I have been pondering the relationship between prudence and pushing on in life, as well as in business. After many years of not diving, I went diving in the Red Sea. I was cautious, I listened to the experts’ advice, I used my dive computer, stayed within the dive/fly limits — and still ended up with decompression sickness.
My brother, who is a master diver in Australia, laughed when I told him what had happened.
“Why didn’t you use your dive tables?” he asked, referring to the old, conservative way of working out the safe time limits between doing multiple dives and properly decompressing the gases that you absorb at depth by the time you fly and effectively reverse the physics.
It’s a good question. The simple answer is I trusted the technology and ignored my intuition. Irrespective of what happened, it was my fault. The upside is that I got to see a side of Cairo that most tourists don’t, sharing the ebb and flow of Egyptian families and dramas in Emergency, waiting for the specialists to come back after three days of Eid, and the fascination of watching Disney’s Maleficent in Arabic sitting in a decompression chamber with six other strangers.
Prudence and pushing on are uneasy bedfellows in life and in business. My father was known as Push-On Pedley during his time as a Spitfire squadron commander during World War 2 — but he was also prudent. He never took risks that were not properly calculated, and he always put the welfare of his pilots front and centre of everything that he did, so they survived to fight another day.
It’s a lesson that I have obviously taken longer to master because a couple of months later, I decided to go skiing in the Lesotho mountains. As with the diving, it had been a while since I’d been on the slopes.
The first day went well, like riding a bicycle, I was relieved to find that it’s not something you lose. The second day my legs were a bit tender, and I did for a second wonder if I should ski, but I did and I took it a bit slower, relaxing, going down the slopes. With my guard down, the inevitable happened — I fell.
Broken fibula
If I had been going any faster, the skis would have come off as I started to tumble. As I cartwheeled, the skis stayed on and I ended up breaking my fibula and causing significant grief to the ligaments in my ankle and knee.
My choice, my consequences. The only gift of six weeks in a wheelchair is the opportunity to ponder the what-ifs and the maybes, distil the lessons and learn from them.
If you are going to take risks, you plan. Pilots always speak of planning the flight and flying the plan. In the diving scenario I’d done the five dives I had set out to do, and then on the last day I squeezed in a shorter, deeper dive, for a second wondering if I should in spite of being within the published limits. That was the one that pushed me over the edge, triggering the decompression sickness as we flew from the Red Sea to Cairo to fly home to South Africa.
In the skiing incident, I was out of practice, I wasn’t feeling great on that second day, but I didn’t want to let anyone down and make a big issue of not feeling up to it. Going out and doing it slowly, though, was worse than actually pushing on and doing it at the proper speed.
Two different cases, two different scenarios but a very similar negative outcome in each, in which I ignored the little voices of intuition.
We have to trust our intuition, but we have to be aware of ourselves at all times to make sure that the intuition is valid. There’s an old flying mnemonic called IMSAFE, which stands for Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue and Emotional state. Pilots use to check if they are up to the job of flying safely to their destination before they even climb aboard.
It comes in useful in any leadership situation. If the captain of the Costa Concordia hadn’t allowed himself to be distracted on the bridge of his cruise liner on that fateful evening off the coast of Italy in 2012, he might not have run his ship aground — literally.
The second thing is the plan. We have to plan for the plan to fail, and be able to adapt, and throughout the entire process we have to remain sceptical, asking questions of ourselves and others we rely on, without ever falling into the trap of becoming cynical. We have to be able to change course if conditions demand it and plan from scratch if need be.
The third and final part of this trifecta is skill. The plan stands or falls on sufficient skill. Risk is not the problem, recklessness is. We have to hone our skillset through continuous practice, we cannot rely on muscle memory. The sharper our skills are, the better our intuition will be to identify and understand risk. The more we practice, plan and role play scenarios, the more we de-risk them.
Continuous practice
When I used to fly in aerobatic competitions, we would start high, perfecting increasingly complex, fast and multi-axis manoeuvres before moving to lower altitudes, until we got into competition mode. We’d practise until safe at the bottom of our “box”, which was 500ft above the ground — two seconds from impact if flying vertically downwards at speed. The simple act of continuous practice made what would otherwise be very dangerous, very safe.
Risk comes in different shapes and forms, sometimes it comes by not changing when you ought to — or changing when you don’t have to. Business leaders need to guard against implementing new ideas just because they are fashionable. A great example is the trend, however clever it may have seemed initially, to pigeonhole different units in an organisation as either cost or revenue centres. It’s a false premise because the business is the sum of its parts, and the revenue centres by definition need the cost centres to properly function.
The moment you start dividing units into one or another definition, you split your company into winners and losers and create a wholly unnecessary — and totally corrosive — tension between the two, especially when the company struggles to hit its numbers. Everyone is part of the systemic value chain and it takes a strong, resilient leader to stand up to the pressure, often against the prevailing sentiment, and speak out and hold to the wiser outcome.
But sometimes we have to take risks and do things that appear totally counterintuitive at the time to survive — and to thrive. Knowing when to be prudent and when to push on against resistance is what defines great leadership. Just know how to differentiate between reversible and non-reversible decisions — and believe me that is a learnable and learned skill.
As for me, I’m weighing up the pros and cons of the third leg of my own trifecta, trying microlight flying again now that I am out of the wheelchair. We’ll see how that goes. Or maybe golf, that voice says… DM