So there’s an interesting kind of question on the table, especially aimed at the C-suite
of how am I to reaccelerate collaboration and learning especially collaborative learning
in the work place.
And the curious thing is that I get asked this as much in Asia where I spend a good
share of my life, time as I do in the United States.
And I usually tell them a story that they find incredible because it appears to have
nothing to do with a C-suite and yet it has everything to do with the C-suite.
Maui has never had in its history any junior or world class champion surfers.
The world-class surfers that come from Hawaii always come from the North Shore in Oahu,
never Maui.
And then an amazing singularity, there were five kids age 16 at the time that now one
but all five basically one year apart from Maui became all world champions.
I asked myself how could this have happened.
Never before in the history of Maui and then out of the blue this happens.
It’s a beautiful story and the beautiful story started with Dusty when he was 16, and
his dad said, “Dusty, what do you want to become?”
And Dusty looked at his dad incredulously and said, “What do you mean, Dad?
I’m going to become a professional surfer.”
And his dad being responsible, , “Dusty, that’s not a career, that’s a hobby.”
Dusty said no it’s not; it’s going to be my career.
I’m going to pull my four best buddies in and the five of us are going to become this
amazing learning community.
You may even call it a community of practice; that’s the terms that Dusty would have used,
but I used.
What these kids did is they first said, “You know, we’re going to go out and we’re
going to get these beautiful videos of all the past world class surfers and we’re going
to study these videos step-by-step-by-step, frame by frame by frame.
And then we’re going to do is you’re going to every time we kind of see a new move we’re
going to dash down the hill and try it out.”
Now here’s where things started to get interesting.
They were always kind of by the way competing with each other and fiercely collaborating
with each other.
And they run down the hill with your own video cameras and they would video each other trying
out this particular move on this particular wave.
And then they would dash back up the hill in the living room and start to paw over the
videos that they took of each other and then collaboratively deconstruct each move that
each of them had actually made and then they dashed down the hill again and tried it out
again.
And so they used some very interesting videotapes, video tools to be able to reflect as a group
on each other because often they would see each other do things that the individual couldn’t
see him or himself.
And that started getting them going to become really, really good.
They started going to the hot spots around the world because they were good enough that
they could now compete, and have these rich conversations about looking at each other,
working as a collaborative group but also analyzing the moves that their competitors
were doing, but again collaboratively constructing a story for what their competition was doing,
even though they were competing with each other.
They said, you know, we’ve got to have new ideas.
Let’s look at adjacencies.
Now this is an a-ha for the corporate world.
They say let’s look at how people are doing other things closely aligned to us that we
may be able to learn from and read purpose, wind surfing, snowboarding, skiing, mountain
biking, and they would even look in the extreme cases motocrossing.
And in fact the last time I checked in with Dusty he had just gotten another world championship
from an idea called The Superman Move on a motorcycle, okay, which is totally unbelievable
unless you follow motocrossing.
But it’s where you actually let the bike get out ahead of you and you hold on to the
back and you fly behind the back of the bike, okay.
This is not something for amateurs to try.
He re-purposed this move here, which is already pathological in the motorcycle realm in to
the surfboard realm and basically won the event the next move.