Some time ago, I wrote an article about Survivor, the juggernaut TV reality show that strands a group of strangers on a desert island and challenges them to “outwit”, “outplay” and “outlast” their fellow contestants for a chance at a million-dollar prize.  In that article, I argued that Survivor was the best teambuilding show on television, at least for half of its 14-week running length.  For the first eight weeks or so, participants live in groups (or tribes), working together both to feed and shelter each other as well as to win competitions against the other tribes.  Then everything changes.  The tribes are merged, and the final few weeks are about everyone competing against everyone else, as individuals, jockeying for a chance to be in “the final two”, with a chance at the big money.

Survivor is undoubtedly my greatest guilty pleasure.  I’ve faithfully watched every Survivor season to date, enjoying the way tribes attempt to leverage their strengths and weaknesses, both to win competitions as well as to survive a month and a half on the beach with minimal provisions.  Some tribe members cook, others fish; some swim fast, others solve puzzles at the challenges. Along with the leveraging of diversity,  I also appreciate the process of “culture-building”, as tribes invent a kind of meritocracy, placing the highest value either on hard work around camp, athletic prowess in the challenges, or social skills and affability around the campfire.  Every Survivor season is different; teams either pull it together in a common vision, or devolve in a morass of personality struggles and multiple agendas.

And okay, sure, I’ll admit it: I get a kick out of the soap-opera element, as well – who’s fighting with whom, which muscled stud is gonna hook up with which lithesome beach babe, that kind of thing.  Heck, this is entertainment after all!

What intrigued me the most about the recently-completed season of Survivor was the emergence of betrayal as a galvanizing force for increasing team unity and performance.  It all happened on episode eight. The Aitu team had six remaining tribe members, the Raro team had eight.  In a stunning twist, host Jeff Probst offered each participant a chance to mutiny from their current tribe, to jump ship and pledge allegiance to the competition, “the enemy” tribe.  To the shock of their Aitu tribemates, Med-student Candice Woodcock and actor/writer Jonathan Penner seized the opportunity, stepping forward and swearing allegiance to Raro, essentially putting their former team in a huge bind.  Aitu’s four team members would now have to go up in the challenges against Raro’s eight, a daunting task. Even more dire was the Aitu tribe’s prospects in the event of a merge when, theoretically, the Raro tribe should be able to methodically vote them off the island by force of numbers. By all rights, Aitu should have been sunk, but something miraculous happened.  Against the odds, the out-matched Aitu tribe started winning …and winning…and winning.  In all, they won four consecutive challenges; clearly they had taken the mutiny personally – as a sign of betrayal – and there was simply no way the betrayers were going to beat  them!

Aitu had more going for it, of course, than simply its feelings of righteous indignation.  They were clearly a little older than Raro, a little more mature. Moreover, Aitu was quite unified in their values, agreeing unanimously on the priority of hard work and honest communication. (By contrast, Raro was struggling with infighting, factionalism, and a split between those who valued work and those who preferred to laze around, letting the others provide for them while they enjoyed an island vacation.)  Perhaps most importantly, Aitu had really learned to identify and leverage its diversity.  Its remaining team members after the mutiny included:

• The Jock:  Oscar "Ozzy" Lusth – perhaps the best athlete (and fisherman) Survivor has ever seen.
• The Heart:  Sundra Oakley – the tribe’s big sister, skillful at keeping the team emotionally unified.
• The Brains:  Yul Kwon & Rebekah "Becky" Lee – lawyers both, dynamic both at solving the puzzle challenges and also at working the inner game of Survivor alliance-building.  (Eventual million-dollar-winner, Yul, may have been the most strategic person to have ever played the game.  His ability to pull Jonathan back into the Aitu fold, at crucial moment, was pure genius.)

Thus the Aitus were strong, smart and synchronized – a winning combination on any team.

Still, I keep coming back to “the big betrayal”.  When Jonathan and Candice bailed out of their tribe, the effect on the remaining Aitu teammates was palpable.  You could almost hear them saying, “We’ll show them, those rats!”  Suddenly Aitu was the maligned underdog, with a gigantic chip on its shoulder.  And up went their performance level.  Quite simply, from then on this was a team that would not be denied!  And even after the merge, when the pull often gets stronger for individuals to break alliances in search of the best deal, the Aitus stayed together.  In the end, they knocked off all eight of the former Raro tribemates, going into the final four undaunted, as a unified team. 

