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Join Derek Hudson as he explores Essential Dynamics, a framework for approaching the challenges facing people and organizations. Consider your Quest!
Welcome to Essential Dynamics. I'm Derek Hudson, the creator of Essential Dynamics, the framework, and host of Essential Dynamics podcast. Thanks for joining me today. Normally, on the Essential Dynamics podcast, we explore the concepts around Essential Dynamics through deep conversations with interesting people. But today, as a follow-up to our last episode, I'm doing this alone as I just reminisce about a recent backpacking trip that I went on and past trips that I've had and how they illustrate the concepts of essential dynamics so clearly.
Derek:Of course, the backpacking trip is really just it's a quest. It's got all the elements of a quest and, of course, a lot of other things do too, and that's what we talk about essential dynamics. And so to set it up from last time, I talked about a specific trip that I went on last week in the Canadian Rockies with, six of my friends, and we talked about the idea that backpacking is hard, and there's opposition, and that, maybe sets it up for considering as a quest. We talked about the the fun scale and how type one fun is just enjoyable when you do it, and it's fun to think about after. And type two fun is gets pushes pushes us to the edge, where we're uncomfortable, where there's more of a challenge maybe than we expected.
Derek:But that, in the end, we really appreciate the experience, think fondly of it, and even seek out to do it again. And that's my definitely my experience with backpacking that I've done over more than fifty years now. We talked about purpose and how, for our trip, as an example, purpose x was to get from a to b, and, purpose y was to have fun doing it. And we talked a little bit about path and about the idea that there are drivers and constraints as the key forces that, come into play when we're trying to work our way up a challenging path. I'd like to pick up on that now and to talk about a few other things, including the people element of essential dynamics.
Derek:And, of course, in essential dynamics, we're always looking for this tension. And the tension that we found with people is between an individual and their own, I guess, self interest and self sense of autonomy and the need for a group to come together to have some cohesion and collaboration and the for for people to accomplish things that, you know, simply can't be done by an individual. So I did I did wanna start with that and pick up pick up on this idea of individual versus group. And and to that, I'll call on what's attributed to be an African proverb that's very popular in the outdoors these days and in a lot of other areas, and that is if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Derek:And here's the situation. There's seven of us on this backpacking trip. There's I'm I'm 64 years old. Two of the participants are older than me by a few years, so let's let's say on the very early early edge of seventies. Three others are a bit younger for the most part, hanging on barely to the fifties.
Derek:And then the son of one of our participants who's, I think, about 27. Here's our group, and the oldest member of our group is a very experienced backpacker who's used to going by himself. And when we got talking about this trip and I invited him, his hesitation was, well, you know, I I do hike alone. But it seemed like a good idea for him to join us. Why is that?
Derek:Well, he hasn't been hiking for a number of years due to to work and health considerations. He's not quite sure what what his body's now capable of. He didn't know the route. There is a bit expected to be a little bit of difficulty in finding the route. And he also, I think, liked the idea of being with some some interesting people that he knew.
Derek:And so the situation was that he had to kind agree to to some degree conform with the needs of the group. Otherwise, this wasn't gonna work out. Well, how does that how does that work? Well, we use, we use hiking as a metaphor in, Essential Dynamics largely because one of the key elements is the idea of constraints, which were, theory of constraints was popularized by doctor Eli Goldratt in his initial book called The Goal. And in the book The Goal, he talks about the protagonist who's a plant manager finding himself leading a group of Boy Scouts on a long hike and figuring out that there's always a slow kid.
Derek:In the in the book, the slow kid's name was Herbie. And even today in, theory of constraints, implementations in a factory, for example, you're trying to find which machine or work process is Herbie, the one that's the slowest. So this is already familiar to, to us as hikers. And here's the psychology of of this because it's it's different when it's, you know, machines and mechanical or automated processes. But as a person, if you're the slow person that makes you feel bad and it's kinda it's a little bit demoralizing, and it might even slow you down further.
Derek:My experience is if you take the slow kid and put him at the front, they have an increased sense of engagement and responsibility, and they and they pick up their pace a little bit without even being asked to. They pick up their pace a little bit, which means that there's another person down the line who is gonna end up being your slow kid. Gonna be the new Herbie, and your constraint has moved, and there's a lot to that in the theory of constraints literature. But now let's move from a youth to a very experienced person. You don't wanna be the slow guy.
Derek:You also don't wanna be rushed. And so in in this case, we had a series of situations where sometimes one of the slow people was in the lead, and the other slow people could just tuck into that pace and not be noticed. And other times, the slow person was at the back, and that changed from time to time based on hydration, nutrition, blisters, and stuff like that. But what my solo hiker friend needed to do was to be okay with either trying to keep up with the group, slowing the group down, or being sort of left behind for a period of time. I really enjoyed the last day as, the two of us hiked out at the back of the pack.
Derek:We're engaged in some really interesting conversation, for some part of it, talk about essential dynamics. And I was going at his pace, and his pace was fine. And the folks in front of us, we knew they were up there somewhere. Why am I saying this? Well, each of us kinda have to find our own way in the group.
