David O'Hara

For the last week I have been delightfully offline, participating in an Executive Leadership Sea Kayaking Expedition with NOLS or the National Outdoor Leadership School.

I had good company that included leaders from Google, Lockheed Martin, Salesforce, Black Diamond, and a handful of other organizations. The Dean of a business school and I were the only representatives from the ranks of academic leadership, and I think it was good for the two of us to be surrounded by such a diverse group of leaders from outside our guild.

Each day we kayaked in Prince William Sound, paddling to our next campsite, setting up camp, and cooking our meals from basic ingredients, plus water we sourced from waterfalls we found along the fjords or on islands. Our daily routes were about ten miles, sometimes under blue skies, but usually under clouds, and often with some wind and rain that varied from heavy mist to pelting downpours.

We were soaked, sore, cold, and dirty. And it felt amazingly good.

Several days I ended our paddling with a quick swim in water that was slightly warmer than the glaciers from which it had recently melted.

Whales and dolphins marked the beginning and end of our trip, and every day we were greeted by otters and seals.

On our last day of paddling, a pair of young male sea lions followed us for hours, and then watched us make camp for another three or four hours, diving for food and then rising above the gentle waves to snort and to watch us make our own meal on the rocky beach.

At each place we camped, and on each leg of our journey, we figured out how to make do with the simple things we brought, since kayaks don’t have space for much luggage. Tents and sleeping bags and food took up most of our cargo space, with a little room for dry bags with a change of dry socks and an extra puffy jacket to sleep in.

And each day we gathered on a beach, in our matching XtraTufs and our rain gear, to talk about leadership. We shared our stories of workplace successes and challenges. As we journeyed along the coast we told each other about our journeys through life and leadership.

There’s something wonderful that happens when we choose to share such a journey with one another. Adversity that is chosen, in the company of others who willingly embrace the challenge, can make an excellent space for conversation.

Whether we were speaking about the beauty of the glacier across from our campsite, navigating the icebergs it calved, or planning to support one another in case of an earthquake or a wave if the glacier’s face collapsed suddenly, the environment provided a classroom we could not have created in any online forum or any boardroom.

Nature was our campus, our laboratory, our seminar room.

This was my third NOLS course, and physically it was the most challenging. It was also the most challenging professionally. Of course it was excellent continuing education in outdoor leadership and education. But all of us on the course have spent a lot of time in wild places; camping without showers, pooping in the forest in bear country, and cooking on a Whisperlite stove are things we’re accustomed to.

The real challenge (for me, at any rate) came in the form of listening to others’ stories and then comparing them to my own life in academia.

The people I was with were and continue to be gifts, and I’m grateful for the time we spent together and for the generosity of their storytelling in that wonderful place that laid our hearts bare to one another.

Fresh stories can help us reimagine the stories we have already been living.

I’ll have more to say about that soon, but now it’s time for me to catch a plane home, and to return to my ongoing story with a fresh vision of what it could become.