzales is featuring real people attempting to survive, not fictional characters like the mice that must adapt to fundamental changes in their lives.

Gonzales suggests that three qualities are needed when dealing with change – perception, belief, then action. He writes about “guessing well” leaning on our natural capacity for prediction.

“Training is an attempt to make predictions more accurate in a given environment. But as the environment changes (and it always does), what you need is versatility, the ability to perceive what’s really happening and adapt to it. So the training and prediction may not always be your best friend,” he writes.

Such behaviours were demonstrated in the Twin Towers attack in New York on September 11, 2001. Some people stayed put, urged to do so in response to rehearsed safety procedures. Others knew instinctively that something was happening beyond any experience envisaged in the emergency manuals. In many cases they were the ones who survived.

The workplace is not about survival, you may say. Isn’t it? Try telling that to the thousands of people who have experienced redundancy. The lessons in this book, however, are less about staving off redundancy, and more about making the best of your changed circumstances when it happens.

People who survive adapt very quickly to their new environment. “Survival is adaptation and adaptation is change,” writes Gonzales, “but it is change based on a true reading of the environment.”

He writes of the transformation in attitude needed when moving from the state of being a victim to being a survivor. Surviving is about coming to terms with change, not clinging to your immediate past and going over old ground in a corrosive cycle of “if onlys”.

If your ship has been wrecked and you have taken to a life raft, your new world is the raft and the sea, and you had better get used to it. Survivors very quickly begin to model and map their real environment instead of one that may have been more comfortable and familiar, says Gonzales. It’s important, he says, to discover what he calls the first rule of life: “Be here now.”

Opening a book such as this it would be reasonable to expect to find parallels in risk management and indeed there are, but not the kind of management that stifles risk. Many of the people in these stories are living with risk every day of their lives, usually by choice.

Gonzales makes a case for living life on the edge. “We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer,” he writes. “Better to take the adventure, minimise the risk, get the information, and then go forward in the knowledge that we have done everything we can.”

Anyone who has ever tried to understand the mind of the entrepreneur should read this book since the survivor mentality it describes is not so far removed from that of the individual who is willing to take a calculated risk in business.

Risk is a natural behaviour anyway. I have written before of the ring toss experiment carried out by the social psychologist, the late David McClelland, where he asked a group of children to compete with each other, throwing hoops over wooden pegs.

No rules were imposed about how near they should stand and, as some became more proficient, they began to edge away from the peg, making their task more difficult.

Gonzales describes the way that children take risks, exploring their environment, as “a delicate, beautiful balancing act.”

It’s part of human nature to enjoy a challenge which is why the best work needs to stretch people in a way that matches their ability to succeed. But while risk may be an integral part of learning, throwing people in at the deep end is not a good idea if they don’t know how to swim.

Reading through the lines in this book I’m wondering if surviving or the capacity for survival is desirable in the workplace. I suspect that it is. But only so much can be achieved through training. Much of the things we do in survival are instinctive, drawn from some inner resource. Some survival trainers talk about positive mental attitude. Tom Wolfe called it the Right Stuff in his book of the same name.

But how do you recruit for that? It’s something, I believe, to which we must become attuned, like the stuff of leadership: we know it when we see it.

Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies and Why, by Lawrence Gonzalez is published in paperback by W W Norton, price £10.99, www.deepsurvival.com.

See also: Is all productivity for the better?