Derek:And, if you're the leader of a group, you really have to figure out who's with you and, who might be slow and then understand how you can, and help them without generally singling people out and demoralizing them further. So that's one that's one aspect of the people thing. The other part of the people thing that I wanna talk about is just this, situation of a group leadership, group decision making. So I was the instigator of this hike in the sense that it's something that I tried to do a few years before, carve this part out of a route that that we did do. So it was left undone, and then tried for a couple years to assemble the right people at the right time to be able to do it.
Derek:So I might been a might have been a bit of a facilitator, but I did not consider myself the leader of the expedition. This was a this was a group of equals working together. We we were working without hierarchy, and we had the ability to draw on the wisdom of each member of the group. And there are decisions that we need to needed to make. Some of them were pretty important decisions.
Derek:And I guess I'll highlight, two two situations that we found on our hike. First one is that this, this hike is up it's along Owen Creek in the Central Canadian Rockies. Owen Creek in places is a very, very deep canyon. And at that at those points, the the hike is in the forest above the canyon. Other times, you're down right along the creek.
Derek:And as we as we proceeded, we got to a point where there was a steep cliff of clay and dirt that washed out the trail and flowed right into the creek. And the creek was flowing very quickly. It wasn't very wide. There's a lot of water moving, and and it didn't look like a good idea to step step into the creek. The lead hiker at the time, who was, it was not me.
Derek:I was a couple spots behind him, determined that the the path wasn't there, and we needed to find a way around it. Saw some, some footsteps that started to ascend up this this dirt slope and followed them. And we all followed, and we've and we got up probably 15 or 20 meters above the creek. It was pretty precarious at times, but we got up above the, above this earth cliff and onto vegetation where we were surprised to find, a little bit of a trail. It was worn in worn in the bushes, and there's a track there.
Derek:And, so we started following it. I have to appreciate that we are our our main source of navigation is an app called FarOut, and we had a section of the Great Divide Trail loaded on that. And the way that works is there's a line that shows the path and a blue dot that shows where we are. Now it's it's very, very helpful, but it's not super accurate at at fine fine resolutions of a few meters. Often, the the map would show the trail on the other side of the creek.
Derek:But we're on the trail and it's on this side of the creek and we know that. So we we we're conditioned to follow the trail and then use the map for, like, our major corrections. So in this case, we find this path. We're following the path. It's steep.
Derek:It's going up the mountain. It's getting further and further away from the creek and from the, really, the direction that we know we need to go. I was expecting that this trail would sort of skirt the top of the cliff and then at some point redirect itself down back down to the creek in a in a safe spot, but it was heading the wrong direction. And our lead hiker called back to me and said, hey. Can you do a position check?
Derek:And so I checked, pulled out the app, and I said, it's gonna show that we're way off trail, and it did. It showed us kind of exactly relative to trail where I thought we would be. But then I saw that there was a note that had been added, some text, which said, there is a trail that that heads up and off to the right. Do not follow it. It is a dead end.
Derek:So that was a that was a bit of a was a bit of a shock and very clear direction. So we huddled up. We had to figure out what to do. And it's just two things I wanna share from that. One is that we eventually decided that rather than go straight down from where we were because we didn't go want to go down the slope that we came up.
Derek:We thought that was too dangerous. We knew about it. We knew you could easily take a tumble into the creek on the way down on that spot that we wanted to meet the trail further up. In fact, what what would be ideal was to stay at the elevation we were, walk towards the creek, and wait for it to kind of, ascend up as as as we went upstream to, to the level of the creek where the level of the creek and the trail matched, or where we where we hit that point. After a while, we found it was very, very difficult to try and stay at the elevation we're at.
Derek:There's steep forest, fallen trees everywhere. You're climbing up around over trees and rocks and stuff. And and so we had a few different opinions on when would be a good time to drop down and just seek out the trail again. One of the people thought sooner would be better, another thought later would be better. And as it turns out, the sooner person was found the trail, it was in a great spot.
Derek:Further up the trail, it didn't look like it would have been as good a way to come down. So we got there. We're back on the trail. We only lost maybe two hours of of time. And so here's what happened.
Derek:Two things. One is that nobody had any ego about whether their answer was the right answer. We just had different ideas, trying them out. We, in a sense, did some test runs, validated a hypothesis, and everyone else just tucked into that. There was no positioning about ownership of ideas or anything like that.
Derek:And I think that's ideal for the way we honor individual contributions in a group, because we all need to have different ideas, and then we try them out, and we go with the ones that work. The second thing is is that despite the fact that I may not have considered myself the leader, I I was one of two people who had the navigation information on their phone, and I was the one who eventually detected the dead end. But I didn't do it very fast, and I wasn't on top of it. And I could've perhaps understood the route better before we started. Could've been more quick to respond when it looked like there was, an obstacle in the way.
Derek:I didn't do those things, and I didn't hear anything from anybody coming back to me about how I'd let them down nor did I hear anything directed at our lead hiker who instinctively chose to not take us across what looked like a a perilous traverse above a raging creek. And all that, what am I saying? Well, every day, we work in groups. Often, we work in those groups without, without direct supervision, without having a commanding officer, directing everything that's done. So we have to make group decisions with limited information.
