The Horn Family had an awesome summer. Part of what made it great were three weeklong camping trips with family and friends in some of the most beautiful spots that the West Coast (possibly the world) has to offer. At our most boisterous and ridiculous, our community consisted of nine kids, six adults, a dog, and enough watercraft to evacuate Dunkirk. We learned a lot about each other as well as what it takes wrangle, motivate, and elevate people in service of fun and connection in nature. Here are five lessons from camping adventures that will uplift your worklife.
Plan to adapt
Creating a shared understanding of the adventure is essential. When schedules, activities, meals, and supervision-expectations are aligned everything is easier and safer. Whether our trip was with friends or family, we consistently created a plan for how the days would unfold. Of course, things changed. Weather, cranky kids, crankier parents, ferry schedules, cool ideas, and following the island vibes (one time we rode bikes to a cidery dance party) forced (or inspired) us to change existing plans.
Organizations that assume certainty are doomed to fail. According to HBR’s Martin Reeves and Deimler, so much uncertainty in the world poses “a tremendous challenge for strategy making” because “…traditional approaches to strategy—though often seen as the answer to change and uncertainty—actually assume a relatively stable and predictable world.” Your strategy – for camping or entering new markets – must be designed to adapt to foreseeable and radical, but possible, circumstances.
Embrace the chaos
Look, rolling with the crew we brought to Tribune Bay on Hornby Island will generate chaotic circumstances. Whether a toddler started a 3am dance party, everyone forgot the rules of California Kickball, or adults needed to shutdown a Pokémon trading fiasco, there were a lot of lessons learned about troubleshooting as emotions and plans unraveled.
At BC Pension Corporation, our people performance and development team use the phrase “progress, not perfection” to ground our highly detail-oriented team in the benefit of advancing our projects and building capabilities incrementally towards a fantastic outcome. When we pay too much attention to the perfect final product, we not only fail to get things done, but we also miss chances to test, learn, and iterate along the way.
Overcommunicate
According to Fast Company’s Adam Bryant and Kevin Sharer, constantly communicating with each other increases clarity and enables adaptation on the fly, even if it feels silly: “The need to constantly remind people of the strategy can seem puzzling. After all, people are smart, and presumably they can remember the key components of a simple plan from week to week.” With so many kids flying around campsites and paddling out to sea it was essential for adults and elder children to be very clear about who was watching who. Expectations about chip consumption and acceptable boundaries for exploring the woods were also things that, as my sister calls it, “The Grand Council of Parents and Grandparents” discussed, presented, and reinforced to the kids … and each other.
Bryant and Sharer emphasize another important reason for overcommunicating in worklife:
A second reason why repetition is so important is that businesses, just as in nature, abhor a vacuum, and if leaders aren’t saying anything, then employees will supply their own narrative, and they will often go to a dark place, spinning conspiracies or worst-case scenarios. Uncertainty creates free-floating, contagious anxiety.
Forget conspiracy theories. If members of our camping party weren’t clear about the plan and/or expectations then its younger members might’ve invented nighttime fire biking while mainlining smores.
Strive for one size fits one
The emerging model for work, education, and life is one size fits one (as opposed to the outdated, industrial model of one size fits all). While our trips yielded activities in which everyone participated, we also co-created experiences that met folks where they were at in terms of ability, preference, and style. For example, I am not able to play at the beach in direct sunlight all day. When we camped with a toddler and grandparents naps were very important (who am I kidding, naps are great and several adults had several naps during every trip). Sure, going on hikes and sharing meals as a full team was important, but from time to time folks needed hyper-personalization to make it through the experience or, at times, the day.
Worklife has given us the tools for navigating learning, connecting, and performing tasks in ways that are customized based on our styles and preferences. For example, leaders should get used to (and good at) presenting similar information and objectives to teams and individuals in different ways because some folks respond better to stories others like visuals and others prefer getting clarity by writing questions in a Teams/Slack channel to uncover depth of detail.
Make it cooperative
From my perspective, teams, not individuals, win camping trips. When folks aren’t included in games (or the older kids always win) or the burden of cooking and cleaning falls on the shoulders of a few people, you can feel tension creep into the experience.
Outfoxed is a cooperative boardgame for kids that brought a spirit of collaboration to pre-dinner activities that Uno, soccer matches, or “shadow tag” never seem to nail. We also created a pretty great cooperative scavenger hunt that incentivized sharing and helping each other. Funnily enough, rewarding collaboration, trust-building, and transparency was not only helpful for fostering immaculate vibes on Hornby Island, but has also been instrumental in transforming Microsoft’s cynical, competitive culture and turning around the organization.
Many years ago, a mentor of mine argued that work should be more like best friends planning a vacation, as opposed to overstructured processes, hierarchies, and RACIs that nobody understands. I must say that she had a good point (and we experienced the vibes to back it up).
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More pictures!
