reach the point where you are into it … As fast as possible to the summit … your hands, your ice axe and your crampons, and they have to just move … You're progressing … that's what it's all about. You want to keep moving, having progress in your life.
Belying the apparent simplicity of his approach, underneath the surface was a very complex web of prior experience from which Steck was able to draw in order to achieve his record time. Steck was no one-hit wonder: he had begun climbing at an early age and by the time he was 18 he had already climbed the North Face of the Eiger as part of a team of four, an incredible feat in itself. By the mid 2000s Steck had built up an extensive résumé of difficult climbs in the European Alps, the Alaska Range and the Himalaya.
Starting out as a rock climber, he progressed towards technical mountaineering and then high-altitude mountaineering, before starting to further refine his specialty to fast solo ascents, initially on the relatively lower mountains of the Alps (such as the Eiger), before taking this approach to the ultimate mountaineering testing ground of the Himalaya. (In 2011 he soloed the south face of Shishapangma, an 8000-metre mountain in Tibet, in a record time of 10.5 hours, and in 2013 he soloed the south face of 8091-metre Annapurna, the world's tenth highest mountain, in a record time of 28 hours; it takes most parties at least one week to reach the summit after months of acclimatising).
In his book Outliers journalist Malcolm Gladwell popularised the work of Dr Anders Ericsson, a Swedish psychologist whose research revealed that natural ability requires ten years, or 10 000 hours of practice, to be made manifest. Steck is the perfect example of the ‘10 000 hours rule', his lifetime spent in the mountains in preparation for the day that he could turn the sport of mountaineering on its head.
And that's what he did on that clear blue day in February 2008.
What can we learn?
So what does all of this mean? It's an inspiring story, yes, but what else can we make of this? What relevance does this story have for us all?
As described earlier, the North Face of the Eiger can be a metaphor for the world in which we are living today, complete with storms, rockfalls and avalanches, and we have no choice but to climb it.
The concave nature of the North Face serves to amplify the magnitude of the storms that strike her. Similarly, the interconnectedness of our world today serves to amplify the storms that strike us, and, as you will read in the following pages, there is a perfect storm of a magnitude never before seen that is just starting to reach us.
The purpose of this book is to provide a manifesto for improving the way in which you and the organisation you work for can adapt to the changes and challenges facing us all. This has been tested and proved in the alpine world, and now you can use it as the storm descends around us.
Regardless of the forthcoming storm, we have a choice as to how we tackle the climb ahead.
We can choose to continue to do things like we have always done, and climb the face in a traditional manner (it's called expedition style, it's heavy and slow, and we'll learn more about it later). We may still get to the top, but it will take us a long time, and we probably won't survive the storm.
Or, we can choose to flip conventional thinking on its head and, following Steck's lead, take a new approach and climb light and fast to help us get through the maelstrom. If we do choose to take this approach (and to be honest, we don't have any other option), there will be difficult times ahead, complete with much discomfort and doubt. We will have to face our fears.
So let us get to work. Onward and upward we must go!
PART I
The landscape
CHAPTER 1
The perfect storm?
In this chapter, we'll try to understand change through:
• the VUCA framework
• the three factors of people, places and technology that can combine to create the perfect storm
• the three-stage framework.
In his classic nonfiction book The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger tells the story of the fishing boat the Andrea Gail and her crew. Lost at sea in 1991, they were caught off the north-east coast of the USA in a super-storm created by an incredibly rare combination of three weather systems. At its peak, the storm had wind strengths in excess of 120 kilometres per hour, and it generated some of the largest waves ever recorded.
Few people took the weather warnings from the National Weather Service seriously. It was only once the true magnitude of the storm became apparent that people started reacting, with thousands along the eastern seaboard evacuating their homes.
Other than a few small pieces of debris, no trace of the Andrea Gail or her six crewmen was ever found.
This ‘perfect storm' killed another seven people and created widespread destruction on much of the eastern coastline, causing an estimated damage bill of $200 million.
It may seem strange to call something so destructive perfect but, in weather terms, this combination of conditions is so rare it has to be seen as miraculous. Sure, two weather systems occasionally merge together to create powerful storms, but three systems merging together? It was unprecedented. Negativity does not necessarily diminish perfection.
The three forces
Today a similar perfect storm, albeit a metaphorical one, is brewing. Just like the real perfect storm that took the Andrea Gail and her crew to a watery grave, a never-before-seen combination of three forces is occurring to create a perfect storm, the likes of which the world has never seen before.
What are these three forces? We will get to them in a minute. But first, it is crucial to understand that the impact of this perfect storm will be felt all over the globe. The old world of business will never be the same again.
Instead, the storm is giving birth to a new world order.
Speaking about the post–World War II era, cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote, ‘All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before'. We are again immigrants in time, as our perfect storm is reshaping society, business and institutional thinking.
Everything from how we play and how we learn to how we work and how we govern – in other words, how we live our lives – is being profoundly changed.
The three forces that have combined to form this perfect storm are:
1. people
2. places
3. technology.
The capacity for people to connect with one another to communicate, share, learn and trade is increasing quickly and easily. This is happening in both virtual and real places through technology's rapid growth.
What does this mean?
It means the world has become flatter, more transparent and more accessible than ever before. It also means that
