The Case For Courage In Business: Part 1

In 2000 the median age of the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 was 85 years. By 2018 that number declined to 33 years for the same category. This trend is puzzling, because business is an infinite game, which means the objective of the game is to perpetuate the game; to play for as long as possible. If that is the objective, and large corporations are experiencing shorter playing time than their predecessors, then something is amiss. Is it possible to reverse this trend, and if so, how?

We can start by adjusting our time horizon. A five-year projection is not a long-term analysis in the infinite game of business. The question we need to ask and answer during our analysis and strategy process is: "How can we make the culture of our business scalable and sustainable for the next 50-100 years?" We need to play the infinite game of business with an infinite mindset. We need to create strategies that will allow us to play the game for as long as possible. As Simon Sinek says, success in an infinite game requires the management of will and resources, because players drop out of the game when they run out of the will or the resources to continue.

In business we have CFO's and many departments filled with people dedicated to managing resources. Where are the CWO's and their support teams for managing will? Once we establish those roles and teams, how do we as leaders manage will? We manage will by helping people do their best work. That is how we create a scalable and sustainable culture of people who wake up inspired and go home feeling fulfilled. That is how we fulfill our roles as coaches and leaders. So the essential question we need to answer is “How do people do their best work?”

Joseph Campbell said that “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.” Helping people develop and fulfill their potential is exactly what leaders are attempting to do, it's another way to say "helping people do their best work," so maybe the clues that Campbell talked about can help leaders and coaches better perform their roles.

The myths that Campbell was referring to were hero myths. Campbell’s life's work was focused on understanding heroic myths and legends handed down by cultures from around the world and throughout time. What his work revealed is that all of those myths and legends followed a consistent pattern, a pattern he called “The Hero’s Journey Monomyth," in his paradigm altering book "The Hero With A Thousand Faces."

The clues contained in the Monomyth provide several key insights into how people develop and fulfill their potential so they can do their best work. We are adapted to crave courage, because nothing feels more meaningful. People find their courage in pursuit of their personal sense of their true potential; their sense of destiny. The mythical protagonist's journey is fueled by hope, and that pursuit of hope and destiny forces them to confront and overcome fear and self-doubt at every juncture along that road. Campbell called this "the road of trials." Through trial and error and adaptation, the protagonist masters the skills they need to develop in order to fulfill their potential, then they solve the problem at the heart of the myth, and it is from that journey that the hero emerges from the protagonist as the butterfly emerges from the cocoon. The journey that passes through fear on the way to hope unleashes courage.

Our adapted craving for courage makes sense when you think about who our ancestors were. Small bands of hunter-gatherers who made the best of a daily struggle for survival. They came face-to-face with primal fear everyday, and everyday they had to overcome that fear. Our ancestors had to find the courage to do their best work as hunter-gatherers each day. They needed to solve problems related to: food, water, shelter, protection from mortal danger, and peacefully coexisting with annoying members of the tribe so that disagreements didn't escalate into mortal combat. Our ancestors had to do their best work and master all of these crafts just to survive, and they did it, and that's why we're still here. Doing their best work and mastering their crafts were the most rewarding experiences they could engage in, because those were life-sustaining experiences. We inherited those same reward systems from our ancestors. Those are the people who handed us the hero myths of ordinary protagonists who found the courage to transcend their fear and self-doubt, found the courage to do their best work and master their crafts in order to survive, and then ultimately found the courage to thrive as heroes who fulfilled their true potential. That is the path the mythical clues from our ancestors point to. That is how the stories of Ulysses, King Arthur, Frodo Baggins, Dorothy Gale, Rocky Balboa, Luke Skywalker, Neo the One, and Andy Sachs give us the clues we need to play an infinite game with an infinite mindset.

As we think about the fulfillment of human potential, let’s look to the extreme upper-limit of human performance. Where can we observe elite performers fulfilling their potential by doing their best work? We can look to the world of sport, and championship winning performances. Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Anderson Silva, Tyson Fury, Tom Brady, Michael Jordan are just some of the elite performers who have done their best work when the stakes were the highest possible level in their chosen craft.

There are higher stakes than that. We can look at military and first responders, and the deeds that society deems heroic. We recognize these people for courage above and beyond the call of duty. That is the key ingredient in all of these potential fulfilling performances - courage.

The formula for courage is hope and wonder combined with fear and self-doubt, because the neurochemical formula for courage is the adrenaline and natural pain-killers triggered by fear and self-doubt combined with the oxytocin triggered by hope and wonder.

Courage is what allows human beings to do our best work. So leaders can help their people do their best work by helping those people find their courage. We manage will by managing courage, and that means managing hope and wonder, and fear and self-doubt.

Fear and self-doubt exist in limitless supplies. They can appear anytime and anywhere, and they can appear everyday. That sounds like a tragic curse, but is in fact an invaluable gift, because if we can find limitless supplies of hope and wonder to combine with limitless fear and self-doubt, then we can find a limitless supply of courage.

In the infinite game of business, players drop out of the game when they run out of the will or the resources to continue. We run out of will when we run out of hope and wonder, and then surrender to fear and self-doubt. Our strategy as leaders must be to develop a culture in which we all do our best work by aligning our decisions and actions with hope and wonder so that we never surrender to fear or self-doubt. How on earth do we do that?

By challenging ourselves and everyone around us to ask and answer the essential questions posed by evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein in their book "A Hunter-Gather's Guide To Modern Society."

• "Who am I? And what am I going to do about it?"

• "What is the biggest, most important problem I can solve? And what is my plan to solve it?"

Working to answer these questions allows one to create a plan for their life and for their career. It allows us to envision our potential, and then plan to fulfill it. It allows us to follow the advice of Michael Jordan, who said "Start with hope." It allows us to pursue our own personal sense of destiny in the tradition of our ancestors and our shared heroes.

How can we make a business culture scalable and sustainable for the next 50-100 years? By doing our best work, and helping the people around us do their best work. How do people do their best work? By leveraging hope and wonder so that they never surrender to fear or self-doubt. How do we find that leverage? By asking and answering the essential questions that aim our decisions and behaviors at hope and wonder so that we never run out of the will to continue as players in the infinite game.

How do we know that this strategy will work? Because if it didn't work, none of us would be here right now. This is the strategy for managing will and resources handed down to us by our ancestors. This is the strategy for playing an infinite game with an infinite mindset, and as Simon Sinek says "When we play an infinite game with an infinite mindset, the outcome is certain, only the timeline is not."

*This article is written with thanks to Joseph Campbell, James Carse, Simon Sinek, Angus Fletcher, Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, and all of the heroes who helped us all get this far.