A basic rule of thumb for any 4×4 adventurer is that the amount of fuel determines how far you’ll be able to travel through the desert. The amount of water determines how long you’ll last. You need both.
You can calculate how many miles it is from one checkpoint to another, but you cannot predict the challenges you’ll face. Nor can you predict how long overcoming obstacles will take before you can continue. So calculating a journey in terms of water is equally important.
Like adventurers, teams (and businesses) must balance saving their resources and expending them wisely to reach the next checkpoint where they can replenish. Either way, the prospect of replenishment is not always known or guaranteed, and in many cases the destination is unknown.
Many teams don’t need to worry too much about refuelling. They operate within large organisations. They’re safe within the castle or city walls.
But what about those teams that exit the city walls?
The teams that pioneer or form convoys (startups / spin outs) in search of greater treasures, heading out into the vast unknown, would be wise not to ignore the above rule of thumb.
I pondered what this adventurer’s heuristic might look like when applied to teams.
Fuel (how far) would be, I believe, the team’s money. Teams typically need financing to buy the resources required. It’s a form of energy sustenance. But it’s not always money that runs out first before a team begins to struggle.
Water (how long), I believe, is the spirit. And when I say spirit, I mean something like a shared narrative that drives the team relentlessly forward. A kind of liquid co-intelligence, liquid identity, and liquid drive all in one. Perhaps even the development of a shared myth – one that unrolls a pathway of potentiality through time.
As Brett Anderson writes:
“Myth, understood in this way, is not a script but a grammar of becoming.” This is important: it’s not prescriptive, but generative. “It is the ‘strange attractor’ representing the optimal pattern of transformation for complex systems.”
The team, a complex system, requires both energy and spirit to overcome inertia, move through obstacles, and generate the path to becoming heroic.
So for teams:
Energy / money: how far.
Spirit / myth: how long.
