Are you ready for an adventure?
Those 6 words were the first words I ever spoke to my daughter. I didn’t tell her I was pretty sure we’d be more like “Adventures in Babysitting” than anything else. She keeps me true to my promise from kayaking in Mobile Bay and saying “sure let’s go further on this uninhabited island” to making sure she’s a foodie in training with a taste for sushi.
Adventure is a core value for me personally and something I think should be included in any contemporary leadership development experience. The value of adventure in leadership development may not be obvious at first but hear me out.
What do we gain from adventure? It equips us to be more fearless, more resilient, and meet challenges with more adaptability. Adventure might be about unchartered territories in the books we read, but for leadership development programs it is about making it safe for people to experiment with new behaviors.
Confidence, resilience, adaptability, build new behaviors. Check your list. I bet they are all there as critical leadership skills. Leadership development programs should not be easy. They should not be more of the same. And they should not be designed for the unwilling.
We can build adventure into leadership development by:
Always injecting something disruptive. This could be as easy as asking a group to self-organize around a project or as a complex as an immersive action learning initiative outside their business area, or the company, or even the country they live in.
Finding a way to connect to peoples lived experiences and values. Our first leaders were parents, teachers, coaches. Make space for these stories and paradigms to emerge in your leadership journey. Consider life mapping, personal narrative creation, or personal crest kind of activities to foster these connections.
Not being too precious about the rules. Now, before every instructional designer or adult learning PhD comes after me, take a breath. I mean that there are tried and true methods… and then there is today’s diverse mix of leaders that are begging us to break out a bit. When you add an element of adventure, you can get to individual outcomes you would never have placed on a list of learning objectives.
I’ve seen these work as a participant and a practitioner. In 2019, I had the opportunity to travel to Tanzania, immerse in the culture and work alongside local leaders to increase cervical cancer screening and prevention through a leadership development program. I am not a sub-Saharan Africa cervical cancer expert. (The Adventures in Babysitting reference gave me away, right? Keep reading.) This was the ultimate adventure. Yet what I gained was a focus to communicate succinctly with less preamble, an ability to better identify root causes, and more awareness that my role as a leader is to catalyze not solve.
Where can you disrupt in your leadership development design? I would love to hear from you!
Also, guess what? Turns out “Adventures in Babysitting” might have some good leadership AND parenting lessons! During their escapades, Chris (played by the always amazing Elisabeth Shue) demonstrates strong decision-making abilities, consistently places the children’s safety as her top priority, and helps the whole group work together to navigate various challenges. The little vocab lesson towards the end was just a bonus educational opportunity.
