Today is June13 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “When things go south, how often do you find yourself solving one problem at a time in order to resolve the situation?”
Explorer Ernest Henry Shackleton decided to be the first man to cross the continent of Antarctica by boat; possible during the summer months.
Unfortunately, the crew of Shackleton’s Endurance ran out of summer, and their ship became permanently frozen in the polar ice.
Though the crew was able to wait out most of the winter, the Endurance didn’t and sank leaving the crew stranded on an ice floe.
Shackleton packed his crew into three life boats as the ice under them began to melt, and got them safely to Elephant Island.
Although Elephant Island was solid ground, it was still uninhabited and far from trade routes. Shackelton then set off for a whaling station 800 miles away. The boat reached South Georgia but landed on the side opposite the whaling station.
The water was too dangerous, so Shackleton took two of his men and made a 36 hour trek over a snowy mountain range to the whaling station. From there he organized the rescue of all his men, without a single fatality among his crew.
Researcher Nancy Koehn “was struck by Shackleton’s ability to respond to constantly changing circumstances. When his expedition encountered serious trouble, he had to reinvent the team’s goals. He had begun the voyage with a mission of exploration, but it quickly became a mission of survival. This capacity is vital in our own time, when leaders must often change course midstream — jettisoning earlier standards of success and redefining their purposes and plans.”
In the movie The Martian, Matt Damon’s character Mark Whatney tells a class of astronauts “At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem... and you solve the next one... and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”
To resolve his situation, Shackleton had to solve one problem after another.
How often do you rely on your ability to resolve one problem after another?