So, am I saying that, in order to raise our work teams’ performance, we need to give them a common enemy, someone to hate, someone to vanquish?   Not precisely, although I won’t deny that people are driven strongly by emotion.  What teams do, require, I think, is a sense of “meaning”, something that makes them feel that their work product is larger than themselves.  I would always prefer that this “meaning” be positive and affirming – helping to make the world a better place in some fashion – rather than negative and destructive. In the short term, rallying against a common villain can release a lot of accessible energy, but such negative emotion can often come back to bite you, especially when, as so often happens in business, you find yourself suddenly needing to collaborate with that other team.  TV’s Survivor is a zero-sum game, with winners and losers, heroes and villains.  It’s designed for drama and conflict, and hence exceedingly entertaining for a mass audience.  But how many of us want to actually be in such charged, "dramatic" situations in our workplaces!

I invite you to consider how we can invoke positive emotions and meaning when rallying our teams.  The effect of constructive (vs. destructive) emotions is much longer lasting than tearing others down, and a lot more enjoyable to be around as well.  In the end, our goal should be create an environment where everyone’s the survivor.

As a treasure hunt guy, I travel a lot.  It’s one of the joys of the biz, and also—on occasion—a bit of a drag.  International travel only accentuates those dual feelings of exhilaration and exhaustion.  After all, how wonderful it is to be paid to visit an exotic city!  But oh my, the jet lag, customs inspections, passport control, surly taxi drivers, etc. Does travel have to be so tiring?!  Often there’s very little time to even enjoy the host city. On a typical “treasure hunt trip”, I jet in, play-test clues, tend to hunt logistics, assemble materials, meet with the client, deliver the program, and rush to catch my flight back to San Francisco.  As any business person who travels for a living can tell you, it’s nice to get away, to have a nice meal or two in a scenic setting, but it isn’t exactly a vacation.

Still, if you must spend a portion of your life on the road, you might as well take an interest in the journey.  How often do we get caught up in the rush to “arrive”, thereby losing sight of the here and now!  I see this often in my treasure hunts, with participants focusing on the end result – winning – and missing the lessons of the activity:  collaboration, communication, conflict resolution, strategy, etc.  It’s as if their minds have flown away from their bodies, lost in the fantasy of how it will feel to hold up a trophy and defeat their peers, and missing the thoughts and feelings they're having throughout the day.

So I try to be present – not only during my hunt gigs, but also while I’m moving from one city to the next. Inevitably I spend a good deal of time in airports, those curious buffer zones that smooth the transition from one culture to another.  In many ways, all airports are similar – the hard, industrial lighting, the synthetic chairs, the taciturn security personnel.  But inevitably there are differences, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, as if the vibe of the city somehow penetrates the airport and infuses it with local character.  Las Vegas’ McCarrin Airport, for example, is glitzy and brash – like Vegas itself – with slot machines in the terminals and a huge video screen in the baggage claim showing previews of casino shows.  Orlando International Airport, on the other hand, is all about Disney, with brightly-colored cartoon characters nearly everywhere you look (especially the ubiquitous Mickey Mouse), lending the place a cheerily-garish theme-park feeling.  In essence, airports are a preview of the host city, as packaged and processed by the local department of tourism.

Airports are great places for people-watching. Family dramas play out in real time.  Lovers reunite.  Siblings squabble.  Business people set up virtual offices.   For the most part, people are civil and polite in airports, but there’s a lot of tension and impatience to be observed as well. I recall one time in Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport when a bomb scare had forced a main hallway in the check-in-desk area to be closed for over an hour.  As the crowd grew, people continued to elbow their way forward to the barrier rope, as if each small gain in territory would accelerate their progress toward their destination.  There is an expression in Japanese that seems apt to me, loosely translated as, “When on the road leave your courtesy at home.”   Alas, when traveling, people around the world so often give in to their impatience, thinking only of where they need to get to and not where they are, whom they are with, and how this impacts their fellow travelers

So I want to propose a game to play at airports and while on the road, to slow ourselves down and to reconnect with the present.  Start by counting your footsteps.  See how many steps it takes to walk from security to your gate. Stay focused on each particular footstep, noticing how it feels, observing how the floor changes from tile to carpet to moving sidewalk, whatever.  Try not to count ahead or make predictions about how many steps it’ll take to reach your final location. Just stay focused on the steps. From time to time, slow down and stand still; look around and see if you can locate three interesting people in your sightline, or three unusual architectural details of the airport.  Then continue walking and counting steps from where you left off.  Stop again after 100 or so steps and inhale deeply, attempting to identify three unique airports smells (ugh!).  Continue on to your gate and there close your eyes and try to identify three specific airport sounds, sounds you might not hear anywhere else. 