Derek:And I just found in this experience that it was just fantastic to be able to, be in a situation where none of us really knew what to do, for people to stay calm, to have different ideas, to, support other people in their ideas. And then when we found out the right way to go, we just we just embraced it and went there without any recrimination for decisions that had been made in the past. So I hope that we can have that experience in organizations, and I'm really glad we had it on the trail. The other thing that I wanna cover in this, discussion about applying this particular backpacking trip and others adventures like it to essential dynamics is this idea of flow. So we talk about system dysfunction and system flow, And, ultimately, we should design our organizations to have flow, and flow ultimately is designed by conveying value to a customer or accomplishing the purpose.
Derek:So we talk about four flows. There's podcast episode that's specifically about them. But, of the four flows, the first is value flow, which is the progress that's made to accomplishing the value of the organization. And for us, in in this this case, like I said, we were starting at point a. We had a car at point b.
Derek:That's where we had to get to. And we could measure value flow, by the kilometers that we had walked and the kilometers that were, that that were were left to walk. It was actually very, very easy. One of the cool things about hiking in the Rockies is sometimes you're in the forest, but a lot of times you're in meadows, valleys, above tree line, on ridges, and peaks. And so you can see a long ways, and you can see where you're headed.
Derek:And, especially, one of the most fantastic experiences is is when you climb up out of a forest, get to a clear spot, and then look down and see how far you've come. We had that experience a number of times on this trip. So that idea of value flow is just baked into a hike. You see the progress in elevation and distance and then you're approaching destination. I don't think we see that enough in our organizations.
Derek:I think we lose we lose the plot, we lose the purpose, and it's very hard for us to see progress in that tremendously challenging for us in terms of staying engaged and being productive. So that's the first thing.
Derek:The second thing is cash flow. Now we didn't spend any cash on this trip. We had to purchase a a public lands backcountry pass, which which each of us did.
Derek:But then we there's no cost. There's no stores. So what why do we talk about cash flow? Well, cash flow is is just a a way of referring to what's really resource flow. And when you're backpacking, resource flow is, is boiled down to some very, very simple things.
Derek:It's about food and water and shelter. If you wanna look at it that way and particularly water and food. And and on our trip, from time to time, we had a situation where, somebody was, starting to to slow down or to be uncomfortable because they either didn't have enough to drink. They've been drinking, but they they were short on electrolytes, or they're short on on calories. We're we're able to fix those situations and replenish the, the calories or the electrolytes that we needed, and off we went.
Derek:But when you're carrying all of your resources on your back other than, the water that you're able to, to find along the way, you're very attuned to the need to have the right amount of resources. You need you need a buffer. You don't need too many because it's costly and slows you down. So so that's, I think, a great illustration of, cash flow. And I've now seen on my hikes two or three situations where it was clear that someone had been exerting themselves for a while.
Derek:They're a bit dehydrated, but most importantly, they were low on electrolytes. And to pop one of those tablets in a in a bottle of water and see the result in someone in in the matter of minutes is quite amazing.
Derek:Now the third flow is information flow. And the information flow on our hike was very simple. It was a combination of what we were seeing in front of us and ahead of us on the trail and what we were seeing on our navigation apps.
Derek:And as I related with this with the story of this unfortunate detour that we took, we missed a key piece of information flow for a while, which is that trail is a dead end. And and we didn't quite know the best way to get through if we'd if we'd avoided that trail in the first instance. Like, I'm not sure how we would have traversed that tricky section. As it was, we had to bail ourselves out of backtrack off on this detour that we didn't need to take.
Derek:I think so many times in organizations, the feedback that people need to do the most important thing, which is to deliver value, is not present. It's not clear. It doesn't come in a timely way. I guess the price isn't as high in the moment, but we certainly, on our trip, valued information flow, particularly when the blue dot was on the red line and the red line was heading in our direction - to our destination.
Derek:The last flow is energy flow. I talked a little bit about, resource flow, but energy flow is that internal motivation, that psychic energy that people need to, to get up and, and do stuff.
Derek:And what I found is that the only energy flow that really matters is what is what's inside a person, and we can help them. We can help them find their energy. We can help them replenish their energy, but it's it's something that's sort of individual to each person. And I've had many experiences where I've seen people dig into wells of energy flow that they didn't think they had. So those are some of my thoughts that I had about essential dynamics and, my recent backpacking experience and some of my older backpacking experiences.
Derek:So some of you that this might be the inspiration to dust off the hiking boots and and get outside. For others, it might be that there are other things that are, your idea of an epic quest that are that might be hard, that might be challenging, that might involve a little bit of type two fun, but they can really make you feel alive and create richness in your life. And for all of us, Monday morning, we gotta go back into the office or the classroom or the laboratory or the plant, and we gotta do hard things with other people. And I think a lot of these principles can apply. And if they do, then you'll be inclined to consider your quest.