Leadership Lessons from SCUBA Diving #1
#1 Maintain Neutral Buoyancy
The holidays have given me a chance to reconnect with the things I love, family, friends and #scubadiving! A recent liveaboard trip made me reflect on what the underwater world can teach us in #business and #leadership. So here’s the first in a series of #lessonslearned.
When people think of #buoyancy, they often associate it with #resilience — the ability to positively bounce back after setbacks, the way a buoy on the ocean pops back to the surface after being dunked by a wave. As our world continues to face into increasingly complex and interconnected challenges, I wonder if taking a SCUBA divers more nuanced view of buoyancy might be be useful?
In diving terms, popping to the surface is a result of #positive buoyancy. Basically, you’re got extra air trapped on you somewhere and it’s pushing you up (this is a super simplistic explanation of the physics, but I hope you get the point). Any diver who has been uncontrollably positively buoyant will tell you it’s a frightening experience, the sense of being pushed by forces outside your control, faster and faster and ever upwards. This kind of ascent is downright dangerous and not desired in diving, but I sense a lot of the time we find ourselves surrounded by well-meaning friends, family, leaders and organisational cultures that want us to be continuously positive, buoyant and growing, at faster and faster rates. What if we were to say it’s ok to #rest , to not jump back up immediately, to not push ourselves to continually grow, and be positive, but to take a moment to integrate what we’ve learnt? To call our #experiences with candour, naming when it was a stretch, when it was a little scary, when we felt we were being swept away? Would this enable us to savour the good more fully and take the pressure off?
The opposite of positive buoyancy is negative buoyancy, where you have too much weight dragging you down to the depths of the ocean. A rush to the bottom can feel safer in some ways, as you aren’t stuck in the disorientating moment of not being able to see the top or the bottom — you feel like you’ve got a point of reference. But do this in the first 5–10 meters of your dive and it’s going to hurt your ears as you can’t equalise quick enough. Do this when the bottom of the ocean is 40+ meters away and it’s going to be hard as a recreational diver to come up in one piece without running out of air. As humans, we love #certainty, but as the world continues to #change and we face novel, #adaptivechallenges that we’ve not solved before, I wonder what anchors we are holding onto? What answers are we rushing toward that are going to hurt us in the long run, but make us feel a bit safer in the short term?
Between positive and negative is every diver’s dream state — neutral buoyancy. Here you neither sink nor float, except as connected to your breath. When you breathe in you rise as your lungs inflate, when you breath out you sink, only to rise again with your next inhale. In this state, everything is effortless. You are weightless and one kick moves you towards your desired destination with ease — it’s like flying or being in space. Neutral Buoyancy enables you to navigate through tight spaces without getting stuck, deal with changing dive conditions with little effort and expend less energy — all while moving you towards your goal.
When you are positively or negatively buoyant you are so focused on trying to stop what’s happening you miss the opportunity to capitalise on the conditions. We often believe that work must be hard, that we have to do the #dailygrind, but when you are neutrally buoyant, you can use the current to boost your #velocity, instead of fighting it every step of the way. When you are neutrally buoyant you can observe what’s happening around you and use the conditions to your advantage, rather than trying to fight an environment feels like it’s pushing and pulling you in multiple directions and expending a lot of effort for little return. How could you invite some neutral buoyancy into your 2022?