I think you’ll find that slowing down like this opens up new worlds.  Airports become fascinating places, packed with sights and sounds and sensations.  We like to think that our final destination, our hotel, is the final arrival…but truly, we are all constantly arriving -- at the here, at the now. 

  As a trainer, you have to be ready for anything.  But sometimes even the best laid plans of mice and men go out the window and you have to scramble-and always, always, this seems to happen when you're on the road. 

So there I was in Dubai last week, about as far out on the road as you can get, in the midst of a nice little treasure hunt for a group of 11 natural gas analysts.  Everything was going smoothly.  The hotel conference room was comfortable and well appointed. The clues were bullet-proof - play tested and nicely printed (in color) at the local Kinko's.  (Yes, they have Kinko's in the United Arab Emirates).  The Polaroid cameras were loaded and working.  The hunt participants were making good progress on stage-one of their driving treasure hunt around Dubai City.  All was ship-shape; I'd done my planning well and was feeling appropriately confident.  And that, of course, is when I let my guard down and everything went acropper. Yes, my friends, I was about to enter treasure hunt hell!

  It went down like this:  ascertaining that the group was okay without me, I hopped in a taxi and raced on over to one of my prime clue sites-a glittering camel statue outside a luxury hotel.  What better location, I figured, to get some photos of the teams on the hunt!  In spite of the dreadful traffic (a Dubai specialty), I arrived at the clue location in stellar time, jumped out of my cab and positioned myself discreetly in view of the camel.   This was going to work out splendidly; I'd get some nice pics, hail another taxi, and meet the group at Planet Hollywood in plenty of time for lunch-just as I'd planned. And that's w-h-e-n...i-t...h-i-t...m-e; my bag was still in the trunk of the cab-my bag with all the clues for stage two of the hunt.  Trainer's Worst Case Scenario come true.  Head spinning.  Mind racing.  Heart on course for thrombosis.  "I am so sunk!  I don't have the taxi driver's name, nor his license number or ID, nothing.  All I have is a receipt for the 20 dirhams I paid him.  If I grab a taxi and proceed to the lunch point, what do I tell the client?  'Oh, sorry, I've lost the second half of your program.  Terribly sorry. Here's your money back.'  Ten thousand miles I came for this program, and it's going up in a cloud of sheesha smoke. Argh!!" 

Clearly I had to shake this off and start thinking clearly.  My plans were blown, sure. But there might still be some way to salvage the situation.  It was time to scramble, and scramble I did.

Fortunately for me, Dubai-the Beverly Hills of Arabia-is not what you would call a "developing country".  People are rather honest, theft  is low, services high.  In short, it is the very definition of "developed".  Hotels, in particular, place a high emphasis on catering to the needs of  the rich and famous.  I am neither of these, of course, but I do a fair approximation of a desperate Westerner. Thus did I hurry to the nearest hotel bell man and explain my plight.  "I need your help in tracking down a cab driver.  Yes, I know, there are hundreds of drivers here in Dubai.   There must be some way to find him."  A quick scan of the cab receipt (a lucky thing I'd asked for it) revealed the name of the taxi company.  My bell man said, "Let me call them."  Ten minutes (and many miles of nervous pacing on my part) later, he came over to inform me that the taxi company had found my driver!  He was 20 minutes away but on his way back for me soon-with my bag (and my reputation!). 

Twenty minutes became forty, natch--this is Dubai, after all, a city with some of the most gridlocked streets to be found anywhere in the world (a subway is under construction but still years away).  But eventually my cab driver rolled on in.  Off we plunged into the noontime traffic, inching our way--painfully--towards Planet Hollywood.  In the end, I bustled into the restaurant just as my group was finishing their meal - just in time for stage two of the hunt!  I didn't get much to eat that day myself, apart from some crow, perhaps.  But my scrambling had paid off.

Planning is certainly to be recommended, both as a trainer and as a team member.  But there are times when you just have to trust your instincts and go, go, go.